Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

anonaddy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 187 posts

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

#111

Post by SteveNuts »

patrickaljord wrote: post #105
geocrasher wrote: post #84

Delivering 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.

The mail still has to come from a domain, which is one of the things that can show up on a blacklist.

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

#112

Post by willbrowning »

johnkarahalis wrote: post #109
willbrowning wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes that's true you could be linked if using a custom domain and someone can determine that nobody else is sharing that domain with you.

That's why I added the additional username feature to compartmentalise aliases and also the UUID aliases.

The UUID aliases all share the same domain e.g anonaddy.me so it is not possible to link ownership of these to any particular user.

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

#113

Post by mehrdadn »

> Our system will then silently discard any further emails and you won't be forwarded anything else for that alias.

Be careful you don't run into legal issues here. I remember reading somewhere recently that silently dropping emails isn't allowed in some jurisdictions.

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

#114

Post by samatman »

huhtenberg wrote: post #20
missmadeleine wrote: post #12

Hey, been using this for a few weeks now. Been an absolute game-changer. So refreshing to have something open-source with privacy at the heart of it. Super user friendly, great dashboard. Considering upgrading to the pro version - how long is your black friday offer available?

Welcome to HN, an account created 9 minutes ago.

"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

#115

Post by willbrowning »

mehrdadn wrote: post #113

> Our system will then silently discard any further emails and you won't be forwarded anything else for that alias. Be careful you don't run into legal issues here. I remember reading somewhere recently that silently dropping emails isn't allowed in some jurisdictions.

I'll have to do some further reading on this. Do you vaguely remember where you read this and why it was not allowed?

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

#116

Post by mehrdadn »

willbrowning wrote: post #115
mehrdadn wrote: post #113

> Our system will then silently discard any further emails and you won't be forwarded anything else for that alias. Be careful you don't run into legal issues here. I remember reading somewhere recently that silently dropping emails isn't allowed in some jurisdictions.

I'll have to do some further reading on this. Do you vaguely remember where you read this and why it was not allowed?

I feel like it was either here on HN, or on some article linked here, a few weeks/months ago. But I could be wrong... vague recollection at the moment. I don't think the reason was mentioned explicitly but to me it's pretty obvious that it would be a question of accountability.

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

#118

Post by mratzloff »

willbrowning wrote: post #106
geocrasher wrote: post #84

Delivering 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!

It really doesn't take much at all to get blacklisted by Gmail or others. Companies like MailChimp have agreements in place with Google.

Unfortunately, mail delivery is far, far harder than it should be.

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

#119

Post by Rebelgecko »

ludditetech wrote: post #117

Spamgourmet been doing this for free for must be about 10 years I think https://www.spamgourmet.com/index.pl

Spamgourmet is amazing and has been really responsive when it comes to fixing the sorts of issues that come up when running an email service (e.g. blacklisted IPs, messages getting shunted to spam, etc). I've been using it since 2007 and it's kept more than 10,000 junk emails out of my inbox. I think it actually started almost 20 years ago.

Unfortunately the operator of the site is really sick and has talked about shutting the site down. Last I heard he'd found someone who seemed trustworthy to run the site when he isn't able to, so we'll see.

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

#120

Post by darkstar999 »

huhtenberg wrote: post #20
missmadeleine wrote: post #12

Hey, been using this for a few weeks now. Been an absolute game-changer. So refreshing to have something open-source with privacy at the heart of it. Super user friendly, great dashboard. Considering upgrading to the pro version - how long is your black friday offer available?

Welcome to HN, an account created 9 minutes ago.

You seem to be ultra paranoid about astroturfing.
Post reply on HN