
Show HN: Personalized email addresses for your entire family - jesperht
https://www.namekin.com
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evan_
I happen to own mylastname.org and it has kind of been a problem if I’m being
honest. I finally had to start start carrying around cards with my email
address printed on them. People can’t handle it, they expect personal names to
come before the @ and if you say anything after the @ besides gmail or hotmail
or a business name they absolutely shut down.

I’m sure it doesn’t help that my last name seems like it’s misspelled...

~~~
giancarlostoro
This is precisely why I still give people my gmail, I realized if I wanna use
a totally custom email I have to carry around a business card. I just might
start carrying business cards soon either way, it's a subtle way for me to get
myself out there when trying to network and meet new people.

~~~
evan_
I got the little half-size business cards from moo.com and just put my name
and email on them.

~~~
jesperht
Been ditching my business cards for [http://clinck.me/](http://clinck.me/) (no
affiliation) over these last few years with great success, maybe worth a shot?

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jesperht
Came up with the idea for this with my wife and decided to build it! Been
dogfooding it with my family and am now sharing it with the rest of the world.

Tech stack is Node/Express running on Dokku/Digital Ocean for the API. UI is
built using Parcel and hosted on Netlify.

Would love to hear your thoughts and happy to answer any questions you folks
may have :-)

~~~
sokoloff
I run a similar for my family and deliverability has been the on-going issue.
Every year or so I have to make some kind of update because some mail admin or
other changes their setup and they start flagging our outbound mail (from
foo@sokoloff.com) as junk/spam.

It's a good idea and I wish you the best of luck, but I am curious how you
handle the outbound deliverability.

~~~
jesperht
Thanks for the feedback! This is certainly a concern and one that I've tried
to avoid by focusing on receiving (forwarded) email and not sending for the
following reasons:

* Easier setup - nothing to configure and you can keep using your existing email setup. Using email clients can be very difficult for some people, especially older folks, so I don't want to make their lives harder by forcing them to learn something new.

* Less maintenance/upkeep - not having to worry about storing/sending/retrying means that users have a better UX.

I'd love to easily integrate sending from the custom email, and I may add it
in the future for the power users, but I think the cost/benefit of it right
now just isn't worth it so I'll keep things Simple©.

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giancarlostoro
I think even just offering @namekin.com as an option, and allowing people to
start mailing lists for their families would be awesome as well (of course,
offering this for the domain option works too). Since some last names are way
too common, it could even make sense to figure out a good list of most common
domains to buy ahead of time and offer to use them to families. Of course you
gotta make sure they understand other families with the same last name could
be using those domains.

You could offer a single @namekin email as a sample of the whole service as
well, which might go a long way and get you more feedback.

~~~
jesperht
Holy cow I can't believe I didn't think of this, that's a great idea. I was
struggling with finding a good way to hook people in with a freemium option,
and this could be it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and ideas.

~~~
giancarlostoro
No problem, I love this idea, it would be nice to see more than just gmail and
other providers out there. I also love your web layout it's really nice.

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indigodaddy
You might think about adding chat into the mix. You could look at possibly
rebasing onto Crossbox ( [https://crossbox.io](https://crossbox.io) ),which
also incorporates chat + some other stuff (I have no affiliation, just
stumbled across it recently and the demo is pretty attractive). Or you could
probably easily add an XMPP chat server/service onto whatever you've already
built..

~~~
indigodaddy
Should have noted your comments about your custom app/techstack, so forgive my
comment about "rebasing" onto something else. However I still think
incorporating a chat feature would add value and believe there would certainly
be interest for it.

~~~
jesperht
That's a really interesting idea, thank you for sharing.

~~~
jesperht
Also, agreed - their site & demo are really great!

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wtmt
It looks quite cheap for someone with a larger family. But there's nothing
substantial on the privacy page. I'd expect at least some more verbiage on how
data will be handled and won't be handled. It also doesn't state how much disk
space quota is allocated, how many mails can be sent, whether each user can
choose multiple aliases, and any other limits that come close to what's
considered abuse.

Tangentially, it's also amusing to see "family name" so ingrained in so many
cultures that it's assumed that people who are part of a family will have a
common name. Around the world, this implicit assumption breaks so many things
for the people who culturally don't follow these (including visa applications,
website forms, etc.). See point #20 here. [1]

[1]: [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
programmers-...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-names/)

~~~
jesperht
Thanks for taking a look. At the moment it's only handing receiving email, not
sending - disk quota/etc are unnecessary. Cheers that link about names, really
good point and quite interesting!

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ykevinator
It's a great idea that a lot if families need. It's not clear what it costs
and its not clear if we use our name domain or your domain and what happens if
it's not available. The white glove service is spot on, the person who would
pay for this would not be the person who would know how to do it themselves.
And finally, this is a great anti Facebook family product and I think you
should mention that somewhere. Hth

~~~
jesperht
Thanks for taking a peek and your comments really highlight a need for me to
make the pricing and explanation of the service much more clear. We generate
several domain name suggestions based on your family name, you pick the one
you like, and then we take care of registering and managing the domain for
you. I also like the anti-facebook angle, great point.

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amelius
Looks great, but one concern is lock-in or name hijacking. How do you
guarantee that if I buy my domain name with you, it will actually be mine and
not yours? This is important if I wish to migrate to a different provider one
day without asking all my contacts to change my email address.

~~~
jesperht
Great question. We mention it in our ToS that we are happy to transfer the
domain whenever you want in case you want to take your business elsewhere.

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thecatspaw
I suggest making pricing a bit more obvious.

You arent collecting actionable (ie current email or similar to follow up)
information prior to showing the price either, so I am not sure what you gain
by hiding it.

~~~
jesperht
That's a great point - wasn't intentionally "hiding" it, but you're absolutely
right that by not collecting any e-mails I'll be missing out on plenty of
opportunities. Will see if I can work it in without making it creepy + adding
some pricing details to the main page. Appreciate you taking the time to look
and giving feedback.

~~~
konschubert
I think the suggestion was the other way around :D

~~~
jesperht
Hah, I guess I'm trying to do both! Either way: Pricing is now on the main
landing page together with the sale messaging :-) Thanks for the feedback
folks!

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sanqui
I put in my family name, which contains a letter with a diacritic mark. It
showed every domain as "unavailable". I suggest normalizing to ASCII.

~~~
jesperht
Whoops, that's certainly an oversight. Thanks for pointing it out, will make
sure that gets fixed :-)

~~~
sanqui
You're welcome. I like the concept.

You might also want to check which TLDs support international domain names
(IDNs) and which don't. The Czech TLD .cz, for example, doesn't[1], even
though Czech is heavy on letters with them.

[1] [https://www.xn--hkyrky-ptac70bc.cz/](https://www.háčkyčárky.cz/)

~~~
jesperht
Ah, TIL - had no idea :-) BTW, I deployed a fix which will hopefully fix the
diacritic bug you mentioned in case you'd like to give it another go!

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WhitneyLand
Seems like a nicely designed, friendly project to arrive for the holiday
season. Nice job.

~~~
jesperht
Thank you for the kind words, happy you enjoyed it!

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josh_fyi
Great idea! But the vast majority of people will find that their family name
is taken.

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jesperht
Yup, definitely a challenge and the reason why I try to suggest lots of
different TLDs as well as some simple mutations like name + "family". I'm
still trying to figure out how else I can open it up for more useful domain
names that don't become completely convoluted.

~~~
giancarlostoro
"the"+familyname+"s" might be another one to try, yeah my last name is also
the name of a big company, and the Spanish word for Bull, so my options are
limited in getting a "family name type of domain" only 1 of the options
cropped up

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sjroot
This is cool but, even with a relatively uncommon last name, every single
possible domain shows up as taken.

~~~
shshhdhs
I have an uncommon last name, and some domain broker contacted me that the
domain squatter wants to sell it for $25,000+ (USD). It's honestly not worth
even $1,000, and there's like only 20 people in the world who would want it. I
openly laughed out loud for a while.

~~~
EamonnMR
I wanted to try and re-register an old, obscure video game fan site with a
short but unpronounceable domain, and a human (!) broker called me and said
that it was going to be thousands of dollars. I estimate it's real value to be
less than what they're paying him to sell it.

