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Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

mailhero.io

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Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#61

Post by pulkitanand »

ricg wrote: post #59

Is there a service that lets me send mail from such an email address as well? Let's say I use this for my Amazon account amzn.myusername@mailhero.io and I need to get in touch with Amazon customer support. For verification they require me to actually send an email from amzn.myusername@mailhero.io. Or another case: as soon as I have to actually send an email to a service I signed up for and use my real email address,…

You could use gmail to send email from these addresses. Gmail requires you to verify that you own the email ids, which should be possible to do with the way mailhero works.

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#62

Post by Jaruzel »

alanh wrote: post #54

Love the anecdotes at the bottom. I’ll add two of my own: - Sent myself a photo from a Southern Californian theme park that starts with "D" and ends with a fireworks show, using a custom email address: No third-party spam, but my god their "unsubscribe" links (NOT that I ever subscribed) just don’t work, I got a promotion for everything vaguely Disney-related for a year until I blocked the address completely. Whoops,…

> Signed up for a famous freemium file-syncing service whose name also starts with "D" using a custom email address, never used for anything else; that ended up in the hands of spammers.

Wasn't just me then. I /know/ I never used that particular address for anything else as it was specific to the D___Box service. Yet within 2 months, started getting lots of spam on it. I don't recall that company getting data breached, so totally unclear how that happened.

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#63

Post by KJP191 »

ricg wrote: post #59

Is there a service that lets me send mail from such an email address as well? Let's say I use this for my Amazon account amzn.myusername@mailhero.io and I need to get in touch with Amazon customer support. For verification they require me to actually send an email from amzn.myusername@mailhero.io. Or another case: as soon as I have to actually send an email to a service I signed up for and use my real email address,…

Sounds like an effective (if slightly underhand) way to monetize. If paying up is the only way to retrieve an account someone cares about...

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#64

Post by aembleton »

This looks really good. I've just seen this message though when I verified my email address: "Do not give out your bare-naked mailhero address (xxx@mailhero.io). Always make sure you add something before the dot, otherwise you can't stop the mails from arriving!"

If anyone from Mailhero is here - why don't you block the bare-naked emails? If this becomes popular then marketeers can just search for @mailhero.io addresses and strip off any string followed by a dot so that they can spam you.

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#65

Post by aembleton »

raihansaputra wrote: post #42

What would it do if people would just strip the prefixes before the dot just for mailhero? Would the email still gets forwarded? Should I shut down the account?

It suggests that that is exactly what could happen: "Do not give out your bare-naked mailhero address (xxx@mailhero.io). Always make sure you add something before the dot, otherwise you can't stop the mails from arriving!"

Seems like that should be a simple fix for them.

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#66

Post by sigio »

aembleton wrote: post #64

This looks really good. I've just seen this message though when I verified my email address: "Do not give out your bare-naked mailhero address (xxx@mailhero.io). Always make sure you add something before the dot, otherwise you can't stop the mails from arriving!" If anyone from Mailhero is here - why don't you block the bare-naked emails? If this becomes popular then marketeers can just search for @mailhero.io addres…

It would be easy enough to just prepend something random to the bare email's anyway, or to replace the random bit with every e-mail sent. So you can still spam mailhero users.

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#67

Post by biot »

aembleton wrote: post #64

This looks really good. I've just seen this message though when I verified my email address: "Do not give out your bare-naked mailhero address (xxx@mailhero.io). Always make sure you add something before the dot, otherwise you can't stop the mails from arriving!" If anyone from Mailhero is here - why don't you block the bare-naked emails? If this becomes popular then marketeers can just search for @mailhero.io addres…

On the same note, they can just construct .user@mailhero.io and email sent there will be forwarded to you as if that's the custom email address you sent out.

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#68

Post by yAnonymous »

findjashua wrote: post #28

With gmail, you can create a custom email for each service, like so: youremail+service@gmail.com Later on, if the service doesn't let you unsubscribe, or sells your email to other spammers, you can just set a filter to trash emails sent to youremail+service@gmail.com

The main problem with this is that many services won't allow your mail address to have a + in it.

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#69

Post by gingerlime »

trickster_ wrote: post #47

Another thing I am working on for Mailhero is to start publicly listing sites/organizations that have leaked mail addresses. This list currently includes Coca Cola, Adobe, Neteller and others.

You can add box.net to the list. I used a one-off email address on their service and it got leaked. They were at least honest enough to confirm it did indeed happen to them:

   We were recently informed by a handful of users that they had received spam email at the address associated exclusively with their Box account. We scoured our own systems and checked every possible scenario, and didn't find any evidence of our systems being compromised. Thanks to information sent to us by our customers, we were able to pin down that a third-party email service we used to send our newsletter to select users in February, March and April had been compromised.
   
   No other information beyond email addresses were ever exposed to this vendor.
   
   We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused our users. We continue to be committed to your privacy and keeping their confidential information safe. As a result of this issue, we're leaving this particular service provider immediately and consolidating all of our customer communication efforts within a single vendor with more robust security practices.

Re: Mailhero – a more permanent temporary email

#70

Post by gingerlime »

Love this idea, and the copywriting on the page is absolutely brilliant!

I hand-rolled my own solution a while back on my own server, simply creating a random forwarder and "tagging" it with a description, so I can always go back and lookup what fw839kopa4 was for... It's a ugly hack, but works.

My ugly hack has the added benefit of not accepting just any email address, but only those I explicitly defined. On the flip side, I have to run this small script and can't just give out citibank.myname@mydomain.com to anyone on the fly.

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