Four letters before the dot

any domain over 12 chars in length is spam now

— Neil Jagdish Patel

I read that and checked my own list. Every name I own already passed, and not by luck. I’d been following a stricter rule for years without ever writing it down.

The rule

The name before the dot is four letters. The part after the dot can be whatever fits the thing.

Why four

• Four letters read as one shape. You don’t spell dhrv, you see it.
• Dropping vowels keeps the name mine. dhrv is Dhruv without the u. lmda is lambda with the middle squeezed out.
• The extension does the describing, so the name never has to.

Under twelve

The longest one, lmda.studio, lands at eleven characters. So the rule clears the spam line with a character to spare, and I didn’t have to think about it once.

Try it with your own name. Keep the first and last letters and the outermost consonants between them, then see which extensions still fit.

When someone said it out loud, I just posted the list. Understood the assignment.