Mailoji bought 300 emoji domains from Kazakhstan to sell emoji email addresses

Ben, the builder behind tinyprojects.dev, started with a joke purchase — the domain netflix.soy — and learned along the way that emoji domains exist. His next question was whether an emoji domain could work as an email address, and a simple mailbox emoji on the .ws extension was still available, so he bought it and put up a small site for it.

Sending mail to his new emoji address failed: emoji domains score so highly for spam that the email was lost. He found a workaround — forward mail from the emoji address through a normal domain before it reaches his inbox — and it worked. That raised a bigger question: with only 13 TLDs accepting emoji domains and nearly every one registered, could single-character emoji domains be had at all? A WHOIS hunt found Kazakhstan's .kz registry still full of them at about $8 each. He bought 150 that night, then 100 more after first sales, and the service ended up with 300 domains.

He built Mailoji with vanilla HTML, JavaScript and CSS plus Stripe payments: customers rent an emoji address and mail forwards through a normal domain so spam filters do not block it. Marketing was one TikTok video posted as an ordinary user after the ad platform demanded a VAT number he did not have. It sat at zero views for five hours, then ran — 200k+ views in two days and 60 addresses sold. A Product Hunt launch, complete with a promotional video voiced by a Japanese voice actor, finished fifth with 320 upvotes, 6.7k site views and 150+ addresses sold on the day.

The launch write-up became the project's real marketing. Mailoji settled at roughly $1,440 a year in revenue with 300 emoji domains on offer, and Ben was candid that he had not yet earned back what the domains cost. The Hacker News post drew 1,683 points and 612 comments, and the story was shared as a model of a small internet project that followed a silly question all the way to a working product.