Mozilla's Firefox Relay to be added to disposable-email-domains blacklist • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by Handytinge » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 7:31 AM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #216

JshWright wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What alternative do you suggest?

Depends hugely on the SAAS and it's current and desired customer base. But some obvious candidates are 1) discontinue free trials. 2) provide enough obvious value to convert the current funnel of free trials into paying customers at a high enough rate that you don't care about the "freeloaders" 3) radically differentiate the support available on free trial accounts. In the long run, and dev effort/time spend integrat…

A comparison of the dev time to check a value in an array and modify your entire business model is absurd.

Mitigation against abusers of a service is a valid strategy.

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

#302

Post by Handytinge » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 7:35 AM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #114

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 conten…

There are many legitimate services that offer free trials. Netflix, Spotify, etc.

Free trials are a common method to battle the barrier people have in spending money before understanding if a product or service fits their needs.

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

#303

Post by trestacos » Fri, Jan 21, 2022, 5:40 PM UTC

bastawhiz wrote: post #66

It's arguably the case that Firefox Relay is no different from the other services in this list. If someone can use it to create ~unlimited identities for almost free, that serves the same purpose as any other disposable email service. And frankly, there's no sense in getting upset about a directory of services that allow the creation of unlimited disposable identities. If it wasn't this github repo, it would be anoth…

I think another option here is for email masking services to allow other services to ask if a user has registered at their site before. Details: https://dev.to/stephensisk/throwaway-email-blocklists-want-t...

I'd be happy to work on building that for my service if someone is interested in using it.

I think your point about mozilla's pricing being too cheap is an interesting one. I don't think of the pricing as $1 - I think it as $1/month, so it builds over time. But clearly it would be a bigger deterrent if it cost more.

I think blocking these email masking services and treating them exactly like throwaway email services is the wrong way to go since I think a lot of users want to use something like this. (discloure: I'm working on https://www.thxnothx.com which is also an email masking service combined with some other features)

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

#304

Post by martenson » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 11:18 AM UTC

ajnin wrote: post #297

martenson wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To work around our list while having a decent level of privacy just do not use a complete burner address. You can e.g. make a pseudonym address with an actual provider like gmail, fastmail, protonmail etc. Heck we even have an allowlist with some "shady" providers that balance on the edge included in the repo, just browse: https://github.com/disposable-email-domains/disposable-email...

In retrospect my comment was probably too harsh. Thanks for providing an escape hatch, but it's practically impossible to create an anonymous gmail account.

Not as impossible as you might think. This service was doing it for free in seconds when I tested it last summer: https://github.com/disposable-email-domains/disposable-email...