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Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

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Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

#171

Post by mean_gene_1976 »

bityard wrote: post #94
matheusmoreira wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Why does everything ask for phone numbers these days? What's next, a picture of my government ID?

So many companies are under the impression that a phone number is a unique, secure identifier for their users when in fact it's fairly easy for a knowledgeable attacker to hijack a phone number for calls and SMS.

Things are always fairly easy to the knowledgeable or experienced. It’s definitely a better practice then not asking. Lots of medium sized businesses can’t implement a cyborg biometric MFA solution. So they easily ask for a phone number. Most don’t make it mandatory, but I think generally it is the best current realistic solution.

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

#172

Post by deskenergy »

estromlund wrote: post #139
imglorp wrote: post #35

There's a much harder problem, granted, but the world needs a throwaway SMS service. Even Imgur needs a phone to sign up now :( There are already some services like this, however it seems they have a smallish pool of phone numbers. Eventually everyone uses those to sign up, one time, somewhere (like Imgur) and that number is then useless for that site. Is there a better way?

I’m the founder of Unlisted ( https://www.unlistedapp.com ) and this is exactly the problem I was aiming at when building our private number service. Unfortunately today, however, many sites will detect VoIP numbers and refuse to send messages to them. There are two reasons: 1) The app detects that it is not a “real” number and blocks its entry, or 2) the number is accepted but no message is ever received. In the sec…

Hi, I have some questions regarding your privacy policy. It appears that Unlisted maintains records of IP addresses, calls, texts, contacts, voicemails and lots of other metadata.

I admire the goal of trying to provide a convenient way to increase privacy when using SMS, but this feels a bit invasive. That's a lot of collected data. Unlisted has access to the entire history of all my conversations and calls. Why not encrypt most of the at-rest data with the user's password and decrypt it client-side? This is common practice for the more privacy-leaning email providers, such as ProtonMail. Similar SMS services have taken this approach as well, like crypton.sh.

You are leaving a lot of the privacy enthusiasts on the table (myself included). It may seem like a small market, but communities like /r/privacytoolsio are very active and constantly on the lookout for privacy preserving products.

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

#173

Post by abathur »

willbrowning wrote: post #85
abathur wrote: post #81

Cool. I've had a similar idea kicking around in my head for a few years. How do you think about the compromise/disclosure risk of the data you keep that associates the subscriber account with aliases?

I encrypt as much sensitive information in the database e.g. recipient email addresses, descriptions etc. Someone suggested the idea of creating hashed aliases, that are generated and hashed on the client side so that even I do not know what they are, then incoming emails are compared against this hash to determine where to forward emails. The only thing is there would probably need to be an additional column on the…

I was interested in hashed aliases as well, though I haven't had any terribly bright ideas about how to mesh platform-blindness with a revenue model that at least covers costs.

I've thought about tokens or credits that get consumed by checking/sending on the hash, but I imagine they'd be most-used for fire-and-forget stuff...

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

#174

Post by bardan »

LIV2 wrote: post #157
55555 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which blacklist was it and how much did they charge? I have always wondered which are more mafia-esque and which less, as they all act so innocent but are also so adamant about hiding their pricing.

I'm guessing backscatterer.org The fix is to configure your MTA so that it doesn't send backscatter

It was backscatterer.org. I don't recall how simple the fix was, but I couldn't find much information on it at the time. The list appeared last in the blacklist tools so I figured it was a fairly new thing.

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

#175

Post by bardan »

55555 wrote: post #148
bardan wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mail server got blacklisted because of backscatter. That is where the sender sends spam to an address that doesn't exist on your server, but they also forge the "from" address, so the "this message could not be delivered" response, complete with the spam message, is sent "back" to the forged address (the spammers real target) It took several months or a large payment to the people maintaining the blacklist for my…

Which blacklist was it and how much did they charge? I have always wondered which are more mafia-esque and which less, as they all act so innocent but are also so adamant about hiding their pricing.

It was backscatterer.org. I seem to recall it was in the low hundreds, but it was quite a while ago now.

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

#176

Post by pdonis »

55555 wrote: post #167
pdonis wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean email alias files. The article explains what it means by "email aliases", and it's something different.

I meant the files that contain aliases which are used to configure MTAs, which thus create email aliases.

Still not what either I or the article is talking about. Yes, the person designing the service has to know about alias files (or whatever other back end is being used), but the user doesn't have to know or care. I'm talking about what the user sees.

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

#177

Post by cx42net »

LIV2 wrote: post #157
55555 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which blacklist was it and how much did they charge? I have always wondered which are more mafia-esque and which less, as they all act so innocent but are also so adamant about hiding their pricing.

I'm guessing backscatterer.org The fix is to configure your MTA so that it doesn't send backscatter

How can you know when you're about to send a bounce to a backscatter? I'd love to know this!

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

#178

Post by gyuserbti »

bfdm wrote: post #103
matheusmoreira wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Why does everything ask for phone numbers these days? What's next, a picture of my government ID?

Because disposable emails are trivially used by casual users and companies see phone number as harder to falsify (correctly, IMO). It's not impossible, obviously. We know SMS can be hijacked and spoofed, but the casual user won't be doing this, today.

But why phone? Why not something more specifically set up for the purpose, like Google authenticator or 2fa keys?

Re: Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

#180

Post by jrootabega »

naveen99 wrote: post #144

I am surprised the people sending me physical junk mail haven’t lobbied the post office to provide all their customers with email boxes along with physical mail boxes and then stuff then with junk email along with important governmental notices only going through post office email boxes that have tiny storage quotas so you have to manually delete all the junk email, otherwise they will stop delivering the email that…

USPS' "informed delivery" service is headed in that direction. They email you attached advertisements along with the scanned mail pictures. Sometimes they just send you an advertisement when you're not even getting mail that day. It's atrocious
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