I'm genuinely impressed by the author's willingness to come up with such a silly idea, go through with it, implement a completely barebones website that won't even let you send emails from the addresses and starts selling subscriptions for $10/year.
I'm not being snarky, I'm genuinely impressed. If it were me I'd spend 2 years mulling about it and never actually do it because I'd be worried about not managing to make it work correctly.
I'll take "things you can do when you're single"... can't quite imagine sidling up to significant other with the gambit "Darling, would you mind terribly if I spent £1000 on Kazakhstani emoji domains?"
I'll never understand this, but I see it all the time. People should have shared money, and they should also have their own money. Does my wife like it when I buy myself expensive toys? I have no idea, it's irrelevant unless I stop covering the bills.
On the one hand, I'm single and if I wanted to I could also blow a few grand on emoji domains for an experiment, then I could.
On the other, I'd be taking a few grand from my savings for my mortgage deposit.
This isn't about relationship status, the author of this post just has money to burn.
And even if the author expected to get their money back through paid sales...they're on the hook for those accounts now unless he personally writes it off.
Personally, if my partner dropped £1000 on something goofy like this, and all bills were paid, I'd probably cheer them on. There's nothing wrong with spending money on something that's got no purpose other than making people smile/laugh/what have you.
But why would you do that? I mean if that's you money, why would you ask your partner? I'm pretty frugal, don't spend on stupid things easily (well, things that I find stupid, at least), but if I had a business idea or even a fun project I don't think I'd need permission from my partner to spend my own money on it. Discussing it is a different story, of course.
I guess software dev can afford to blow 1000$/year on silly side projects. Especially seeing how he got back significant portion of his expenditure. Being single or not has nothing to do with that? It sure seems fair to agree on spending policy with your significant other beforehand, but other than that...
It was kinda like that in 2013 when I suggested btc mining to my wife to cover the costs of the electric heat in our new house. And here we still are...
can't quite imagine sidling up to significant other with the gambit "Darling, would you mind terribly if I spent £1000 on Kazakhstani emoji domains?"
There's a PSA running on Australian radio these days that says if your spouse doesn't let you control your own money, that's a form of abuse. There's even a hotline to report that you're being abused.
Find yourself a partner who will share in your enthusiasm.
From the looks of the author’s website, he very carefully time boxes his projects and weighs the expense and revenue generation. This is very different from spending a grand on something with unbounded time costs and no tangible return, like buying a boat.
I've come to believe that there's a certain amount of insanity required to be a great entrepreneur. Like Jobs or Musk--their personal qualities aside, they both had arguably legitimately insane visions that they refused to let people talk them out of.
The side effect is they're also crazy in other ways (Musk-time and the billionaire-playboy-cyrptocoin-gambler being easy examples), but I think it really does take someone who operates with a totally different set of constraints on the world to pull Really Cool Stuff off. Like reusable rockets. Or electric performance cars. Or an incredibly versatile computer that fits in your pocket (while also giving the middle finger to Flash, the incumbent web media tech at the time).
The day I have to ask my significant other how to spend money I earn is the day I will quit that relationship. I get that some couples throw everything on a pile and go a pseudo-democratic way of spending things, but I have never understood this meme of males telling all the world that they have to ask their wives for permission to spend money. We're in the 21st century now. She is supposed to not be dependant on him, and the same should apply in reverse.
There's a big downside to using .kz in that the registry has a policy (as per https://nic.kz/rules/) that .kz hostnames must relate to "Internet resources" located on hardware and software located within the territory of Kazakhstan.
I think the OP is OK as it appears the IP addresses of both the A and MX records are located within Kazakhstan, but something to be aware of if you think registering a .kz is a fun idea(!) :-)
This is something to keep in mind with all TLDs really. They're not all created equal and can be subject to rules specific to their operators. Have to do your homework before you buy that cute domain.
The most fun TLD is .su
Someone on IRC managed to register "kremvax.su" a few years ago and gave anyone in the channel who wanted them email addresses (so I briefly had swiley@kremvax.su for example.)
Unfortunately the were asked for some documentation they couldn't provide a few months later and it got shut down.
> There's a big downside to using .kz in that the registry has a policy (as per https://nic.kz/rules/) that .kz hostnames must relate to "Internet resources" located on hardware and software located within the territory of Kazakhstan.
Any country TLD is a potential risk that most western "entrepreneurs" blissfully ignore.
Just a month ago notion.so had troubles with it's domain because .so belongs to Somalia, and Somalia changed some rules around registration and ownership [1]
The registration of a domain name in the ccTLD .it is permitted only to persons who have citizenship, residence or a registered office in the countries of the European Economic Area (EEA), the Vatican, the Republic of San Marino, and Switzerland.
I learned some countries have things like this after an article last month where someone traced an IP range used by palor or another organization like that to a country with similar rules, and filed a complaint with the company that leased it, who revoked the range. (Going from memory here, sorry if I'm getting things wrong).
Especially given Ive heard some of these TLDs are cheaper to encourage their use, people who want to run services on these should be careful even if enforcement is often lax or nonexistent until a complaint is filed.
Uh oh. How do I find rules for other domains? I went a little batty with the .de domain years ago and have quite a few. But, I'm not in Germany. While there is a mild ethical cringe at doing this, am I running afoul of some rules that might actually bite me later?
The information on Wikipedia itself is mostly descriptive, while the registry website or other external links should have the actual rules and restrictions.
I was actually just thinking that he should probably register the [diamond][hands].kk domain, there's got to be some demand for it given how much it gets spammed over there.
The customer's words echoed in his mind. 'robert at lightbulb emoji dot kz, but with a real lightbulb emoji.' The clerk had registered thousands, maybe tens of thousands of e-mails into the Nordstrom Rack Nordy Rewards program, and he had seen it all, but this, this was something entirely new. This wasn't the single letter username or the overly sexual address or the gmail address with the plus sign, all mildly interesting but within the bounds of what was possible. What was normal. What was sane. This was something entirely new. The point of sale workstation has no key for the lightbulb emoji. This was the predicament. But if an emoji can be an e-mail address, maybe some other part of the computer can be a keyboard. Maybe the floor can be a table. Maybe hands can be screwdrivers. The clerk began touching the screen. Pawing at the sides of the monitor. He began mumbling as he moved his attention to the receipt printer, ripping it open, 'there's gotta be an emoji button in here somewhere.' As his search intensified, so too did the stares of customers waiting in line. In a final effort the clerk hoisted the register above his head before smashing it on the ground, bringing himself down with the machine. Associates had pooled around their coworker and were urging calm. Emergency Services had been notified and were en route, and slowly the chaos turned to calm. An associate reached out to ask the customer if she could finish ringing him up on another register. 'Sure,' he replied, 'but this time let's just use my gmail address.'
That UI is hilarious (for a given value of hilarious) in the sense that the search for emojis uses whichever input language you're using, even if your UI language is something else.
So, for instance to find the light bulb emoji, I need to start typing "valo" (light in Finnish), which really threw me off at first.
If your Windows isn't updated enough, grab AutoHotkey[0], and try this: [1]. It's a little "emoji keyboard" I wrote a few years ago, to insert most important emojis into team conversations. Globally binds itself to F2, and it's ergonomic. You press F2, then number, then CTRL+V (that last step could be automated too).
The script is easy to extend with new emojis, and also supports selecting alternatives based on which program you had focus on when invoking the keyboard - you can see it using Skype-specific notation for Skype.
--
[0] - https://www.autohotkey.com/ - it's the keyboard rebinding / advanced automation platform for Windows. Literally the first thing I install on a new Windows machine (mostly for rebinding Caps Lock to Ctrl).
There is an actual emoji button on new dell keyboards as well as a lock button. Not just a repurposed FN key but really a separate key with a smiley on it and one with a lock next to it. Both work without extra drivers in Windows 10.
Yeah. Try using wildcard email accounts together with a uncommon TLD, and people ask me if I work at their place all the time.
Last time I booked a car at Hertz:
> Me: My email is hertz@capableweb.work
> Agent: Woah, you work here at Hertz? That's so cool
> Me: sure, can you remind me of the employee discount again?
So many email validations fail with a uncommon gTLD that I started switching everything to a .com domain instead. Sometimes I even get rejected when my email address contains the company name... "Sorry, your email seems invalid" is all I get, but changing one letter of the company name makes it pass the validation...
Mine ends in .sexy, the looks I get are even better than when I used my .io one ;p and then if they follow up for my phone number it gets even better when I tell them as it ends in 6969.
Hell, booking.com will even tell you that "your address looks incorrect" (sometimes, I got it once out of two bookings made on a single day), if you dare to use your own domain .com. They used to nag me about "ohh, are you sure it's not tadzik_@gmail.com"? And I'm not sure what's worse.
My domain ends in .me which according to Aliexpress is not real. So instead of me having to manually unsubscribe, they got sent to the huge spam box that is gmail.
Sometimes it is better not to be too clever. I built a CRM like app for the construction industry and used "inc.construction" and "inc.services" as the app domain. So customer would have
<business-name>.inc.construction
I thought it was clever, but people do not understand them. Everything is .com in their mind.
Mine is my name, like john@jsmith.com. The number of people who exclaim "I've never heard that one before!" surprises me. Obviously other people don't use it, because it's my name.
firstname @ (nickname for firstname) + (last initial) .net
And it's amazing how hard it is to explain this to people over the phone or in store for email receipts, etc.
I'm shocked how few folks seems to be vaguely aware that .net as TLD exists even though it's one of the original TLDs from when they were first created: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.net
My spouse, who does not work in an IT/software related field, has an email address that is firstname@lastname.com and quite a large number of people refuse to believe that such a thing is possible. There has been more than one instance where some person treated them as if they were so clueless that they didn't know how to properly format an email address.
Bill burr on his podcast was talking about, when he first discovered reddit. He couldn't understand what it was... He then realized later.. "it's a site for people that really like to type.. that's what it is.."
Maybe the whole covid thing lowered my happiness-level standards, but I find this charming.
Also I would be scared to receive actual money from people for something as out of my control as email. I hope the author doesn't get hit by a wave of "my emoji emails are not being delivered to @commercial-behemoth or @government-branch and I've made my emoji adress my main one and it's all your fault" a few months down the line.
Personal preferences aside, the original article [0] on the Netflix and Facebook domains gives context which is no less charming, at least on ethical grounds.
Quoting the relevant part: "They're welcome to have them back anytime they want."
> At the same time, we like to make email more fun. We are commited to build tools that help you process email easily. Your banks don’t have an API to help you build a real-time activity tracker? Just use email.
Email can be really fun, especially with webhook. I build https://pix.fastloop.xyz where you simply email pix@fastloop.xyz a picture to have it show up on the site.
I'm thinking about comment for a static site. Simply send an email to a magic address to comment? Similar to news letter? Anyone like this idea
I rely on email spam filterting, which seems effectively filter out them. No sophisicated filtering yet. I didn't advertise it anywhere outside of Hacker News and not many people know about it yet.
This service should come with a big fat warning that the emoji email addresses should never be used for anything remotely serious.
Running an email service is not, by any means, a 'tiny project'. I would never pay, nor rely on an e-mail service that is effectively a one-men side project.
I just took a quick check on the 'mailbox' domain (I can't paste emoji here on HN). There seems to be no DMARC, no MTA-STS and no TLS-reporting set up for these domains. The SPF record allows a single /48 (65k) IPv6 block of addresses to send email on behalf of the domain. The MX does not seem to support TLS. The SPF record seems to be added at the '@' domain, so it is returned on every query, even where it is not supposed to be returned, so you can be sure DKIM will fail (you did set up DKIM, did you?). Just to name a few issues.
But even if implemented perfectly, there are a lot of 'enterprise' email 'solutions' out there that are not even close to implementing even the most basic of RFCs. Do not expect them to support punycode. Do not expect your emoji email to de deliverable to any of these services.
What you say is entirely true. But in practice, this is for fun, no one gonna use their emoji email for anything important. But it's great to have an emoji email to give to medium when they ask for it? Isn't that great.
> no one gonna use their emoji email for anything important
I disagree.
We, as technical HN crowd, know not to do this this. But any non-technical person who sees 'get a next-gen email addresses' being advertised for 9,99/year will expect more. A lot more.
Do not underestimate how naive and demanding consumers can be.
That is all until The Queen snatches up that reserved Liz@[crown].kz, after that the MI5 will buy and run the [union-jack].uk for all governmental parties and typing in very.important.person@parliament.uk istead of [serious-face-with-a-tie]@[big-ben] will be considered rude in high circles, believe me that!
If enough people start using it, the big email providers will follow, or the new service will get around to fixing it.
It’ll work out either way.
I’m not going to shed a tear for gmail if they have to start putting up with someone else’s busted non-standard email infrastructure. They should be able to get what they give.
Except, that will never happen. What's more likely, Gmail changes what they do to accomodate some goofy emoji system, or users of some goofy emoji system get frustrated about it's incompatibility and stop using it because it is so frustrating? I'm not talking about tech nerds on HN or the likes. I'm talking about FOMO/YOLO types that think it's "cool", but then new shiny happens, and they just forget about. One group significantly outnumbers the other.
He advertised it to a general audience on tic tok,and it is a service people pay for. Why would they not expect it to work? That makes no sense to me. It seems that way because you understand how dysfunctional email is. I would be upset if I bought a service for something I don't understand that is normally completely functional and free and when I relied on it it broke only for people who understand it to laugh at me because I should have just known that vendor was unreliable.
If you know so much about this stuff instead of criticizing, offer to help for a consulting fee and get your own paragraph in the next update to this story
This is a fun hack, but there is no way I would get involved in providing any form of commercial email service for $1440 arr. I wouldn't do it for $1440 a _day_. Everything involved with email is pain. I wish you luck.
Agree. Even if you comply with most important technical standards/requirements you still need to spend a lot of time overseeing your system, and researching best practices and recommendations that directly affect domain and IP reputation, to avoid getting blacklisted.
Shameless plug: A while ago I decided to try build a home made SMPT Mail submission component for better understating what's going on under the hoods (and for "fun"), it was really though, and once I was able to send a DKIM verifyed e-mail to GMAIL servers I called it a day and moved on [1]
> Even if you comply with most important technical standards/requirements
...there's no guarantee anyone else will. Currently I am getting moaned at because the "Money Stuff" newsletter is not arriving - which appears to be because Bloomberg have flubbed their DKIM. What am I supposed to do about that, eh?
I've attempting something similar before so here's a non-exhaustive list of problems from the top of my head:
1. Getting to send email, at all: lots of hosting providers blacklist outgoing port 25 TCP specifically to prevent random people getting their IPs put on a spam blacklist
2. Getting your IPs de-blacklisted: unless you get really lucky whatever IP you _start_ with has a good chance of already being on several blacklists, and some make it stupidly hard to get your IP off the list even if the ban was from 5 years ago by whoever had the IP back then
3. To even have a chance of your emails being deliverable you have to understand and configure reverse DNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC (and probably a few other I've forgotten or which have been invented since I tried this)
4. Even after you get this far, major providers like gmail are likely to send your email straight to /dev/null because you're a new provider with no reputation
5. If (or more accurately when) somebody manages to abuse your service to send a ton of spam you'll get re-blacklisted and have to fix that all over again and implement/fix spam filters to stop people like this (this will probably happen several times as you constantly attempt to battle spammers)
6. You're going to want some sort of incoming spam filter, because people don't really like spam in their inbox, and most existing open source and/or free solutions are mediocre at best
7. If you use a weird TLD (i.e. not .com/.org/.net/similar) random online business will not allow your email or not send to you properly, and your customers will blame you despite you being able to do almost nothing about it
8. Even if you use a "standard" TLD to get past 7 some particularly bad actors will use a email domain _whitelist_, so only gmail and friends are allowed, and again your users will blame you
The other day I setup a postfix server in my VPS, which I intend to use with mailman3 to have some mailing lists.
It was a bit of a pain to set up, but nothing too difficult. The worst part was setting up DKIM and SPF.
The thing is, I constantly hear people saying that managing an email server is something extremely difficult and that requires constant attention.
Am I doing something foolish by attempting to do this by myself? Should I just pay for a big email provider? (They’re quite expensive for the resources my organization has)
I’ve tried to set everything up as securely as possible, but I’m not an expert in email either. I’m just afraid I might be creating big trouble for myself in the future.
I set up a personal mailserver a few years back, and have hit a lot of painpoints. The main ones were software complexity (setup) and dealing with blacklists (ongoing).
Setup for a normal mailserver requires Postfix (SMTP send/recieve), Dovecot (IMAP mailbox management), SpamAssassin, a webmail frontend (Roundcube), something for user management (MySQL + PHPMyAdmin for me) and a generous amount of glue. Things like DNS records, config files, spam rules and classifiers, etc).
Blacklists are far more annoying, especially w.r.t. GMail. I use a DigitalOcean node, and some of their IP ranges are blacklisted due to past spamminess. Depending on the provider, there may or may not be a bounce email, and may or may not be a whitelisting process. I've even seen mixed results within GMail. I can send from my custom domain to my GMail without trouble, but emails to a friend using a custom domain on GMail are dropped silently. (That's the worst of self-hosting, I think. Silently dropped messages are way harder to detect than a mailer-daemon block notification.)
Long story short, it's a mess :)
On the flipside, similar commercial plans (3 domains, 20GB shared storage) run $30/mo or so, which is way more than I'm willing to spend on a vanity email. Sounds like a similar story for mailing lists.
I'd give self-hosting a shot and see how it goes. Since mailing lists are opt-in, users will know if they aren't receiving what they signed up for, and are likely to reach out for support help. That's different than conventional email, where a silent drop and no reply are hard to tell apart for the recipient.
Hope that wasn't too much info/text, and good luck!
Readit News
I'm not being snarky, I'm genuinely impressed. If it were me I'd spend 2 years mulling about it and never actually do it because I'd be worried about not managing to make it work correctly.
This isn't about relationship status, the author of this post just has money to burn.
And even if the author expected to get their money back through paid sales...they're on the hook for those accounts now unless he personally writes it off.
There's a PSA running on Australian radio these days that says if your spouse doesn't let you control your own money, that's a form of abuse. There's even a hotline to report that you're being abused.
(Heard it on 2GB/Sydney last week.)
From the looks of the author’s website, he very carefully time boxes his projects and weighs the expense and revenue generation. This is very different from spending a grand on something with unbounded time costs and no tangible return, like buying a boat.
The side effect is they're also crazy in other ways (Musk-time and the billionaire-playboy-cyrptocoin-gambler being easy examples), but I think it really does take someone who operates with a totally different set of constraints on the world to pull Really Cool Stuff off. Like reusable rockets. Or electric performance cars. Or an incredibly versatile computer that fits in your pocket (while also giving the middle finger to Flash, the incumbent web media tech at the time).
Deleted Comment
I think the OP is OK as it appears the IP addresses of both the A and MX records are located within Kazakhstan, but something to be aware of if you think registering a .kz is a fun idea(!) :-)
Unfortunately the were asked for some documentation they couldn't provide a few months later and it got shut down.
Any country TLD is a potential risk that most western "entrepreneurs" blissfully ignore.
Just a month ago notion.so had troubles with it's domain because .so belongs to Somalia, and Somalia changed some rules around registration and ownership [1]
The same, really, goes for Tonga's http://dev.to, Libya's http://bit.ly or Greenland's http://goo.gl...
[1] https://twitter.com/EpsilonTheory/status/1360239738020634629
IOW not available to citizens or companies in Europe, but not member of the EU eg. Bosnia and Herzegovina
[0] Who can register a .it domain? https://www.nic.it/en/find-your-it/faq
The registration of a domain name in the ccTLD .it is permitted only to persons who have citizenship, residence or a registered office in the countries of the European Economic Area (EEA), the Vatican, the Republic of San Marino, and Switzerland.
But you shouldn't use TLDs of countries with which you have no affiliation.
Especially given Ive heard some of these TLDs are cheaper to encourage their use, people who want to run services on these should be careful even if enforcement is often lax or nonexistent until a complaint is filed.
[1]: https://www.gandi.net/en-GB/domain/tld/de
The information on Wikipedia itself is mostly descriptive, while the registry website or other external links should have the actual rules and restrictions.
the people there are f'ing addicted to the rocktes emoji and dont care how much to pay to have it appear somewhere
So, for instance to find the light bulb emoji, I need to start typing "valo" (light in Finnish), which really threw me off at first.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IBus#Emoji_input
The kitty terminal emulator supports this out of the box (it also works on two other platforms):
https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty
Ctrl+Shift+U opens a Unicode input panel with fuzzy search by symbol code or name.
And if it's not, please go update your Windows. You should not be reading HN with out outdated operating system.
The script is easy to extend with new emojis, and also supports selecting alternatives based on which program you had focus on when invoking the keyboard - you can see it using Skype-specific notation for Skype.
--
[0] - https://www.autohotkey.com/ - it's the keyboard rebinding / advanced automation platform for Windows. Literally the first thing I install on a new Windows machine (mostly for rebinding Caps Lock to Ctrl).
[1] - https://gist.github.com/TeMPOraL/d330edccf8ba9a2b13d01b4e7f1...
Edit: Alas, it does not work on HN. Pity.
Last time I booked a car at Hertz:
> Me: My email is hertz@capableweb.work
> Agent: Woah, you work here at Hertz? That's so cool
> Me: sure, can you remind me of the employee discount again?
So many email validations fail with a uncommon gTLD that I started switching everything to a .com domain instead. Sometimes I even get rejected when my email address contains the company name... "Sorry, your email seems invalid" is all I get, but changing one letter of the company name makes it pass the validation...
<business-name>.inc.construction
I thought it was clever, but people do not understand them. Everything is .com in their mind.
firstname @ (nickname for firstname) + (last initial) .net
And it's amazing how hard it is to explain this to people over the phone or in store for email receipts, etc.
I'm shocked how few folks seems to be vaguely aware that .net as TLD exists even though it's one of the original TLDs from when they were first created: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.net
I also have firstmiddlelast@gmail.com, and about half the time I tell someone my email address, the send it to the gmail one.
For services that actually require correspondence, I register the cool fun tld and a seperate .com for email
This also lets mailing lists het marked as spam without harming the deliverability of the other
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory
EG if my surname was "Gummersby" my email domain is "Gummers.by"
From a customer's perspective, this is the way everyone does things. (Sample size: themselves)
From a cashier's perspective, this weirdo is a few standard deviations outside the mean. (Sample size: 1,000+ customers)
Why wouldn’t you throw stuff all over the floor. It’s the biggest shelf in the room.
This kind of prose is truly hilarious.
Thank you.
Bill burr on his podcast was talking about, when he first discovered reddit. He couldn't understand what it was... He then realized later.. "it's a site for people that really like to type.. that's what it is.."
Also I would be scared to receive actual money from people for something as out of my control as email. I hope the author doesn't get hit by a wave of "my emoji emails are not being delivered to @commercial-behemoth or @government-branch and I've made my emoji adress my main one and it's all your fault" a few months down the line.
The name grabbing (netflix and facebook domains) - not so much!
Quoting the relevant part: "They're welcome to have them back anytime they want."
[0] https://tinyprojects.dev/posts/i_bought_netflix_dot_soy
Dead Comment
> But they're fun, and I think tech should be more fun.
Apparently I run https://hanami.run an email forwarding service and I also say that
https://hanami.run/blog/posts/welcome-to-hanami/#the-future
> At the same time, we like to make email more fun. We are commited to build tools that help you process email easily. Your banks don’t have an API to help you build a real-time activity tracker? Just use email.
Email can be really fun, especially with webhook. I build https://pix.fastloop.xyz where you simply email pix@fastloop.xyz a picture to have it show up on the site.
I'm thinking about comment for a static site. Simply send an email to a magic address to comment? Similar to news letter? Anyone like this idea
Nice but I see some risks there (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26357033)
I cautiously opened the site and was basically prepared to be greeted with (child) pornography. How do you prevent that?
I like the commenting idea.
Running an email service is not, by any means, a 'tiny project'. I would never pay, nor rely on an e-mail service that is effectively a one-men side project.
I just took a quick check on the 'mailbox' domain (I can't paste emoji here on HN). There seems to be no DMARC, no MTA-STS and no TLS-reporting set up for these domains. The SPF record allows a single /48 (65k) IPv6 block of addresses to send email on behalf of the domain. The MX does not seem to support TLS. The SPF record seems to be added at the '@' domain, so it is returned on every query, even where it is not supposed to be returned, so you can be sure DKIM will fail (you did set up DKIM, did you?). Just to name a few issues.
But even if implemented perfectly, there are a lot of 'enterprise' email 'solutions' out there that are not even close to implementing even the most basic of RFCs. Do not expect them to support punycode. Do not expect your emoji email to de deliverable to any of these services.
I disagree.
We, as technical HN crowd, know not to do this this. But any non-technical person who sees 'get a next-gen email addresses' being advertised for 9,99/year will expect more. A lot more.
Do not underestimate how naive and demanding consumers can be.
;)
After all, people pay money to obtain these. Why anybody paying a subscription fee would expect that the product is useless?
I don't know, we said the same thing about jeans.
It’ll work out either way.
I’m not going to shed a tear for gmail if they have to start putting up with someone else’s busted non-standard email infrastructure. They should be able to get what they give.
Except, that will never happen. What's more likely, Gmail changes what they do to accomodate some goofy emoji system, or users of some goofy emoji system get frustrated about it's incompatibility and stop using it because it is so frustrating? I'm not talking about tech nerds on HN or the likes. I'm talking about FOMO/YOLO types that think it's "cool", but then new shiny happens, and they just forget about. One group significantly outnumbers the other.
Dead Comment
TLS and MTA-STS are for receiving and would be good to set up, eventually.
Wish I'd seen this comment 4 years ago.
Agree. Even if you comply with most important technical standards/requirements you still need to spend a lot of time overseeing your system, and researching best practices and recommendations that directly affect domain and IP reputation, to avoid getting blacklisted.
Shameless plug: A while ago I decided to try build a home made SMPT Mail submission component for better understating what's going on under the hoods (and for "fun"), it was really though, and once I was able to send a DKIM verifyed e-mail to GMAIL servers I called it a day and moved on [1]
[1] https://thomasvilhena.com/2020/01/mail-submission-under-the-...
...there's no guarantee anyone else will. Currently I am getting moaned at because the "Money Stuff" newsletter is not arriving - which appears to be because Bloomberg have flubbed their DKIM. What am I supposed to do about that, eh?
Can you maybe share what problems OP might have? I have toyed with an idea of starting something similar and would love to know what I'm getting into.
1. Getting to send email, at all: lots of hosting providers blacklist outgoing port 25 TCP specifically to prevent random people getting their IPs put on a spam blacklist
2. Getting your IPs de-blacklisted: unless you get really lucky whatever IP you _start_ with has a good chance of already being on several blacklists, and some make it stupidly hard to get your IP off the list even if the ban was from 5 years ago by whoever had the IP back then
3. To even have a chance of your emails being deliverable you have to understand and configure reverse DNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC (and probably a few other I've forgotten or which have been invented since I tried this)
4. Even after you get this far, major providers like gmail are likely to send your email straight to /dev/null because you're a new provider with no reputation
5. If (or more accurately when) somebody manages to abuse your service to send a ton of spam you'll get re-blacklisted and have to fix that all over again and implement/fix spam filters to stop people like this (this will probably happen several times as you constantly attempt to battle spammers)
6. You're going to want some sort of incoming spam filter, because people don't really like spam in their inbox, and most existing open source and/or free solutions are mediocre at best
7. If you use a weird TLD (i.e. not .com/.org/.net/similar) random online business will not allow your email or not send to you properly, and your customers will blame you despite you being able to do almost nothing about it
8. Even if you use a "standard" TLD to get past 7 some particularly bad actors will use a email domain _whitelist_, so only gmail and friends are allowed, and again your users will blame you
Dead Comment
It was a bit of a pain to set up, but nothing too difficult. The worst part was setting up DKIM and SPF.
The thing is, I constantly hear people saying that managing an email server is something extremely difficult and that requires constant attention.
Am I doing something foolish by attempting to do this by myself? Should I just pay for a big email provider? (They’re quite expensive for the resources my organization has)
I’ve tried to set everything up as securely as possible, but I’m not an expert in email either. I’m just afraid I might be creating big trouble for myself in the future.
Setup for a normal mailserver requires Postfix (SMTP send/recieve), Dovecot (IMAP mailbox management), SpamAssassin, a webmail frontend (Roundcube), something for user management (MySQL + PHPMyAdmin for me) and a generous amount of glue. Things like DNS records, config files, spam rules and classifiers, etc).
Blacklists are far more annoying, especially w.r.t. GMail. I use a DigitalOcean node, and some of their IP ranges are blacklisted due to past spamminess. Depending on the provider, there may or may not be a bounce email, and may or may not be a whitelisting process. I've even seen mixed results within GMail. I can send from my custom domain to my GMail without trouble, but emails to a friend using a custom domain on GMail are dropped silently. (That's the worst of self-hosting, I think. Silently dropped messages are way harder to detect than a mailer-daemon block notification.)
Long story short, it's a mess :)
On the flipside, similar commercial plans (3 domains, 20GB shared storage) run $30/mo or so, which is way more than I'm willing to spend on a vanity email. Sounds like a similar story for mailing lists.
I'd give self-hosting a shot and see how it goes. Since mailing lists are opt-in, users will know if they aren't receiving what they signed up for, and are likely to reach out for support help. That's different than conventional email, where a silent drop and no reply are hard to tell apart for the recipient.
Hope that wasn't too much info/text, and good luck!