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Comment by GOTO95 | Hacker News Reader

I have a globally very rare last name and also own the .com for it, registered it in late 90's so that all of us would get their firstname@lastname.com email addresses. During the last 25 years exactly one (1) other than me ever wanted one and that was my younger son (he did use it exclusively).

So even if you think getting firstname@lastname.com is cool, just like I did/still do, I doubt most of your family really cares.

Also, Gmail/GSuite. Done. If it costs then good, you're not the product.

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Haha, yeah. That is the likely outcome. Especially since while tech-advanced, in the country of origin, ain't nobody trust anybody.

Just curious, how did you advertise this "service?" I am wondering about that aspect myself. [0]

Making this as obviously trustworthy as possible is probably the feature for which to optimize.

[0] That's why I was imagining a portal at surname.com, so that people could Google our name, sign up, with me in the loop for account approval.

NOTE: Who knows, this is an interesting legacy to leave behind, even if not popular now.

There's only ~25 of us and we used to get together for an extended family dinner once or twice a year - and I would just casually tell others that if they want their firstname@lastname.com email just ask me.

No one ever did.

Also I tried the portal thing - I put a simple webpage at https://lastname.com/ where it basically said to ask me for email accounts or web space... again, no one ever asked, not once. Not even my mother, she's been using the same Hotmail/Outlook/O365/whateveritsthisweek account since late 90s and doesn't want to move anywhere.

Interesting. I wonder if in my case, being more forceful would work.

As in, gather their email addresses, create forwards with first@lastname.com, and give them biz cards, or DMs, with those addresses. Once you are able to share first@last.com as your email, it's hard to go back.

I think that's kinda how Stripe got sign-ups back in the day, according to HN lore. Just grab their laptop, and write the 3 lines of code. :)

I just want my fam to have the power of saying "my email is first@last." Maybe Reply As is not important. Just the to: alias would do.

I could probably manually scrape FB and make the aliases,[0] send them messages asking for their current email address, create the @lastname.com fwd, and meet a bunch more family that way.

Thank you for helping me get to this point.

Cheers!

[0] Namecheap allows 100 email fwds/domain for free. That's what I will do manually.

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