Email hacks

Posted by Angela Beesley on September 11, 2006 (Wikia, Wikipedia)

Wikipedia’s deleted articles are usually junk, but I found an exception - it was an interesting article on email hacks, a non-notable neologism by Wikipedia’s standards, but still worth rescuing for the Internet Wikia. An email hack is defined as “an unconventional email address that uses the commercial at symbol (”@”) as the letter “a” in the construction of a email address title.”

It inspired me to buy the domain nge.la, which gives me the email address wiki at nge dot la, which in theory can be read as “wikiangela”. a.nge.la also redirects to this site, but I have a feeling that many people wouldn’t even recognise it as a valid URL and would just think I was writing my name in a very odd way. Does that seem true or am I not giving people enough credit for recognising that not every domain ends in .com? :)

4 Comments

  1. [[meta:user:walter]] said,

    September 11, 2006 at 7:08

    You are correct. Many people do not know anything else besides .com and there country TLD. Even many webforms will not except an emailadres from a less know TLD, and that is even .info many times

  2. [[en:user:Gary Kirk]] said,

    September 14, 2006 at 1:33

    I must say when I saw you change your email address on your userpage, I didn’t “get it” and thought maybe it was some sort of new spam trap.

  3. james_uk said,

    September 26, 2006 at 0:41

    I think this is a mildly diverting piece of trivia. Good luck with more substantial efforts.

  4. Mark said,

    November 11, 2006 at 20:25

    Angela, I love it! I think that it is smart. .com - yea most people think of that, but it will be soon enough before the tipping point comes and people understand tld’s.