Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

What it is...

Create a new uniqe mailhero email when you sign up to a new service etc. Mailhero will keep forward those emails to your real one until you choose not to.

So if that email ends up in a spamming list and you get starting to get alot of unwanted email from different spammers that could be hard to block you could just stop the forwarding.

So it works like a temporary email but is more permanent at the same time. And dont stop working after like 24h like many other temporary email services.

(Sorry for a shitty title)

How is this different/better than Gmail's address+spammer@gmail.com?

Also some websites won't let you put + in the address despite it being a valid character per protocol. Crippling email sign ups for one company, astonishing.

Fastmail has subdomain addressing. eg. hackernews@myemail.fastmail.com which is a lot harder to detect.

If this becomes popular, what stops spammers from figuring out that the part before the last dot in the username can be anything?

A lot of shady folks already know about Gmail's plus-addressing trick. If I were a spammer and I found that foobar.username@mailhero.io didn't work, I would just try bazbaz.username@mailhero.io.

Perhaps you could set up the system to only accept aliases that have been explicitly configured. But that would make Mailhero a bit inconvenient for regular users, since they would have to add an alias before using it elsewhere.

Another possibility would be to add a big button in the dashboard that automatically generates a plausible address (e.g. barack.hillary.trump@mailhero.io) with no connection whatsoever to your regular username or other aliases. No need for the user to decide what alias to use, and no way for a spammer to figure out a working alias.

You mentioned it before I could! I'm somewhat amazed that site is still ticking, but I'm happy it is. I should make use of it more often... It even has some really nice features like being able to send email from your temporary address and more manual management of each temporary address you create. I highly recommend checking it out, even if the website looks old and strange, it's solid.

EDIT: Oh, and you can download the code for it and run it yourself if you want. Fantastic.