Awesome! I wanted to have something like this for ever and planned to build it myself using a combination of gmail and Flow or something. Now LastPass , 1Password etc. need to integrate it so every time you generate a new password you can add a random email to the mix.
Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service
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Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service
#102Awesome! I wanted to have something like this for ever and planned to build it myself using a combination of gmail and Flow or something. Now LastPass , 1Password etc. need to integrate it so every time you generate a new password you can add a random email to the mix.
Yes a few other users have mentioned integration with password managers. I agree that would be extremely convenient, but this would obviously be up to the password manager to integrate it using the API.
Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service
#103There's a much harder problem, granted, but the world needs a throwaway SMS service. Even Imgur needs a phone to sign up now :( There are already some services like this, however it seems they have a smallish pool of phone numbers. Eventually everyone uses those to sign up, one time, somewhere (like Imgur) and that number is then useless for that site. Is there a better way?
I agree. Why does everything ask for phone numbers these days? What's next, a picture of my government ID?
Because disposable emails are trivially used by casual users and companies see phone number as harder to falsify (correctly, IMO). It's not impossible, obviously. We know SMS can be hijacked and spoofed, but the casual user won't be doing this, today.
Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service
#104Beautiful site. Can I ask how you made it? I see some mention of a Tailwind template for the landing page, but how did you do the secondary pages and the admin interface? The blog? Also, I see some mention of Vue. Did you do the admin interface differently than the main site?
Thanks a lot.
The other pages e.g. the blog, FAQ, posts etc. are just very simple layouts along with the nav bar and footer.
I'm using Jigsaw[1] which is a static site generator that allows you to use Laravel's blade templating engine, it's awesome.
The admin interface I made myself using a few Vue components, it is a reasonably simple layout to be honest.
Yes the account site where you login (everything at app.anonaddy.com) is completely separate from the landing page (anonaddy.com).
The first is a Laravel app, the second is a static site. They both have different repositories on GitHub. Feel free to browse through all the source code to get a better understanding of how it works. Just let me know if you have any more questions about it.
If you are looking for some help or inspiration with UI design I highly recommend the Refactoring UI book[2] by Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger.
[1] https://jigsaw.tighten.co/ [2] https://refactoringui.com/
Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service
#105Delivering mail services on the Internet is hard. Really hard. It's even harder to do correctly, and harder yet to prevent abuse. It is quite likely that you're going to end up in a game of whack-a-mole with abuse issues, and that's going to be your primary fight. The moment somebody abuses the system, your IP gets RBL'd or DNSBL'd and it's game over until it's fixed. It's a cool product that has a lot of great legit…
Maybe he's using some cloud provider smtp/api to send mail in which case it's not much of a headache, just a few lines of code.
Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service
#106Delivering mail services on the Internet is hard. Really hard. It's even harder to do correctly, and harder yet to prevent abuse. It is quite likely that you're going to end up in a game of whack-a-mole with abuse issues, and that's going to be your primary fight. The moment somebody abuses the system, your IP gets RBL'd or DNSBL'd and it's game over until it's fixed. It's a cool product that has a lot of great legit…
I agree there may well be some challenges along the way but I'll do my best to prepare and prevent them. I'm always reading and learning more about the best measures to have in place for the server.
Thank you, hopefully I'll be able to stay sane!
Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service
#107This is pretty cool. Do you have any info on how you set up all the email infrastructure?
Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service
#108Delivering mail services on the Internet is hard. Really hard. It's even harder to do correctly, and harder yet to prevent abuse. It is quite likely that you're going to end up in a game of whack-a-mole with abuse issues, and that's going to be your primary fight. The moment somebody abuses the system, your IP gets RBL'd or DNSBL'd and it's game over until it's fixed. It's a cool product that has a lot of great legit…
Maybe he's using some cloud provider smtp/api to send mail in which case it's not much of a headache, just a few lines of code.
If a spammer is able to exploit his system he'll either run out of money and/or his hostname will be blocked. His challenge is to filter spam before those few lines of code.
Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service
#109Awesome idea! I've been doing this exact same thing since march this year with my own domain using MailGun (Free) and custom forwarding rules. Really amazing to see someone turn it into a product that can easily be set-up by the general folk. (And for a nice price!). Loved your UUID-alias idea. May I ask however, how do you expect to handle a blacklist of your domains? I've had trouble in the past signing up to some…
Nice! I also plan to add random word aliases soon e.g. yellow.biker57@anonaddy.me etc. just because some people think UUID aliases stick out a bit and look odd. To be honest the only true solution to that problem is to use your own domain. I will be adding more generic domains to use in the future so hopefully will be able to evade the majority of these blacklists.
A friend of mine was considering building an anonymous forwarding service and ran into this same question. He also considered allowing custom domains, but if a custom domain is used, is it really anonymous? Couldn't services coordinate to realize that all email addresses under whatever.com are owned by the same person?
Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service
#110This is pretty cool. Do you have any info on how you set up all the email infrastructure?
Thanks, I do have a small number of instructions for self hosting[1] they're still a work in progress and you'll need to know how to manage a server from the command line etc.
A few users have asked for me to create a Docker image that can easily be deployed, however I'm not familar with Docker so I'll have to learn how to do this first.