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Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address
31–40 of 212 posts
Re: Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address
#32how do i know i can trust the security and privacy of this?
Re: Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address
#33So if you shut down I no longer receive any emails I have signed up for?
Re: Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I had to guess, requiring that each email address be tied to an individual person would allow NBox to stay off "temporary email address" blacklists. It's a privacy service essentially, not an anonymity service. Same reason why credit card masking services are legal, but Visa/MC/etc wouldn't allow a mass-shared CC number.
But a throwaway gmail account works the same yes?
Hi alkonaut, yes it works the same, but it might end up piling up.
Re: Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address
#35As an alternative, you could register a domain with a catch-all email address and simply register for new services on the fly using a unique string for each site. Have the catch-all forward to your main email account. For example, I would sign-up for HN using hackernews@marak.com and for Reddit using reddit@marak.com Simple and effective.
Gmail allows you to create unlimited unique addresses by using the + symbol. so you could do: username+trello@gmail.com. It's worked well for me for a few years.
The only downsides I see are that (very few) sites still complain about the perfectly legal + symbol and some sites / bots are probably starting to reverse engineer that since it still exposes your username. But so far, I've yet to have a single site or service expose my primary mail account, so it at least helps.
Finally: this is a fantastic hack for testing your own signup flows. :)
Re: Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address
#36As an alternative, you could register a domain with a catch-all email address and simply register for new services on the fly using a unique string for each site. Have the catch-all forward to your main email account. For example, I would sign-up for HN using hackernews@marak.com and for Reddit using reddit@marak.com Simple and effective.
Been there done that. If you catch all e-mail you will also get a lot of spam to random addresses like say sven@marak.com, lollerskates95@marak.com and so on and so forth. So then you need spam filtering anyway, or you need to configure which addresses are valid. I still host my own e-mail but I no longer do catch-all. There are only a few sites and services I care about. For those I have trusted them with my e-mail…
what kind of accounts do you use throwaway mail services for? the use case where NBox would be useful for me is sites I don't use often, i.e. a clothing site or online video game store. but i wouldn't trust those to a throwaway email
Re: Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address
#37As an alternative, you could register a domain with a catch-all email address and simply register for new services on the fly using a unique string for each site. Have the catch-all forward to your main email account. For example, I would sign-up for HN using hackernews@marak.com and for Reddit using reddit@marak.com Simple and effective.
Been there done that. If you catch all e-mail you will also get a lot of spam to random addresses like say sven@marak.com, lollerskates95@marak.com and so on and so forth. So then you need spam filtering anyway, or you need to configure which addresses are valid. I still host my own e-mail but I no longer do catch-all. There are only a few sites and services I care about. For those I have trusted them with my e-mail…
I actually haven't gotten any spam through my catch-all emails. Hopefully it stays that way.
I use a completely different domain than the one that's publicly associated with me though. Maybe that helps.
Re: Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address
#38how do i know i can trust the security and privacy of this?
Hi water42, don't ever trust anyone with your data, governments and big companies get hacked every day.
Our angle: we don't ask for any personal information.
Re: Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address
#39As an alternative, you could register a domain with a catch-all email address and simply register for new services on the fly using a unique string for each site. Have the catch-all forward to your main email account. For example, I would sign-up for HN using hackernews@marak.com and for Reddit using reddit@marak.com Simple and effective.
But it's also more easily traceable to you. With a service aggregating these, we see many users from NBox. Perhaps this is not a concern for your use case, but it seems a tradeoff worth considering.
> more easily traceable to you
Depends who is tracking you.
If I register some non-personally-identifiable domain "e.g.: bumblebutt.example" and use a WHOIS proxy, you're can only be given up by a registrar... which usually means a warrant.
Still paranoid? Pay for the domain using bitcoin you got in exchange for cash/services (there are a lot of registrars that take bitcoin).
Re: Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address
#40As an alternative, you could register a domain with a catch-all email address and simply register for new services on the fly using a unique string for each site. Have the catch-all forward to your main email account. For example, I would sign-up for HN using hackernews@marak.com and for Reddit using reddit@marak.com Simple and effective.
Gmail allows you to create unlimited unique addresses by using the + symbol. so you could do: username+trello@gmail.com. It's worked well for me for a few years. The only downsides I see are that (very few) sites still complain about the perfectly legal + symbol and some sites / bots are probably starting to reverse engineer that since it still exposes your username. But so far, I've yet to have a single site or serv…
Not a Gmail specific thing. That's something you can do with email in general.