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.
Very few new things emerge feature-complete.
Everything. All the time.
So the holier-than-thou, thou-shall-not-deploy-less-than-perfect perspective is pretty irrelevant.
This is a side project. That did something neat. The author should be commended, not lambasted for not rebuilding Gmail on their own.
And God knows the Internet would be a better place with a little more weirdness again.
;)
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.
TLS and MTA-STS are for receiving and would be good to set up, eventually.
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.