Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email • Hacker News Board

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#11

Post by JonathonW » Fri, May 27, 2016, 2:48 AM UTC

jalami wrote: post #6

ceejayoz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spammers know to take off the +spammer part.

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.

I like Yahoo's approach-- they do their disposable email aliases like this:

basename-spammerspecificsuffix@yahoo.com

Where basename is user-chosen (and not necessarily related to the real email address), and the suffix has to be registered ahead of time (so a spammer can't just start randomly generating suffixes to avoid filters).

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#12

Post by winterswift » Fri, May 27, 2016, 2:55 AM UTC

Signup seems to be broken? I've tried a few 'random' (keyboard-mashing) usernames to no avail. As guptaneil pointed out, some immediate form feedback on username availability would be very helpful as well.

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#13

Post by jweir » Fri, May 27, 2016, 2:58 AM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #5

nfirvine wrote: post #4

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

Spammers know to take off the +spammer part.

Couldn't spammers just start sending to (rand).username@mailhero ?

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#14

Post by jrwoodruff » Fri, May 27, 2016, 3:09 AM UTC

guptaneil wrote: post #9

Sounds awesome, would love to try it. Spent 5 minutes trying to sign up, but every variation of usernames that I tried were taken. This normally wouldn't be an issue to complain about, except that in order to test whether a username is available or not, I have to enter the username, password, and captcha every time. Please please please tell me whether or not a username is taken as a type it before I go further.

Same awful experience here. Sounds great, was terrible.

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#15

Post by schneems » Fri, May 27, 2016, 3:22 AM UTC

I made something almost exactly like this 6 years ago. Called whyspam.me

Good luck.

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#16

Post by matart » Fri, May 27, 2016, 3:23 AM UTC

guptaneil wrote: post #9

Sounds awesome, would love to try it. Spent 5 minutes trying to sign up, but every variation of usernames that I tried were taken. This normally wouldn't be an issue to complain about, except that in order to test whether a username is available or not, I have to enter the username, password, and captcha every time. Please please please tell me whether or not a username is taken as a type it before I go further.

I also had every username I tried come up as taken. Even ones I found on main stream sites.

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#17

Post by schneems » Fri, May 27, 2016, 3:40 AM UTC

schneems wrote: post #15

I made something almost exactly like this 6 years ago. Called whyspam.me Good luck.

Almost forgot I open sourced it when I took it down. https://github.com/schneems/WhySpam

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#18

Post by crazydiamond » Fri, May 27, 2016, 3:50 AM UTC

I have been using gishpuppy for several years. It actually works. It's a free service, you create an email for any website that asks for one. There are addons/extension for firefox and perhaps other browsers, too.

http://www.gishpuppy.com/

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#19

Post by newman314 » Fri, May 27, 2016, 3:51 AM UTC

Why can't it just be some random hash? For me, a key benefit of a disposable mail account is not to have any identifiers including username.

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#20

Post by keehun » Fri, May 27, 2016, 3:53 AM UTC

guptaneil wrote: post #9

Sounds awesome, would love to try it. Spent 5 minutes trying to sign up, but every variation of usernames that I tried were taken. This normally wouldn't be an issue to complain about, except that in order to test whether a username is available or not, I have to enter the username, password, and captcha every time. Please please please tell me whether or not a username is taken as a type it before I go further.

I'm having a similar experience. I have a username that is NEVER taken... Not even on Gmail, and yet it was not available. I sense that the form is wrong, or maybe it's not accepting new users right now.