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Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address

nbox.notif.me

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Re: Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address

#71

Post by sverige »

chatmasta wrote: post #10
_Marak_ wrote: post #9

As 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.

If you do this, make sure you lock down your account at your domain registrar. A socially engineered DNS hijack could be all it takes to obtain full read/write access to your email.

The other thing that happens is spammers use your domain to spam others. That catch-all will work for systems that test email validity for the spammer's made-up address on the From line.

Re: Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address

#73

Post by threatofrain »

chatmasta wrote: post #10
_Marak_ wrote: post #9

As 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.

If you do this, make sure you lock down your account at your domain registrar. A socially engineered DNS hijack could be all it takes to obtain full read/write access to your email.

Would you mind elaborating? Do you mean socially tricking a GoDaddy or other domain registrar employee into changing DNS records?

Re: Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address

#74

Post by Ajedi32 »

alkonaut wrote: post #27
jacobwg wrote: post #12

Earlier 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?

Gmail accounts sometimes require you to give a phone number in order to register a new account. Not to mention creating a new email address with this looks way easier than signing up for another Gmail account.

Re: Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address

#75

Post by jtwebman »

_Marak_ wrote: post #9

As 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.

With gmail you can just do username+hackernews@gmail.com and it will send it to username@gmail.com. The nice thing about this service though is you can just remove the fake email and they can't email you anymore.

Re: Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address

#76

Post by mmanfrin »

jtwebman wrote: post #75
_Marak_ wrote: post #9

As 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.

With gmail you can just do username+hackernews@gmail.com and it will send it to username@gmail.com. The nice thing about this service though is you can just remove the fake email and they can't email you anymore.

There are a fair number of sites with broken regexes/validations that reject emails with +s in them.

Re: Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address

#77

Post by mccolin »

This seems like it's almost "1Password for Email Addresses," which would be pretty great: go to site, hit key combination, have random/saved email inserted into login boxes. Combining that with email forwarding to my real email address that I can turn on and off is pretty powerful.

Re: Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address

#78

Post by massaman_yams »

mmanfrin wrote: post #76
jtwebman wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With gmail you can just do username+hackernews@gmail.com and it will send it to username@gmail.com. The nice thing about this service though is you can just remove the fake email and they can't email you anymore.

There are a fair number of sites with broken regexes/validations that reject emails with +s in them.

I have also observed emails tagged with "+" to break unsubscribe links in cases where the address is included in the link and the link is not properly URL-encoded.

Re: Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address

#79

Post by ajnin »

Presumably if I don't want to receive spam emails I'm also unlikely to allow a website to send me notifications. I'm unlikely as well to install an extension for a very specific service I'm not going to use very often. Extensions are a privacy concern and consume memory needlessly.

If I'm willing to give a fake registration email I probably don't care about privacy and this is just for throwaway anyway. I'm not going to give any personal info to a website I don't trust with my email in the first place.

I also don't understand how this is not going to be blacklisted like any other anti-spam email service.

Maybe I'm not the target for this product bu this seems to bring nothing new in a slightly more annoying way.

Re: Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address

#80

Post by slg »

bdav24 wrote: post #2

Hi, I'm David, one of the developers of nBox. nBox generates for you an email address for each site, for free. - Effortlessly thanks to our browser extensions - Addresses are anonymous and private - Delete the addresses you don't want any more - Be notified according to your preferences on each email I'm looking to share the service. Any feedback is very welcome. Thanks!

My hesitation in signing up for any of these unifying products is the potential lock in. If I start using your service and eventually have dozens of sites directed through you, what happens when the product disappears?

My question is therefore how do you plan to fund this indefinitely if it is "Just Free, Forever" and is unlimited? You say it is part of promoting your brand, but it looks like that brand (or at least the domain) has been around for less than a year, so not much history. If it isn't you company's main product, what is to stop you from deciding the costs of providing this becomes too expensive for the promotion it is giving you?

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