I own a 3-letter domain with a 2-letter TLD and still spells my family name. Many of my friends finds it cool when I share links via that domain. The links are indeed easy to remember but it comes at a higher yearly cost of renewal and I had forgotten to renew twice. Luckily, I was able to re-register them (nobody wants it, ;-)).
I used to have a mail address along the lines of d@nblows.com
But beware, single letter local parts are not universally supported by web sites.
Microsoft accounts with those mail addresses are possible (they used to be impossible), but recently I stumbled upon two other web sites that didn't like single letter local parts.
I use an email address with a single-letter username (m@...) and have never had a problem with services rejecting it. The only problem is that rarely when I sign up for a service using a random password like gAdlzIBVom4j3Paf, it tells me "your password cannot contain your username" because it contains the letter "m". Hah!
Haven't had that problem before, far more of a problem when I try to register with site specific email addresses like d+hn@nblows.com which I've tried to get in the habit of doing.
Some mail providers (eg Gmail) use the plus sign as a label. So your everything still gets routed to d@nblows.com but tagged "hn" or "twitter" or whatever.
It's quite a convenient way to have site specific addresses while still only having a single mailbox to manage.
I get told that my email is invalid by some apps, for using a .so domain. Apple was one that would not let me create an apple ID upon buying a new laptop. Eventually, I set up the machine without Apple ID, and opted to create it after the fact via apple.com which accepted it. It makes me wonder if it is intentionally a "Hard no" during system setup, and then a "well okay if you insist" when the user has installed the system without using an Apple ID as a last resort.
Yes, I did that single letter email way back around 2007-2008 and had it with my Bank (closed account for a company). Now, I can neither change nor login (not valid to them), and I have set a specific filter just to ignore that email from the Bank that keeps sending me newsletter and offers.
I don't use the short oin.am as my primary (which is oinam.com), I have it as a alias domain, allowing me to quickly say/hand-write my email to someone and continue the conversation from my main domain -- say, ß@oin.am.
I literally had a bank tell me my email was invalid today. It was 2 letters before the @, and I think that's why. I'll probably come up with a longer one that I like (I own the domain) later and try again, but it just felt incredibly lame for them to reject my email like that.
>> "So why did we switch to delicious.com? We’ve seen a zillion different confusions and misspellings of “del.icio.us” over the years (for example, “de.licio.us”, “del.icio.us.com”, and “del.licio.us”), so moving to delicious.com will make it easier for people to find the site and share it with their friends. Of course the old del.icio.us domain and all its URLs will continue to work. Also note that the domain change requires a new login cookie, which is why everyone has to log in again."
I wonder if the parent was being sarcastic. I could never remember where the dots went; I suspect I wasn't the only one, and that was probably why they end up changing to delicious.com.
Reminded me for some reason of mikerowesoft.com - believe the story is that Microsoft sued the guy for infringement and ended up winning. Let's hope a tech company with the name Danblos or something doesn't blow up
When changing ISP, I gave ispname@myname.fr and the dude got confused and couldn't understand. He wanted to call his supervisor to ask if I was allowed to do that.
I think you're missing that the feature we're talking about is specifically within the $5/month option, in much the same way that ProtonMail (the one I use), also hides their catch-all option behind a higher price-point.
I'm also fairly sure that they don't let you reply as the address the catch-all was placed on, which is an important feature.
True, I missed that "custom domain" isn't part of the lowest tier.
The point still stands though, if you have a mail provider that supports custom domains there usually isn't a limit on the catch all aliases you can add (or a very high one). In any case it's far from being "prohibitively" expensive.
> I'm also fairly sure that they don't let you reply as the address the catch-all was placed on
That is definitely possible with Fastmail as that's how I use it. In their case I believe that feature is called "Alias". If you reply to an email you just select with alias you want to reply from.
I use Cloudflare Email Routing. Only problem I currently have is if I don't think ahead, I might have to setup the alias on the spot (probably should setup a catch all to make sure that it doesn't just drop them). And that redirects stuff to generally anywhere (though I mostly have it setup to redirect to an outlook.com family plan, which is already paid for for other reasons).
I do something similar with the old Gmail for Domains product (or whatever it was called before Workspace) - it lets me add real mailboxes but also have a catch-all, where everything else gets delivered to a specific address.
I know this is not available any more so I've done the same with Cloudflare Email Routing which lets you set up a catch-all and is (still) free.
Another happy owner here of a 3-letter domain with a 2-letter TLD: rio.hn. I can spell my name, Dario, as d@rio.hn. Lots of people laughs when they realize it's my name, they find it clever.
Example https://oin.am/rr/