
Show HN: Maskmail – anonymous email address service - dasil003
https://www.maskmail.net/
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jedberg
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.

~~~
shaneos
(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!

~~~
scrollaway
Will you add support for Bring-Your-Own-Domain? This HN commenter is
definitely interested.

~~~
shaneos
We hadn't considered it, but it's an interesting idea. We'd have to think
through how to make it work, there'd be some interesting interplay with
routing and mail servers.

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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!

------
abetusk
A bit off topic but does anyone know of an email service that doesn't require
a pre-existing email account, doesn't require ID, is TOR friendly and accepts
cryptocurrency as payment? It seems like this should be an obvious service but
I have a hard time finding one.

~~~
detaro
[https://mailbox.org](https://mailbox.org)

[https://protonmail.ch](https://protonmail.ch)

~~~
nmbr213
> [https://protonmail.ch](https://protonmail.ch)

No IMAP/POP3 on free account is such a turn off

~~~
vorpalhex
I imagine they're worried about their service being used to send spam, which
would trash their reputation as a sender.

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ryanlol
You can’t spam using either of those protocols.

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vorpalhex
1\. Sign up for an account to comment, using a free email account

2\. POP3/IMAP your email to your bot, clicking any links

3\. Write spammy comments

~~~
ryanlol
Sure, you have a point. But I've noticed that nobody blacklists new domains,
so using existing providers would be a waste of time for most of such
operations.

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jlis
Great landingpage dude! Was building something like that a while ago for
myself until I realized, I'd just use the email+something@gmail.com feature.

But anyways, great idea! Wish you all the success or at least some decent side
money.

~~~
hda111
this +something neither anoymizes your real address nor prevents it someone to
spam your real address forever

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gyvastis
I've actually thought of this a while back and thought "wouldn't that be
awesome?". Kudos to the ones who developed it!

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Tepix
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.

~~~
jedberg
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 the user field, but most spam software is catching onto
that too.

~~~
Tepix
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.

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

~~~
krageon
The reason for this is of course that it's a complete pain to work with the
large email providers (say, you want to send an email to gmail) if you have
your own service. Email has been far from truly decentralised for a while now.

~~~
Tepix
It's not that bad really. Been doing it since more than a decade.

~~~
krageon
If you enjoy the administrative work that comes with it (removing yourself
from "you exist and you are therefore banned" blocklists, trying to convince
gmail/hotmail/etc that you're really a real person, etc) then yes, it's not
hard. If you use email, want it to work and don't enjoy extra administrative
duties on top of your day job, I'd say it is that bad.

------
perseaalexandra
This looks extremely similar to
[https://burnermail.io](https://burnermail.io). And they're free

~~~
csergiu
It kinda looks like it's almost a 1 to 1 clone of burnermail.io lol

------
ralphc
I try to create an account, put in a username and matching passwords, but the
"create account" button gives me a circle-bar "you can't do that" pointer,
with no explanation. Chrome on OSX.

~~~
shaneos
Good feedback, I'll make it clearer, this is a confusing state

~~~
shaneos
It's fixed now, thanks for trying it out!

------
qluml
I think it is a good way to only register in sites. For collaborating is not
good, because "reply-to" header is set to the real sender. This a only one way
to `mask` email. Answering thought masked mail is not possible.

------
JulienRbrt
There is as well anonbox.net[1] from the CCC which is pretty useful too, even
if its functionalities are a little bit different

[1] [https://anonbox.net/](https://anonbox.net/)

------
muvek
Correct me if I am wrong, but this is the same idea as spamgourmet.com, right?

~~~
coaxial
I love this service, whoever runs it: thank you!

------
stamps
Blur by Albine[1] has been my preferred anonymizer.

Though my main appeal is the burner credit cards.

[1] [https://www.abine.com/index.html](https://www.abine.com/index.html)

------
acreux
We also do the same thing at
[https://theothermail.com](https://theothermail.com) except you have 100
emails for free

------
dvfjsdhgfv
I don't understand one thing: the whole point of a disposable e-mail address
it's that you just can use it instantly and never reveal your real e-mail
addresses to anyone. That's why Mailinator got so popular. But in order to use
Maskmail I have to register - what's the point? I was thinking I could give it
a try because it's new so it will work for a while for sites that for some
strange reason block disposable e-mail addresses, but registering simply
defeats the purpose.

~~~
detaro
Note it says "anonymous", not "disposable".

> _the whole point of a disposable e-mail address it 's that you just can use
> it instantly and never reveal your real e-mail addresses to anyone_

For you maybe. For others the point might be "never reveal my real e-mail
address to the sites I give disposable addresses to, be able to keep receiving
e-mails for some of them long-term and not having them publicly exposed to
everyone that knows the address".

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
Why not create a Gmail account for that purpose then? (Or Yahoo/Outlook if
you're concerned with data collection.) The amount of hassle is the same. With
Mailinator I just type khdgfkasjdhfg in the register field, then then type
Ctrl+L "maili" [Enter], paste khdgfkasjdhfg in the (already active) "Check Any
Inbox" field and bang! - I'm already there, always. Maybe there's something I
don't see here.

~~~
shaneos
If you create a new Gmail account, as many people do, you can still be tracked
with that. Using the same email address on multiple sites allows data
aggregators to match your profiles from each site to build a very
comprehensive picture of you. Of course, you could create hundreds of Gmail
accounts, but then you have to manage hundreds of inboxes, which you won't do
well leading to you missing lots of emails.

Maskmail essentially does this for you with extreme convenience.

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arisAlexis
Another approach is a service I built called veropost (dotcom) that is an
email paywall so the sender needs to send a tiny tiny bit of Bitcoin in order
to reach you.

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stanislavb
Good job, mate! Seems pretty useful. Who would you name your top competitors?

~~~
Promarged
33mail probably...

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moltar
Looks like Trashmail but more $

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ruduhudi
dnt.abine.com

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helios893
Complete anonymity you say? Please show me how you bypass "lawful search".

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sjwright
Cool, another domain name to add to my list of disposable email services.
Done.

~~~
mcjiggerlog
But why?

~~~
sjwright
To thwart low-effort drive-by anonymous abuse.

(I also block TOR. Pure anonymity is not a service I choose to offer, because
it is inevitably abused and I don’t have the time or resources to deal with
it.)

