Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 96 posts

Re: Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

#21

Post by stavros »

8organicbits wrote: post #11

I'm always a little suspicious of these services. People use them to create throw-away accounts, which they abandon after one use. Those accounts remain active and are useful for botting (vote manipulation, comment spam, etc). Whoever owns the email domain can do a password reset to do an account take over. I'm curious about the privacy policy. The title says that you don't have ads, but there's tons of discussion ab…

If I'm using a temporary email service, I'm using it specifically because I don't care if the account gets taken over, though.

Re: Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

#22

Post by TemporaryMail »

SoftTalker wrote: post #17
xlinux wrote: post #3

The only feature temp mail service should focus on having tons of domains. Many temp mail domains are blacklisted. only way to get around is rotating the domain name everyday. I will give it a try.

Yeah the first one I learned about was mailinator and it worked for a good while but I think throwaway email services get blacklisted pretty quickly now, at least among people who don't want you to use them for whatever reason.

True and perhaps more weight is being put into detecting these nowadays.

The only reason the service provider requires your email address is to access your data.

Re: Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

#24

Post by 8organicbits »

stavros wrote: post #21
8organicbits wrote: post #11

I'm always a little suspicious of these services. People use them to create throw-away accounts, which they abandon after one use. Those accounts remain active and are useful for botting (vote manipulation, comment spam, etc). Whoever owns the email domain can do a password reset to do an account take over. I'm curious about the privacy policy. The title says that you don't have ads, but there's tons of discussion ab…

If I'm using a temporary email service, I'm using it specifically because I don't care if the account gets taken over, though.

Oh, the threat isn't to the user. They don't care about accounts they have abandoned. The threat is to services that suffer vote manipulation, spam, etc. The benefit of this approach is that you've got a bunch of abandoned accounts that were organically created (captchas solved, residential IP ranges, etc.)

Re: Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

#25

Post by ranger_danger »

8organicbits wrote: post #11

I'm always a little suspicious of these services. People use them to create throw-away accounts, which they abandon after one use. Those accounts remain active and are useful for botting (vote manipulation, comment spam, etc). Whoever owns the email domain can do a password reset to do an account take over. I'm curious about the privacy policy. The title says that you don't have ads, but there's tons of discussion ab…

they're honeypots.

Re: Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

#27

Post by bastawhiz »

TemporaryMail wrote: post #13
8organicbits wrote: post #11

I'm always a little suspicious of these services. People use them to create throw-away accounts, which they abandon after one use. Those accounts remain active and are useful for botting (vote manipulation, comment spam, etc). Whoever owns the email domain can do a password reset to do an account take over. I'm curious about the privacy policy. The title says that you don't have ads, but there's tons of discussion ab…

Yes, just like all other email providers nothing is encrypted and you could totally look at the emails. The difference here is though that there's nothing of value. If I wanted to use this for malicious intent, then I think the most valuable thing I could get away with would be a 5% discount coupon. I like that you bring this stuff up though as it could perhaps be good to mention this on the site down at the FAQ so p…

> If I wanted to use this for malicious intent, then I think the most valuable thing I could get away with would be a 5% discount coupon

Or spinning up hundreds of accounts on a website so you can perform card testing. Or creating accounts so you can put all of the inventory for an e-commerce site into carts to reserve it for yourself. Or running sneakerbots. Or any other malicious intent where the victim is the website operator.

Re: Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

#28

Post by TemporaryMail »

asimpletune wrote: post #23

Is there a link to the mail parser itself?

No, I wrote it in PHP and I didn't want to get an angry mob after me.

I've been thinking about open sourcing it if anyone would want it, but right now the site has way too little attention for it to get any traction. It's a really neat script though and it's also just one file and supports all the different kind of emails (with/without boundaries, base64 emails, attachments and some other stuff).

Re: Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

#29

Post by j0hnyl »

8organicbits wrote: post #11

I'm always a little suspicious of these services. People use them to create throw-away accounts, which they abandon after one use. Those accounts remain active and are useful for botting (vote manipulation, comment spam, etc). Whoever owns the email domain can do a password reset to do an account take over. I'm curious about the privacy policy. The title says that you don't have ads, but there's tons of discussion ab…

There's a whole industry around detecting these and placing them on block lists.

Re: Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

#30

Post by ocdtrekkie »

TemporaryMail wrote: post #19
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact they constantly have to rotate to avoid blocks is because they are used for abuse and are attempting to essentially attack network services. Something like private aliases attached to a real account you actually have adds privacy, but retains accountability. (You can create aliases on Proton, Fastmail, Outlook, etc. but they are attached to your real account so abuse is manageable.) A service rotating tempor…

I don't agree with this and I think the right approach is to simply not require visitors to give up their email accounts if they don't want to. If you want to block a malicious attacker, then you can use a captcha. A serious malicious attacker wouldn't have a problem paying a few dollars to buy a domain, creating a catch-all address and if he wants to take it one step further he can even have it look like a legitimat…

Aliases you can discard are ad blockers for emails, disposable services are for bots, scams, and fraud. If you know the space, you'll be aware CAPTCHAs are trivially defeated today, regardless of the provider.

I certainly agree people shouldn't be asked to provide an email if it's unnecessary, but again for the issue of bots, scams, and fraud, you generally need some sort of unique relatively hard to get many of identifier to prevent people making tons of accounts on any service which either allows posting content or costs money to provide service. Email is generally okay for this.

Ultimately disposable email providers who continue to believe domain rotation is anything but an attack will force a far worse outcome, which I've already seen some major sites do: Only accept registration from Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo accounts. (The Verge is one example where I know I had to register with a Gmail account and open a support ticket to change my email to my real email because they figured out the best way to avoid abusers on disposable email was to allowlist major providers.)

Post reply on HN