Check If Email Exists • Hacker News Board

Re: Check If Email Exists

#21

Post by gh2k » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 12:31 AM UTC

I hope nobody uses this for anything serious. I run my own domain and use -@ to have a unique email for everything I sign up to.

I have no email address that this counts as anything other than "risky".

If this opts me out of marketing mail then that's probably a good thing, but I hope nobody puts a password-reset or security/billing notifications behind it.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#22

Post by rudyfink » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 12:40 AM UTC

gh2k wrote: post #21

I hope nobody uses this for anything serious. I run my own domain and use - @ to have a unique email for everything I sign up to. I have no email address that this counts as anything other than "risky". If this opts me out of marketing mail then that's probably a good thing, but I hope nobody puts a password-reset or security/billing notifications behind it.

Would you mind sharing your experience on how well that has worked for you? Has the complexity of maintaining different addresses been a problem?

I ask because it is something I have always thought about, but I suppose I kept hoping a service would come along and magic the solution for me. Kudos on making it happen!

Re: Check If Email Exists

#23

Post by dmitryminkovsky » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 12:44 AM UTC

gregd wrote: post #5

Back in my day, we used to just telnet into the mx server and RCPT TO

How I sent my first email in 1995! Nothing like being able to write messages from bill@microsoft.com.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#24

Post by reid » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 12:45 AM UTC

rudyfink wrote: post #22

gh2k wrote: post #21

I hope nobody uses this for anything serious. I run my own domain and use - @ to have a unique email for everything I sign up to. I have no email address that this counts as anything other than "risky". If this opts me out of marketing mail then that's probably a good thing, but I hope nobody puts a password-reset or security/billing notifications behind it.

Would you mind sharing your experience on how well that has worked for you? Has the complexity of maintaining different addresses been a problem? I ask because it is something I have always thought about, but I suppose I kept hoping a service would come along and magic the solution for me. Kudos on making it happen!

Not OP, but I just accept wildcard *@mydomain and give out a unique name for every business. Works very well and I blocked a few businesses by which do not allow for opt-out and/or shared my address with others.

This is easy to do with the Alias feature of FastMail.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#25

Post by user3939382 » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 12:45 AM UTC

gh2k wrote: post #21

I hope nobody uses this for anything serious. I run my own domain and use - @ to have a unique email for everything I sign up to. I have no email address that this counts as anything other than "risky". If this opts me out of marketing mail then that's probably a good thing, but I hope nobody puts a password-reset or security/billing notifications behind it.

I’ve been doing the same thing for years and haven’t had any trouble except for Mailchimp. Their overly-clever validation decided mailchimp@example.com is a shared email account (it wasn’t going to be) and blocked me from using it. Their email support apologized but said they couldn’t fix the false positive, and that they hoped the email I used instead wasn’t reflective of my opinion: mailchimp-morons@example.com.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#26

Post by contravariant » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 12:45 AM UTC

jchw wrote: post #20

Disclaimer: IANAL. This is a particularly interesting use of AGPL because it appears to contain a RESTful HTTP server built-in. To my knowledge, with the way AGPL works, there are some interesting wrinkles: - It is only intended to “trigger” when distribution occurs under some legal copyright law definition of “distribution.” - It allows commercial use of unmodified and modified instances of the licensed code, as lon…

Though if we follow this logic to its conclusion then using and distributing a program that cracks a trial version of software doesn't shouldn't be a copyright violation.

That said I would be interested if anyone could clarify to what extent a copyright license has any legal power if you're not distributing anything.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#27

Post by rootusrootus » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 12:46 AM UTC

rudyfink wrote: post #22

gh2k wrote: post #21

I hope nobody uses this for anything serious. I run my own domain and use - @ to have a unique email for everything I sign up to. I have no email address that this counts as anything other than "risky". If this opts me out of marketing mail then that's probably a good thing, but I hope nobody puts a password-reset or security/billing notifications behind it.

Would you mind sharing your experience on how well that has worked for you? Has the complexity of maintaining different addresses been a problem? I ask because it is something I have always thought about, but I suppose I kept hoping a service would come along and magic the solution for me. Kudos on making it happen!

I'm not OP but I do something similar, which I can describe. I don't whitelist addresses, I have a domain with a catchall account. So I make up addresses as needed. When I want them to die, I add them to a ruleset on the server that punts them into the bit bucket.

So far it has been really great. Easy, effective.

Edit: Like the other reply you got, I use FastMail for this service.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#28

Post by whakim » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 12:46 AM UTC

Cyberdog wrote: post #8

Could someone spell out a use case for this? One that comes to mind would be validating that a mailing list doesn't have any outdated email addresses in it, but couldn't that be determined by just checking for a bounce when a message is sent to it? I tried to sign up for SiriusXM the other day, and though I could create an account with my .pro email address, I couldn't actually sign up for service with that same addr…

If you're asking for an email address in exchange for some piece of content (e.g. a soft paywall), I find that it's reasonably sensible to filter out the absolute spammiest-looking of email addresses in order to collect more real email addresses and prevent people just rolling their face across the keyboard and calling it a day. (It can also help with bots a little bit, although most bots are smart enough to use .@gmail.com or something). The best way to do this is obviously double opt-in, i.e. actually emailing the address in question. Most businesses believe (probably accurately; I don't have the stats) that this creates too much friction. I've used Sendgrid's email verification service in the past, and the actual scoring is basically garbage but if you set the threshold really low (e.g. reject all emails with a score between 0 and 0.1) then your precision is really good (almost every email address you reject is invalid, as measured by actually sending an email to them and the email hard-bouncing or being otherwise undeliverable). You let a decent number of bad emails through but it's an improvement over nothing.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#29

Post by dmd » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 12:47 AM UTC

It thinks the email address I've used for more than 25 years is invalid. Great job.

Re: Check If Email Exists

#30

Post by reid » Fri, Jul 02, 2021, 12:49 AM UTC

Cyberdog wrote: post #8

Could someone spell out a use case for this? One that comes to mind would be validating that a mailing list doesn't have any outdated email addresses in it, but couldn't that be determined by just checking for a bounce when a message is sent to it? I tried to sign up for SiriusXM the other day, and though I could create an account with my .pro email address, I couldn't actually sign up for service with that same addr…

I bought a new car a few years ago and I was unable to enter my .life email address into the SiriusXM registration form in the car. Had to use a .com address :(