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

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

#111

Post by Nextgrid »

createmyaccount wrote: post #22
AequitasOmnibus wrote: post #10

The reason disposable email addresses exist and are popular is because services have abused users' trust to not use these emails for shady ad revenue and marketing schemes. It's further compounded by shoddy security that leads to leaks and exposure of people's personal email addresses to pwned compromised lists. People don't want to give up their personal email addresses so that they can be spammed or hacked. Until s…

I’m the founder of a small bootstrapped SAAS and people use disposable email addresses all the time to avoid paying for our product. We don’t sell any data.

Out of curiosity, what does your service do and how do you know that these users would've paid for the service otherwise? As in with piracy, the argument is that it hurts sales but it's very difficult to determine whether that is really true.

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

#113

Post by feces »

AnonC wrote: post #55
johnklos wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Cloudflare are abusive, money-driven and monopolistic, perhaps?

Could you expand on the “abusive” part? I get the other two to an extent since it’s a for-profit company.

No post body was provided.

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

#114

Post by Nextgrid »

wenbin wrote: post #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 disposabl…

I find that the problems you mention are primarily a problem when you offer free accounts and monetize via some other (and typically malicious) way such as the usual "growth and engagement".

If accounts or services are paid, spamming becomes unprofitable (the ROI of spam would become negative as they'd need to keep paying for new accounts all the time).

Scraping? If you're selling content you should be selling content and not mode of consumption, and for misbehaving scrapers your DoS defense strategy (you have one, right?) would also work there - an easy solution is to rate-limit the amount of requests by account to a reasonable level (that a human user won't exceed) and then let them choose whether they want to consume the content manually or through scraping.

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

#115

Post by zinxq »

The real fallacy falls to companies that equate email with identity. They were never the same thing.

The discontent comes when companies rely on that as fact, and someone comes along and via masking or disposable or lots of other ways (even just signing up for a new email at yahoo or hotmail or proton or tutanota or..) , shows them it isn't true.

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

#116

Post by brightball »

ravenstine wrote: post #106
AequitasOmnibus wrote: post #10

The reason disposable email addresses exist and are popular is because services have abused users' trust to not use these emails for shady ad revenue and marketing schemes. It's further compounded by shoddy security that leads to leaks and exposure of people's personal email addresses to pwned compromised lists. People don't want to give up their personal email addresses so that they can be spammed or hacked. Until s…

Yup. Sign up for a trial of something and suddenly you're getting 3 emails a day. --- "Ravenstine, kick your goals into overdrive now" "Check this feature out!" "We're the best, but don't take our word for it" "Your account is waiting for you" "This will be like money in your pocket" "Don't miss out on our webinar" "The gift that keeps on giving" "It's been a while..." "So this is goodbye, Ravenstine?" --- F--- YOU!…

Ah, automatic drip emails. I don't know anybody who likes these things but a lot of marketing people insist that they are a necessity.

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

#117

Post by Nextgrid »

josephcsible wrote: post #24

I wish Google would start offering disposable relay emails that were indistinguishable from their regular ones, since nobody could afford to block all of @gmail.com.

Google makes their money off "engagement" and has absolutely no incentive to help privacy-conscious users.

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

#118

Post by Spivak »

3np wrote: post #97
Spivak wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine, you don't have to provide your real email and can use a forwarding service. I'm gonna need you to verify your non-voip phone number, submit a picture of your government issued ID and a photo of yourself in a specific random pose as a liveliness check, or register a valid credit card in order to activate your account. Services use emails from well-known providers specifically because they're "good enough" signal…

I really don't see how "determine unique legal identity" is such a requirement? What are you running, e-voting? If that's really what you need, the relevant jurisdiction is likely to have some adopted e-identity system. If not, go back and question how you can solve your issues with as little PIIs as strictly necessary.

We did, it's called non-disposable email. A non-unique pseudoanonymous identity that's somewhat difficult to mint in bulk.

If you don't like "accounts of well-known service providers" -- email or login-with-whoever then sources of identity that "everyone" has that are hard to get many of are government ids, phone numbers and credit cards.

Like what else is there? For super technical people we could do something like "proof of bitcoin address" where we verify control of a wallet with some minimum long-standing balance. We could make you submit a recording of yourself saying some random phrase and then do some facial recognition to detect duplicates. IP banning hasn't worked since the 90's.

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

#119

Post by Nextgrid »

0xC0ncord wrote: post #59
schleck8 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really difficult creating a fake google account nowadays

As someone who gets spam from various Gmail accounts on the daily I'm not inclined to believe it's that difficult.

It's only difficult for those who want to commit the atrocious crime of having privacy.

Lesser evil criminals such as spammers already have a supply chain of phone numbers, residential IP addresses, etc that can be used to work around the restrictions.

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

#120

Post by teakettle42 »

Karunamon wrote: post #109
pooper wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the subject line of an email in my inbox right now. Sure you could say the sender allows me to opt out but I shouldn't have to opt out. This isn't legally spam but I want to know what you would call this unsolicited, non-transactional commercial email. » Your Prime Membership: {{first name}} {{last name}}, discover the latest in deals and entertainment included with Prime

> I want to know what you would call this unsolicited, non-transactional commercial email. Commercial email, differentiated from spam in that you have a commercial relationship with Amazon that you initiated and agreed to (i.e. solicited), and as such, they are allowed to market to you until such time as you ask them to stop. I can see my opinion on this matter isn't a common one on HN.

> I can see my opinion on this matter isn't a common one on HN.

Your opinion isn’t common among anyone other than marketers trying to justify sending spam.

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