Man buys 300 emoji domain names and expands emoji email service

At the end of last year, British full-stack developer Ben Stokes bought the rights to 300 emoji domain names with which he set up an emoji mail service. With its service, called Mailoji, anyone can buy an emoji address for a fee.

Quite by accident, the British full-stack developer discovered Ben Stokes at the end of 2020 that he could also buy emoji domain names in addition to traditional domain names. Slightly disappointed, he learned that the rights to many single character emoji domain names had already been bought. However, this was not the case with the letterbox emoji combined with the .ws top-level domain, which he subsequently bought.

Stokes’s curiosity was unstoppable. The man wondered if he could also use his new emoji domain name for mail traffic and he ran into a problem. Stokes wanted every email that arrived at the emoji address to be automatically forwarded to his personal Gmail account, but that didn’t work. He learned that emoji addresses are systematically blocked by spam filters and that every email he sent from his new emoji address never arrived.

To fix this problem, Stokes had all mail traffic from his emoji domain name automatically forwarded to a conventional .com email address that didn’t have an emoji spam filter activated. He then had this e-mail address forward the received e-mails to his usual e-mail address in order to read them. His diversion worked and the plan came to Stokes’ mind to build a real emoji email service based on the same principle.

Stokes, meanwhile, learned that the Kazakh top-level domain .kz still had most of the single character emoji domain names available, unlike other TLDs. He then bought everything he wanted and $1200 later, 150 Kazakh single character emoji domain names belonged to him, allowing him to start building his beloved email service. With some programming, Stokes put together the Mailoji.com mail service in a few weeks, whereby all incoming mails from the emoji addresses are forwarded to a linked email address. According to the website, sending or receiving e-mails is currently also done via the linked e-mail address. It is not clear whether this will change in the future.