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

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151–160 of 212 posts

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

#151

The first thing I saw was "naviguate". Um, no, if you can't even manage to run a spell checker I don't think I can trust you.

Hi irrational, that's fixed now, thanks. We're not native English speaker, so mistakes can slip through.

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

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did that, too. Used a catch-all and just subbed to things with a new e-mail address, relying on the catch-all to put it all into one box. Big mistake. First off, I got FLOODED with e-mail bounce-back spam because spammers send e-mail with forged From: headers and I'd get all the errors. Second, I discovered that nobody is actually selling my e-mail address except for one gaming forum I used years ago. Not even Face…

You could have solved the second problem by storing the email with the login and password in a password manager. Maybe they were not a thing yet when you started this experiment. The third problem is more serious. I use Thunderbird. I googled and there are a couple of addons that makes it easy to edit the from address without having to create new Thunderbird identities. https://github.com/absorb-it/Virtual-Identity h…

Why you need addons for it? Thunderbird allows to change From address by default. ("customize address" in identity combobox)

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

#153
post #92

The FAQ says that it's not a disposeable-e-mail-generator, but the description of what it does makes it seem like that's exactly what it is. (Maybe it means that it doesn't generate random e-mail addresses from a shared pool?) I've been a satisfied user of SpamGourmet (www.spamgourmet.com) for years, and the only (argueable) downside I've seen is how upset customer-service representatives get upset while reading my a…

Hi JadeBN, you're right spamgourmet is very similar to nBox. Here are a few differences:

- With spamgourmet the addresses are designed to expire after X emails, so it's intended for services you don't care about. - Once I know one spamgourmet address, I can try to guess other addresses of yours. - We don't ask for your personal email. If spamgourmet gets hacked, spammers will get your information.

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

#154

So what's it like when NBox goes under and you can't recover your password on any of your sites?

Hi midnitewarrior, here is a post where I try to answer that (valid) concern: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/nbox/comments/483328

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

#156

Most of these new email services overlook a few very important details which guarantee that they will probably not be around in a year: 1. You need to have multiple domains. If your solution is just one host name and your service becomes popular, it will become blacklisted in a matter of months. 2. The volume of spam you'll receive is huge. Really huge. Even if your service is only moderately successful. It costs mon…

Hi hota_mazi, I won't say that we can think up of everything but we have these two points in mind.

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

#157

This is a good idea but creating a new address for each site seems to be overcomplicating a simple problem. I just have "mynormalemailalias_spam@domain" which is used for sign ups, if I ever need to log into a site I've signed up with using that address it's easy to remember the login details and/or reset my password.

Hi synicalx, I used that method for many years too, but with time the emails end up piling up. That's manageable of course, but it feels nice to control exactly who owns your information.

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

#158

In my experience spamers use mostly email addreses publicly exposed (web sites, usenet, forums) and stolen address books (viruses, malware) - you can't do much about the second if that happens to your recipients.

Hi imhoguy, spammers also happen to buy leaked data sometimes to better target people. Anyway, spam is one thing we address, but that's not the main point. It's more about control of your privacy.

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

#159
post #148
post #95

I've had a catch-all for *@mydomain.com forward to my primary email address for 10+ years. In that time I signed up for services and websites with [domain]@mydomain.com thinking I'd catch all those dirty scoundrels selling my email address and have an easy way to filter unwanted mail. But you know what really happened? I wound up with hard to remember email logins and caught less than a handful of services sharing my…

You are not solving the privacy problem. You can be easily identified by your custom domain, unless there're a couple thousand people using it.

That depends on your definition of "solution". The scheme protects you (to a certain degree) from automated creation of inter-site profiles. The reason is, only very few people employ (a variant of) this strategy, so trying to "deanonymize" is costly and usually not worth it economically.

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

#160
post #95

I've had a catch-all for *@mydomain.com forward to my primary email address for 10+ years. In that time I signed up for services and websites with [domain]@mydomain.com thinking I'd catch all those dirty scoundrels selling my email address and have an easy way to filter unwanted mail. But you know what really happened? I wound up with hard to remember email logins and caught less than a handful of services sharing my…

I do not use catch-all addresses, but use a version of [domain]@mydomain.com buy adding new email addresses (aliases) in an automated way. I "remember" the used email addresses in two ways: 1) my mail server configuration contains a list of all aliases created in the past, 2) my password manager saves logins on top of that. The nice side effect is, that you keep track of all the sites you have ever created logins at.
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