Show HN: Why share your email address when you can hide it?

Full disclosure, I did a Show HN some time ago(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23131035)

It worked, some of my friends were using it, but I never really improved on it although it was always in the back of my mind to do so at some point. So December 2020 seemed like a good time to do this.

I completely rebuilt it, but again, did not really expect that there will come much of it, it is really just for myself. It seemed that the problem I was solving was really just a problem that I had.

But then Apple announced their Hide My Email (albeit just on Apple devices) service at WWDC 21. I was like: "Hey, if Apple thinks there is something here, maybe other people would start thinking about it too."

I want to continue building on this; I've had some ideas (browser extensions, Mobile, business plan, etc. etc.) that I want to implement sooner rather than later. There is a small fee for using the service and I believe that there may now be some people, non-Apple or otherwise users, who would start to see the value of this and be willing to pay for this service.

I have not tried Apple's Hide My Email, but I think what makes Mailphantom different is that:

1. You can reply to an email; and 2. You can also add your own custom domain which only you will have access to

This is something I made and can be played with :)

Why would I use this over Firefox Relay? (free)

I hide my email address by using Fastmail which supports wildcard users e.g. *@example.com so I can effortlessly assign a unique email address to anyone who asks for one.

FYI, after years of running this experiment I’ve found that vendors don’t tend to share their email address lists. One of the only exceptions that comes to mind is someone scraping my LinkedIn email for e-commerce marketing.

I never intended to make profit from this.

But the fact that Apple thinks email privacy is important, made me think there may be something here.

I am sure this does not answer your question, but hope that helps with some context.