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My burner email blocklist blocked me

benjamin.piouffle.com

41–50 of 58 posts

Re: My burner email blocklist blocked me

#41

The article author attemps to make a distintion between "burners" and "aliases" but I don't believe one exists for this usecase. Let's say for the sake of argument that you think blocking burner emails provides meaningful protection (I don't, but services using such a list obviously do). From your perspective, an "alias" is the same as a "burner". Both can be easily generated in bulk by a human or bots, cannot be res…

> cannot be resolved to an identity, and cannot be compared to determine if two emails are the same person.

How do you do that with gmail addresses?

Re: My burner email blocklist blocked me

#43

The article author attemps to make a distintion between "burners" and "aliases" but I don't believe one exists for this usecase. Let's say for the sake of argument that you think blocking burner emails provides meaningful protection (I don't, but services using such a list obviously do). From your perspective, an "alias" is the same as a "burner". Both can be easily generated in bulk by a human or bots, cannot be res…

What kind of hide-my-email providers give you unlimited aliases that can be created in bulk?

It’s definitely against the ToS for the ones I’ve used.

One could give the same argument for blocking Gmail. You can create Gmail accounts in bulk, you can’t resolve them to an identity, and you can’t compare them to determine if they’re the same person.

The difference is that you trust Gmail to enforce their ToS, do KYC and ban people abusing their service. Should you?

Re: My burner email blocklist blocked me

#44

IDK man .. many services really just don't even want to deal with a sign up they are never going to reach. By using a disposable email, you're telling the business, I want to use your service, get value, but I don't really want you to reach me. To them, it sounds like a loss loss situation. Business are there to make money, and they offer a signup/trial/free account so they can give you access in exchange for being a…

The article specifically calls out for the distinction between burners and aliases.

If you give a business a hide-my-email address, they can reach you at that address indefinitely.

Re: My burner email blocklist blocked me

#46
post #3
post #2

Reminder that apple provides burner emails that are effectively unblockable (because they use the @icloud.com domain, at least for now[1]), for $0.99/month. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48559935

$50/year and Fastmail will let you alias anything@yourdomain.com to your inbox. I use a different email for every company or website I interact with, so I know who spams me.

That doesn’t provide additional privacy, however, because it’s easy to determine that all emails at @yourdomain.com belong to the same user, so you can be tracked across services.

Re: My burner email blocklist blocked me

#47

IDK man .. many services really just don't even want to deal with a sign up they are never going to reach. By using a disposable email, you're telling the business, I want to use your service, get value, but I don't really want you to reach me. To them, it sounds like a loss loss situation. Business are there to make money, and they offer a signup/trial/free account so they can give you access in exchange for being a…

The article specifically calls out for the distinction between burners and aliases. If you give a business a hide-my-email address, they can reach you at that address indefinitely.

Hence my response: > Aliases are fair game .. for organization for just hiding your own email to limit tracking.. that's fair .. but bad, known disposable email generally just costs too much and is too risky for businesses.

Re: My burner email blocklist blocked me

#48

The people who want privacy and the people you want to block are using the same services and techniques. That's why web firewalls block privacy focused browsers, why TOR exit nodes are blocked from bald the internet, why email providers block new domains, and why sign-up forms block burners ("aliases" as you might also call them). You can accept privacy enhancing measures but doing so hurts your ability to filter spa…

The "Anyone can use this to do anything they want in total anonymity and privacy" to "oh no bad people are using this to do bad stuff" pipeline is eternal.

Re: My burner email blocklist blocked me

#50
post #25
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just use my.name@gmail.com for the no-alias version. So myname+foo@ works and my.name@ works but myname@ goes directly to the trash.

That can also be normalized.

The normalised version is what gets redirected to trash, according to GP's proposal. Legitimate senders who do not normalise have their mail delivered to the inbox.
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