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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

#31

Post by CathedralBorrow »

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.

Do you find it impossible that someone would read a thread without an account, find a topic they want to comment on, create an account and then post a comment?

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

#33

Post by willbrowning »

baggachipz wrote: post #32

Fantastic looking product, and the first year of service for the price of a beer is a great value. Just hooked it up with my own domain to track spam offenders and eventually migrate off gmail entirely.

Amazing, thank you! I use it myself alongside Tutanota, great combination!

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

#34

Post by cddotdotslash »

willbrowning wrote: post #24
rinchik wrote: post #18

This looks great! The only note would be pricing? Margins look too low for the tech product? You need to sustainably acquire and maintain a very large user base in order to make it work, the larger the base the more expensive maintenance will be, can potentially be dangerous. Let me know if I'm missing something.

Thanks, to be honest the expenses for the service are quite low. It is just the server and domain costs at the moment and of course my time. You're right as it scales I may need to upgrade the server etc. but I think it will cover its expenses quite easily.

I went through a very similar process when building a product as an engineer (albeit B2B, but I think the same ideas apply here). When I first started, I wanted to undercut the market and charge what I felt was an extremely fair price (I was charging $8/month when competitors were charging $500/month). After scaling the product for a few years, it was eventually acquired, but one of the biggest regrets I've had is not charging more sooner, especially because the market could clearly support it.

Anyway, it's a bit unsolicited, but I could definitely see this being at least $4.99/month for Lite and $9.99/month for Pro. Congrats on the launch!

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

#35

Post by imglorp »

There'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?

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

#37

Post by newfeatureok »

One feature I'd love to see is automatic grouping, combined with the functionality you offer already.

So for example if you have an email (using a custom domain): email@example.com

You obviously will receive emails as you give out your email. Say for example you get emails from the following senders:

- mail@google.com

- azure@microsoft.com

- notice@azure.com

- ok@imgur.com

- hello@startup.com

It would be nice if the dashboard had something like the following (almost like meta emails):

  Email Address                       Enable
  email-mailgooglecom@example.com     [x]
  email-azuremicrosoftcom@example.com [ ]
  email-noticeazurecom@example.com    [x]
  email-okimgurcom@example.com        [ ]
  email-hellostartupcom@example.com   [ ]
The reason for this is that rather than deal with the flaky "unsubscribe" you can just disable emails from that sender. With what you have now you could accomplish the same thing by creating aliases for each service, but the issue is that sometimes you receive emails from unexpected address (e.g. you give your email to Microsoft for billing but start receiving from their marketing department).

The above, combined with intelligent grouping of emails and a uBlock Origin like curated list of "bad" emails could truly eliminate all spam.

You should introduce a 4th tier of payment if you have the above functionality, by the way as it's not that trivial.

The end result of this would probably look something like:

Your email (custom domain): mail@example.com

  Group                                Enabled
  Microsoft                            [o]
   - Azure Emails                      [ ]
   - Microsoft Store                   [x]

  Google                               [x]
   - Google Cloud                      [x]
And you then would allow people to customize what emails constitute "Microsoft", "Azure Emails", etc.

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

#38

Post by rinchik »

willbrowning wrote: post #24
rinchik wrote: post #18

This looks great! The only note would be pricing? Margins look too low for the tech product? You need to sustainably acquire and maintain a very large user base in order to make it work, the larger the base the more expensive maintenance will be, can potentially be dangerous. Let me know if I'm missing something.

Thanks, to be honest the expenses for the service are quite low. It is just the server and domain costs at the moment and of course my time. You're right as it scales I may need to upgrade the server etc. but I think it will cover its expenses quite easily.

Well, general suggestion is to build pricing model that is relative to what users (businesses?) can afford and not relative to the cost.

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

#40

Post by willbrowning »

cddotdotslash wrote: post #34
willbrowning wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, to be honest the expenses for the service are quite low. It is just the server and domain costs at the moment and of course my time. You're right as it scales I may need to upgrade the server etc. but I think it will cover its expenses quite easily.

I went through a very similar process when building a product as an engineer (albeit B2B, but I think the same ideas apply here). When I first started, I wanted to undercut the market and charge what I felt was an extremely fair price (I was charging $8/month when competitors were charging $500/month). After scaling the product for a few years, it was eventually acquired, but one of the biggest regrets I've had is no…

That's an interesting story and has some good points.

My main concern would be the fact that complete email solutions such as Tutanota, Posteo are very cheap at 1 euro a month or so.

So I'm not sure users who aren't as concerned about their privacy would think it was worth it for $4.99 per month+

I mean I could be completely wrong, just my thoughts from some of the feedback I've received so far.

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