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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 -->
> I have a cat, but she's pretty unexciting by Internet standards
Ironically, this easter egg makes her exciting.
If the box were closed it could be Schrödinger's cat!
I love the domain squatting complaint--
> 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?
Recent relevant XKCD. Average Familiarity.
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.
out of curiosity, why do you maintain a catch all? would it not be easier (and less of a privacy issue) to just reject them outright?
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.
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.
It’s an old term for /dev/null et al. (The New Hacker’s Dictionary has a comic featuring a literal one in the background of the water-powered computer: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/bit-bucket.html)
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.
Yes! It's the bucket you toss the useless bits of chad! Think of teletypes and what to do with the chads of paper.
I don't imagine you ever imagined the cross-polination of hanging-chads with bitbucket.com!
There's an updated version for the modern app developer, https://devnull-as-a-service.com/
Past threads:
Gail.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854961 - Dec 2019 (9 comments)
Gail, not Gmail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13817969 - March 2017 (154 comments)
Good that they still have it. In France, a seamstress named Milka infamously lost her shop's milka.fr domain to a food giant owning the brand.
Meanwhile Mr. Nissan's legacy(he passed away last year) lives on:
> 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.
There's a similar attack involving registering domains that are a bit flip off from a well-known domain.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/windows-com-bitsquat...
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...)
An interesting fact: A factoid is not "a small piece of fact", it is infact:
an item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact.
Also known as typosquatting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typosquatting
Awesome site, the owner(s) seem like good people.
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.
A four letter .com domain must be worth a lot of money. I'd want to cash in.
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.
[0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/rkevinwatson
(I found this by Googling “Kevin Watson La Cañada”, the defendant mentioned in the domain takeover lawsuit.)
I have one. I also have a /24 IPv4 address block. Back in the old days, you often registered both at the same. They were also free.
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. :)
Last I heard they easily fetch 7 figures even for garbled acronyms. gail.com is a word, a name, a typo of gmail... in other words it's worth a fortune
zoom.com sold for $2,000,000 on 12/14/2018
I own awio.com and nobody's ever offered to buy it from me. It's not for sale, but 4-letter domains that aren't real words must not be so valuable.
The floor for random four letter .coms is only around $100 currently. Gail.com would go for 1,000-10,000x that though.
the shop that services my porsche owns epe.com. they have had several offers for $1M plus, but they will not sell it.
i only take my vehicle there because they own a 3-letter domain! ;)
Not only GMail, many of those hits might be people trying to reach Gas Authority of India : GAIL website .
It is www.gailonline.com
> Q: Interested in selling gail.com?
> A: Sorry, no.
I wonder if that answer would stand if Google offered her $3M USD so they could recover some of their lost traffic.
this domain is probably worth more than all the money I've ever made, not selling it is quite impressive
<font> elements! It really is from 1996. I haven't seen code that outdated since the frontend of Hacker News.
I was just 1 year old in 1996. For my generation it’s sucky that someone can squat on a domain by virtue of being first.
less than a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27957877
I didn't think typosquatting actually worked. I wonder if there's a general way to figure out the most common misspellings of a given domain name...
The one that scares me is gamil.com. I have made that typo numerous types, and the domain is owned by some guy in Florida who runs a small business.
As boomers who also worked in IT they have a house and all the money they need. Might as well have a little gimmick hobby on the side!
I have read the FAQ on the page. What a wonderful, pleasant person.
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.
> faq at gail period com
There's a typo at the bottom of the page, I think you mean faq at gMail period com.
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.