Throttle – Control who can send you email • Hacker News Board

Re: Throttle – Control who can send you email

#31

Post by Veratyr » Tue, Jan 12, 2016, 11:14 PM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #18

This is just anonymizing of addresses. Through your throttle account, connected to a convenient browser extension, you can conveniently generate throwaway addresses which forward to the real inbox. These addresses can be shut down and since they are unique, they identify misuse. Anonymizing isn't new. For instance Craigslist generates an anonymized e-mail address through which people interested in your ad can contact…

The concept isn't new but the usability is. This was very hard for normal people to do until very recently.

Re: Throttle – Control who can send you email

#32

Post by saltyshake » Tue, Jan 12, 2016, 11:47 PM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #18

This is just anonymizing of addresses. Through your throttle account, connected to a convenient browser extension, you can conveniently generate throwaway addresses which forward to the real inbox. These addresses can be shut down and since they are unique, they identify misuse. Anonymizing isn't new. For instance Craigslist generates an anonymized e-mail address through which people interested in your ad can contact…

"Of course, if you reply to it, then you reveal your real address"

Do you ?

I am pretty sure it redirects everything through the CL email proxy and the only way for them to know your real email address is for you to give it to them (or they guess it from your "Name" which the CL relay copies from your email).

Re: Throttle – Control who can send you email

#33

Post by szermer » Tue, Jan 12, 2016, 11:57 PM UTC

cromulent wrote: post #7

Takes about 5 pages until you get to the little price tag. I wonder how many abandonments they will get. Personally I like seeing the price up front.

This has me stopped cold right now. I'd love to check out the dashboard, get a feel for the controls, and see how the digest format fits into my workflow. Right now my options are to abandon or charge ~$50 and ask kindly for a refund if I don't like the service.

Re: Throttle – Control who can send you email

#34

Post by kazinator » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 1:28 AM UTC

mecer wrote: post #8

Am I missing something? Why not just create a filter that permanently deletes or marks emails from a certain sender as spam?

Because that is a spam-fighting approach that, by itself, last worked well in 1993.

Re: Throttle – Control who can send you email

#35

Post by banterfoil » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 1:56 AM UTC

saltyshake wrote: post #32

kazinator wrote: post #18

This is just anonymizing of addresses. Through your throttle account, connected to a convenient browser extension, you can conveniently generate throwaway addresses which forward to the real inbox. These addresses can be shut down and since they are unique, they identify misuse. Anonymizing isn't new. For instance Craigslist generates an anonymized e-mail address through which people interested in your ad can contact…

"Of course, if you reply to it, then you reveal your real address" Do you ? I am pretty sure it redirects everything through the CL email proxy and the only way for them to know your real email address is for you to give it to them (or they guess it from your "Name" which the CL relay copies from your email).

correct

Re: Throttle – Control who can send you email

#36

Post by kazinator » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 5:04 AM UTC

saltyshake wrote: post #32

kazinator wrote: post #18

This is just anonymizing of addresses. Through your throttle account, connected to a convenient browser extension, you can conveniently generate throwaway addresses which forward to the real inbox. These addresses can be shut down and since they are unique, they identify misuse. Anonymizing isn't new. For instance Craigslist generates an anonymized e-mail address through which people interested in your ad can contact…

"Of course, if you reply to it, then you reveal your real address" Do you ? I am pretty sure it redirects everything through the CL email proxy and the only way for them to know your real email address is for you to give it to them (or they guess it from your "Name" which the CL relay copies from your email).

My bad! Sorry!

CL performs a decent, two-way anonymization. When you reply to a listing's anonymized e-mail, your own e-mail address is anonymized (just not your name, which I think comes from your From: header or SMTP envelope address? In any case, you control that).

Furthermore, the originating SMTP paths are mutually concealed by CL. You don't see how the mail arrived into CL, just how it came from CL to you; i.e. it's completely remailed.

Lastly, even the Message-ID is rewritten. The originator's message ID could contain clues about the mail domain and such; CL replaces it with their own.

Quite probably, they strip away the signatures from bodies as well; those could inadvertently leak identity bits.

[Source: I searched my inbox for some CL interactions, several years old, and examined the headers.]

Re: Throttle – Control who can send you email

#37

Post by ptype » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 9:38 AM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #29

ptype wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been running this setup for years without any administration. Email forwarding tends to be included from your domain registrar so no server is necessary. You don't need a tool to generate the addresses as you can make them up as you go along.

What do you mean you can just make them up as you go along? Suppose I have two users in my domain: bob@mydomain, alice@mydomain. How can alice just make up a new @mydomain address which goes to alice@mydomain? Okay, that part is simple: we can have an entire space of these generated by a rule, like gmail's addr+whatever@gmail.com. But then how does alice invalidate such an address that is misused? I want it so that a…

If it's my own domain (probably not unusual among the HN crowd), I would sign up to e.g. kazinator.com by 'inventing' an email address kazinator@mydomain.com, which is forwarded to my gmail through a catch-all email forwarding setup with my domain registrar. Emails to kazinator@mydomain.com now arrives to my gmail and hence it's easy to block email (e.g. spam) arriving to this email address as well as knowing who leaked my email address to third parties.

As people have pointed out, it now seems possible to use the + functionality of gmail which I was not aware of, but the above setup avoids the issue of forms not accepting + in a valid email address.

This only works with a catch-all email forwarding as I mentioned, so if you want bounce on non-valid addresses it will not work, but like I said it has served me very well.