There's a great little Easter Egg if you view source:
> <!-- Okay, if you really want to see a photo of my cat and have resorted to looking at the source HTML, here is a photo: https://gail.com/boxcat.jpg -->
> vii) it is unlikely that the Respondent was unaware of the Complainant’s trademark considering the fame and tradition of the trademark GAIL;
Can the respondent really be so ignorant of overseas manufacturers of extruded architectural ceramics, which were available in the respondent's home country as recently as 1990?
I took two earth sciences classes and even I can’t name any. The best I can do is that silicate is SiO4. I think. And it’s this tetrahedron thing that makes for really tough minerals like quartz. Maybe.
Our company is the owner of kamer.nl (kamer=room/chamber) and our government in the Netherlands has a first and second chamber (eerstekamer and tweedekamer) as a parallel to Congress/House of Commons.
We're getting a lot of emails (due to a catch-all) because politicians type foo@tweede.kamer.nl, foo@eerste.kamer.nl or just plain foo@kamer.nl instead the correct foo@tweedekamer.nl or foo@eerstekamer.nl.
It does sometimes contain some privacy-sensitive information and we always reply and point them to the mistake. We do this because hopefully they learn (most do...) and they can get the information to the right person.
It has a business reason: we let customers email each other on an anonymized email address ($hash@kamer.nl) to keep their info private. I know the structure of the hash (length etc) but no clue how to filter on the mail-server side using this characteristic, that’s why a catch-all. We’re thinking of sunsetting the feature and that would mean that a catch-all won’t be necessary anymore :-)
As the owner of a domain that matches with an ISP in Washington state (except for a missing "M" in mine), I feel Gail's pain.
I send back a canned response to most people once, then blacklist/drop the incoming address.
The worst I had was when someone decided that I was the one doing the wrong thing and demanded that I forward the email to the correct person. I engaged them back and forth for a bit, then eventually found the contact details of the company, forwarding the email chain to them and pointing out their customer service person's stupidity.
I got a nice reply from the CEO thanking me and an apology email from the CS person.
There are only two valid e-mail addresses on the gail.com domain, so it is extremely likely that your photos were rejected by my e-mail provider and tossed into the bit bucket.
Good to know their rejected emails are instantly uploaded to a hosted git server ;)
I've actually never heard bit bucket used like this before. Is that the origin of the name for bitbucket.com?
Uh oh. This makes me think my younger colleagues don't know what I'm talking about at least half the time, but never ask...
It never even registered with me until you asked, but that makes bitbucket the worst possible name, maybe next to "trashfire.com", for a service that is supposed to store data.
So as a metaphor I guess it's roughly equivalent to /dev/null or the recycling bin? Yeah, probably not the best name for a mission-critical immutable data store, unless it was meant to be ironic.
Of course (oh, how it makes me feel old too) that fantastic name is already registered and parked, and available for resale at the nice, nice price of $4,395 from HugeDomains. :(
I assume this is where the company got their name from; I remember thinking when I encountered them that it was a bit strange to name your company after something that implied unreliability and lost data.
> I've actually never heard bit bucket used like this before. Is that the origin of the name for bitbucket.com?
Yes, it's ancient as far as computer jargon goes. The etymology is pretty grounded in the real world though! It's where chads that were discarded by card punching machines go.
Haha, my brain seems to still bit-flip on the term "chad" nowadays. Before the current usage, the biggest thing was the "hanging chad" in Florida in a US presidential election.
Then I did Comp. Sci. at school, and I learned that the whole Chads from punched cards was a thing, so my association with the word changed.
re: Bit Bucket. Again due to my age I guess, it was always a term for where thrown-away data went, along with 'Into the Ether' for lost network packets.
> Another interesting gail.com factoid: my amazing e-mail provider, ProtonMail, rejects about 1.2 million mis-addressed e-mails per week to the gail.com domain.
Would be interesting to set up mail servers on "mistyped" domain names. I wouldn't be surprised if you could get sensitive information that would be useful for spear phishing.
I created a little python script that took a list of domains and created various misspellings of those domains, checked for MX records set for them.
I ran this on a list of "sensitive domains" (law authorities, government agencies etc). For example there were 2-3 domains for misspellings of "polisen.se" (the Swedish police) that had MX records set and were presumably receiving some emails they shouldn't.
> I wouldn't be surprised if you could get sensitive information that would be useful for spear phishing.
I know a bunch of people with common names who frequently get misdirected gmails that include car rentals, doctor appointments, hotel bookings, etc. I've only had a few (<10), alas, and they were mostly about buying art.
(Although who knows? Maybe those "misdirected" emails are themselves a sophisticated attack to get people to click on the "unsubscribe" or "this is not me" links...)
I have a relatively common name in South America, and get all kinds of stuff. Travel itineraries, legal documents, info about kids soccer matches, all sorts of stuff. I used to try to help people but it’s honestly pretty annoying, so I just delete it now.
An interesting factoid: though that was the original (and etymologically correct) meaning of the word "factoid," the meaning has since shifted. The word can now also mean "a briefly stated and usually trivial fact."
Q: Don't you know that you could throw some ads up and make money?
A: Yes, I know, thank you. For those who feel they need more advertising in their life, please have a look at our swanky Electronic Frontier Foundation ad below. If you believe in a free Internet, please consider clicking on the link and donating to the EFF.
Given that this [0] is very likely Gail’s husband (the guy who purchased the domain as a birthday gift for her in 1996), I don’t think they need the money.
I own several 3 & 4 character .com/net domains and have never had any requests to purchase them. They are all too obscure to be useful I guess.
This one would only be super valuable to Google (Catch gmail.com typos) or if someone wanted to launch a product called Gail (in my opinion).
Paying a million or more for a domain to consolidate branding is common for example pop.com https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28223515 and I know Puppet Labs paid a pretty penny for Puppet.com when it became available, and they were able to rebrand once they had that domain.
Technical co-founder of DigitalOcean owns wit.com (and he loves telling people) - he told me he's had offers well into 7 figures for it. 10000% sure he'll never sell it, ever, he loves it. :)
I actually did register a domain in 1998. Playstationcheatcodes.com. I was 12 and had no idea how to make a website, and my stepdad had some words when he got the bill. Good times!
Internet is only going to get more important. There’s no way domains are going to get cheaper. Any short domain will be worth millions given a long enough timeline.
You might have replied to the wrong comment, this thread is about the value of domains, not OP’s link. I agree keeping the domain is silly, but perhaps the guy is rich enough to not care.
We did this for a customer and to see what leaks. It’s very surprising and sometimes very bad from a security perspective on popular and high traffic domains of service providers.
I remember when this hit HN a few months(?) back, for me it was the first time learning about this and I assumed this might be an obscure thing.
I ran the python script against my (very large) employer's domain name and was pleasantly surprised to see we owned all the bitsquatted versions already (there were maybe 10?)
I recall reading a story about someone who became legendary among squatters because he somehow managed to negotiate the rights to commercialize Colombia's TLD (.co), meaning he positioned himself to take a cut of every .com -> .co typosquat ever.
Here's the guy himself talking about it in a NYT article[0]
it worked for that person because gmail.com is a hugely popular domain and they had gail.com before gmail was even created. nowadays much more competitive
Reading the legal arguments of the Gail ceramic company makes me never want to do business with that horrible company.
>> "Respondent’s domain name was registered and is being used in bad faith. The domain name <gail.com> is nearly identical to the trademarks owned by the Complainant and was registered to prevent the Complainant from reflecting the trademark GAIL in a corresponding domain name. Furthermore, because the Respondent registered the domain name exactly when the Complainant increased its sales of GAIL products to the United States, this should be identified as an abusive practice"
Ugh. Seriously? Who pays a lawyer to write horrible stuff like this. It is so pathetic and there was no evidence any of it is true. At least the respondent won the case.
If you think that's bad you should see the extended legal battle a guy with the family name Nissan had to engage in when he was sued by the car company.
Especially given that at least some autocorrect systems helpfully suggest correcting to "gmail" when you write something similar-looking in the domain part of an address.
It's funny how some of those systems try to correct anything that doesn't look like one of the big email providers. I use a custom domain for mail, and I can be 100% sure that it doesn't even look remotely like any well-known mail provider's domain, yet a very well-known website I tried to sign up for warned me that there is most likely a typo in my email address.
Better answer for the question "I tried to send some photos to my girlfriend and typed gail.com instead of gmail.com in the address field. The photos were of a very personal nature. Can you please delete them?" would be: "Don't worry! Your photos of a very personal nature are safely stored at NSA and will be scanned for all possible (ab)uses, many times, even in the future. In case of artificial intelligence false positives, they will also be manually scanned and reviewed - many times, even in the future. So please send the removal request to the NSA."
ahh typo-squatting... it creates so many interesting stories.. I have a few products related to domain names [1][2] and in the past I knew some users who owned "none.com.au" (which is a typo for nine.com.au - one of Australia's TV channels) and "gail.com.au" (similar to gail, but with .com.au) - which all attracted pretty decent traffic without any effort. They had some pages with Google AdSense going.
I also knew this user, who had the same domain name as one of the more popular YouTube video downloading tool, but with ".net". He put up an adsense that attracted 8k clicks per day.
Internet is filled with these fascinating stories.
> <!-- Okay, if you really want to see a photo of my cat and have resorted to looking at the source HTML, here is a photo: https://gail.com/boxcat.jpg -->