Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla's Firefox Relay to be added to disposable-email-domains blacklist

github.com

11–20 of 304 posts

Re: Mozilla's Firefox Relay to be added to disposable-email-domains blacklist

#11
From a service provider's point of view [1], a big portion of "users" with disposable email domains have intention to do bad things, e.g., spamming, aggressively scraping contents... It's not easy to distinguish users-who-want-to-try-out-then-never come-back from users-who-want-to-do-bad-things-to-your-service.

Typically, online service provider may have empathy towards users with whatever emails, including disposable emails for privacy reasons. Then the online service becomes popular, and spams / scraping activities become out of control - Internet is big and there are a lot of bad people / bots. Try different tactics to fight bad users / bots. Eventually, the service provider joins the dark side and bans the use of all disposable emails. It's not ideal. If you are Google or Amazon, maybe you can trivially allocate 20 full time engineers to develop an elegant solution. For small businesses, you just use very limited resources and do whatever to survive.

[1] I run listennotes.com

Re: Mozilla's Firefox Relay to be added to disposable-email-domains blacklist

#12

I've started using my own domain to avoid giving out my "real" addresseverywhere. It doesn't always work, but it usually does.

I used to do that, but then considered I might be leaking out more inferred info by doing that.

Such as WHOIS info (if not cloaked), or an algorithm may assume I'm a business and charge me higher prices, etc. I used to get marketing spam from Dropbox saying that many of my coworkers enjoy using it and to upgrade -- but I was the only user on that domain name.

Re: Mozilla's Firefox Relay to be added to disposable-email-domains blacklist

#15

I've started using my own domain to avoid giving out my "real" addresseverywhere. It doesn't always work, but it usually does.

I did the same using proton mail and catch-all addresses. Every website I give a unique email address and it all goes into a special folder. If I start receiving spam from any address it gets blocked. This also gives me a pretty solid idea if a company is selling my info.

Re: Mozilla's Firefox Relay to be added to disposable-email-domains blacklist

#16
post #8

I hope this addition will help reduce the spam on Discord. I had a talk with one of these spammers and he explained that he is unblockable because of Firefox Relay.

It takes a bit more effort than that - Discord servers can use IP address, email address, and phone number to blacklist against.

Re: Mozilla's Firefox Relay to be added to disposable-email-domains blacklist

#20

I've started using my own domain to avoid giving out my "real" addresseverywhere. It doesn't always work, but it usually does.

Your own domain pointing to your own service or other "standard" email service (as contrasted with say mailinator's custom domain feature) ? I have never had any problem using unique addresses at my own domain with anybody. It makes for funny interactions with customer service people though, because those addresses generally contain the name of the company I give it out to.

(Obviously anything at a domain I own is directly associable to me, and for many trashwalls I still prefer to use mailinator etc)

Post reply on HN