My name is Dan Blows, and my domain is da.nblo.ws, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. Most people are confused or don’t even notice it.

I used to have a mail address along the lines of [email protected]

But beware, single letter local parts are not universally supported by web sites.

Microsoft accounts with those mail addresses are possible (they used to be impossible), but recently I stumbled upon two other web sites that didn't like single letter local parts.

I use an email address with a single-letter username (m@...) and have never had a problem with services rejecting it. The only problem is that rarely when I sign up for a service using a random password like gAdlzIBVom4j3Paf, it tells me "your password cannot contain your username" because it contains the letter "m". Hah!

Good old security theatre

Haven't had that problem before, far more of a problem when I try to register with site specific email addresses like [email protected] which I've tried to get in the habit of doing.

Why do people use plus addresses when minus/hyphen addresses are much less problematic?

Are there many providers who support one, but not the other?

Some mail providers (eg Gmail) use the plus sign as a label. So your everything still gets routed to [email protected] but tagged "hn" or "twitter" or whatever.

It's quite a convenient way to have site specific addresses while still only having a single mailbox to manage.

I get told that my email is invalid by some apps, for using a .so domain. Apple was one that would not let me create an apple ID upon buying a new laptop. Eventually, I set up the machine without Apple ID, and opted to create it after the fact via apple.com which accepted it. It makes me wonder if it is intentionally a "Hard no" during system setup, and then a "well okay if you insist" when the user has installed the system without using an Apple ID as a last resort.

I have the same problem with my .one domain. Even though that TLD is about 7 years old, about 10% of sites won't accept it.

Yes, I did that single letter email way back around 2007-2008 and had it with my Bank (closed account for a company). Now, I can neither change nor login (not valid to them), and I have set a specific filter just to ignore that email from the Bank that keeps sending me newsletter and offers.

I don't use the short oin.am as my primary (which is oinam.com), I have it as a alias domain, allowing me to quickly say/hand-write my email to someone and continue the conversation from my main domain -- say, ß@oin.am.

I literally had a bank tell me my email was invalid today. It was 2 letters before the @, and I think that's why. I'll probably come up with a longer one that I like (I own the domain) later and try again, but it just felt incredibly lame for them to reject my email like that.

Yep, I’ve encountered that problem fairly often. These days, I only use that email for vanity.

Hah I had the email address [email protected] for a little while - same thing, everyone just got confused by it.

Ah! The del.i.cio.us days.

Having lunch with a friend he said something I didn't expect,

> but my C drive crashed and I lost the bookmarks.

There's still a Delicious market.

del.icio.us

Just like old times.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080906141421/http://blog.delic...

>> "So why did we switch to delicious.com? We’ve seen a zillion different confusions and misspellings of “del.icio.us” over the years (for example, “de.licio.us”, “del.icio.us.com”, and “del.licio.us”), so moving to delicious.com will make it easier for people to find the site and share it with their friends. Of course the old del.icio.us domain and all its URLs will continue to work. Also note that the domain change requires a new login cookie, which is why everyone has to log in again."

Also: interview with Joshua Schachter on the Web Masters podcast. One of those rare podcasts where every episode is worth listening to.

https://latonas.com/blog/web-masters-episode-9-joshua-schach...

Delicious is one of those words I have a hard time spelling, let alone remembering where the dots would go.

I wonder if the parent was being sarcastic. I could never remember where the dots went; I suspect I wasn't the only one, and that was probably why they end up changing to delicious.com.

Hi Joshua, when you are here, why did you choose that name, with the dots?

Almost certainly a cheap(er) way to get a cool domain on a startup budget.

when i registered icio.us in 2001 or so, Doing Startups wasn’t a thing. i got it because “icious” suffixed the largest number of words

Reminded me for some reason of mikerowesoft.com - believe the story is that Microsoft sued the guy for infringement and ended up winning. Let's hope a tech company with the name Danblos or something doesn't blow up

Fwiw I also think it's the coolest thing ever

Why not danblo.ws?

Apart from the extra coolness, it also let me have the email [email protected].

He wanted to be extra cool.

My name’s Corlin and I own corl.in

I sign up for accounts with emails like [email protected] and that lets me easily filter and organize my inbox.

But when I have to tell some customer service rep my email they get very confused.

I do that as well, my domain is my last name .fr

When changing ISP, I gave [email protected] and the dude got confused and couldn't understand. He wanted to call his supervisor to ask if I was allowed to do that.

As someone who does a similar thing, I get this a lot. One of the most concerning (and common ones) is "oh, do you work here?".

I deal with this by reversing the brandname, or coming up with some other code. So long as it's unique per signup, I can trace back anyway.

Can I ask how you host your emails? I have a similar situation but the price for most hosts for a wild-card domain is prohibitive.

> Can I ask how you host your emails? I have a similar situation but the price for most hosts for a wild-card domain is prohibitive.

Almost every email host that supports custom domains supports receiving email with unlimited wild-cards. Is there something I'm missing?

Example: https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/ ($3/month)

I think you're missing that the feature we're talking about is specifically within the $5/month option, in much the same way that ProtonMail (the one I use), also hides their catch-all option behind a higher price-point.

I'm also fairly sure that they don't let you reply as the address the catch-all was placed on, which is an important feature.

If you know any that do, that'd be great.

True, I missed that "custom domain" isn't part of the lowest tier.

The point still stands though, if you have a mail provider that supports custom domains there usually isn't a limit on the catch all aliases you can add (or a very high one). In any case it's far from being "prohibitively" expensive.

> I'm also fairly sure that they don't let you reply as the address the catch-all was placed on

That is definitely possible with Fastmail as that's how I use it. In their case I believe that feature is called "Alias". If you reply to an email you just select with alias you want to reply from.

I use Cloudflare Email Routing. Only problem I currently have is if I don't think ahead, I might have to setup the alias on the spot (probably should setup a catch all to make sure that it doesn't just drop them). And that redirects stuff to generally anywhere (though I mostly have it setup to redirect to an outlook.com family plan, which is already paid for for other reasons).

I do something similar with the old Gmail for Domains product (or whatever it was called before Workspace) - it lets me add real mailboxes but also have a catch-all, where everything else gets delivered to a specific address.

I know this is not available any more so I've done the same with Cloudflare Email Routing which lets you set up a catch-all and is (still) free.

Protip: [email protected]

Another happy owner here of a 3-letter domain with a 2-letter TLD: rio.hn. I can spell my name, Dario, as [email protected]. Lots of people laughs when they realize it's my name, they find it clever.

Especially on HN!

My favourite personal domain by anyone is Matt Mullenweg's ma.tt, it's so short and really stands out.

But for me, {firstname}.{country}, is enough because it's pretty cool to be the only {firstname} in {country} who decided to register the domain. :)

I've got https://xavd.id, which I'm very proud of. @xavdid is my username across most sites (except for very old accounts, like this one)

Sadly http://merl.in has been idle for the past 10+ years, and I have not been able to get in touch with the owners...

My name is Justus, and I had my eye on https://just.us for years. It was just the photo gallery for a couple’s 60th anniversary dance.

I checked every year on the expiry date to see if they renewed. Every year they did.

One year I forgot to check and now the domain is parked and for sale for $288k.

If it is any consolation they probably used a bot to pick it up and you would have been beaten to it unless you were going to use a bot.

That actually is a bit of consolation, thanks!

I've been waiting years to try and get jo.sh but it's a heckin premium domain and doesn't expire until 2027 (registered in 1998)

Same here, I somehow managed to get lucky enough to register https://yuv.al

same, but without the name part haha. well, I guess it kinda does, my name is pavlos, paul in English. https://p0l.co/55