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Show HN: Maskmail – anonymous email address service

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Re: Show HN: Maskmail – anonymous email address service

#11

Post by Tepix »

jedberg wrote: post #8
Tepix wrote: post #7

Why not just append a unique marker to your mail address? Some services support this. For gmail i believe you can use "+" as the separator: I.e. your email address is victim8384@gmail.com and you want to give your email address to a party called "spammer", you give them victim8384+spammer@gmail.com instead. Once you start receiving spam to that address, you block it.

Most spammers know about that trick, and their software automatically strips the + and anything after it. Their software has been doing that for about 20 years already, sadly. The + trick really only works with people you trust already. Also, + addressing is in the RFC, so pretty much every mail server supports it. Gmail also added . (dot) as a non-counted character, so you can put as many of those as you want into t…

I use a different delimiter (using the option recipient_delimiter in postfix on my mailserver) and have yet to see a spammer figure it out. YMMV.

Re: Show HN: Maskmail – anonymous email address service

#12

Post by Tepix »

alexmat wrote: post #9
Tepix wrote: post #7

Why not just append a unique marker to your mail address? Some services support this. For gmail i believe you can use "+" as the separator: I.e. your email address is victim8384@gmail.com and you want to give your email address to a party called "spammer", you give them victim8384+spammer@gmail.com instead. Once you start receiving spam to that address, you block it.

As a spammer, wouldn't it be trivial to just run a regex on email lists looking for that pattern and then harvesting the results? Or is this like the old joke where you don't have to outrun the bear, just your friend?

Well, one more reason not to use gmail i suppose. If you have your own mailserver you can configure a different delimiter.

Re: Show HN: Maskmail – anonymous email address service

#13

Post by jedberg »

Tepix wrote: post #11
jedberg wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most spammers know about that trick, and their software automatically strips the + and anything after it. Their software has been doing that for about 20 years already, sadly. The + trick really only works with people you trust already. Also, + addressing is in the RFC, so pretty much every mail server supports it. Gmail also added . (dot) as a non-counted character, so you can put as many of those as you want into t…

I use a different delimiter (using the option recipient_delimiter in postfix on my mailserver) and have yet to see a spammer figure it out. YMMV.

That works great if you control your own mail server, but most people don't these days. :)

Re: Show HN: Maskmail – anonymous email address service

#14

Post by dmortin »

jedberg wrote: post #2

Nice idea, but I suspect if it gets any traction, many services will just block maskmail addresses. That's why mailinator uses 100s of different domains and makes it really hard to get a list of all of them.

Which also means users can't use them either. Sometimes I want to use a different mailinator domain, but loading the homepage usually only shows the known domains.

Re: Show HN: Maskmail – anonymous email address service

#16

Post by danieka »

Me and a a colleague discussed this just last week and even considered building something ourselves. Good thing you beat us to it, you seem to have done a marvellous job. The one thing we did some thinking about is how to avoid getting blocked. We run a SaaS and have blocked several hundred domains such as mailinator because of the high rates of fraud. Anyway, good luck!

Re: Show HN: Maskmail – anonymous email address service

#19

Post by shaneos »

jedberg wrote: post #2

Nice idea, but I suspect if it gets any traction, many services will just block maskmail addresses. That's why mailinator uses 100s of different domains and makes it really hard to get a list of all of them.

(co-creator of Maskmail here). That's in our plan for future updates, at the least allowing users to opt in to using many different domains. Many other features in the pipeline too, please feel free to send any ideas you have to support@maskmail.net, or tweet at us @mask_mail

Hope you find value in the service!

Re: Show HN: Maskmail – anonymous email address service

#20

Post by QasimK »

jedberg wrote: post #8
Tepix wrote: post #7

Why not just append a unique marker to your mail address? Some services support this. For gmail i believe you can use "+" as the separator: I.e. your email address is victim8384@gmail.com and you want to give your email address to a party called "spammer", you give them victim8384+spammer@gmail.com instead. Once you start receiving spam to that address, you block it.

Most spammers know about that trick, and their software automatically strips the + and anything after it. Their software has been doing that for about 20 years already, sadly. The + trick really only works with people you trust already. Also, + addressing is in the RFC, so pretty much every mail server supports it. Gmail also added . (dot) as a non-counted character, so you can put as many of those as you want into t…

My plus addressing with gmail is strictly a whitelist. Anything sent without a plus address is immediately deleted with an automatic filter. The issue I encounter is services that (incorrectly) treat a plus address email as invalid, preventing sign ups.
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