

Ask HN: Would you pay for a 1Password-like service for email? - newman314

Given the privacy concerns around Buzz and Facebook's purchase of Ocatazen, it is more than likely that you can be tracked across different social networks if you use the same email address.<p>Would people be willing to pay for a service that does for email what !Password does for passwords? That is you provide a different email per site but it funnels all back to a specific email of your choosing.<p>Of course, this is not a Tor like service but at a minimum creepy services such as Intelius and Pipl would have a harder time of mapping out your activities in an aggregate manner.
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there
interesting idea. a few issues come to mind:

\- people concerned enough about privacy to use such a service might have
concerns about their emails being passed through your service as well.

\- the domains of that service might get blocked on certain sites due to abuse
and people using multiple email addresses to create multiple accounts.

\- spam filters might block the inbound emails because the 'to' address
doesn't match up to the user's. though i can't imagine many would place a high
probability on this metric since mailing lists and such would act the same
way.

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newman314
Well, given that this would be a hosted service, the revenue model would be
the redirect service and not name scraping. I have no interest in scraping
names and think that that is completely unethical behavior.

However, to further address your concerns, email addresses could be stored in
such a way that the provider does not match or log any email transactions and
acts strictly as a forward only model.

Domains getting blocked is a fact of life and is something that will have to
be managed. However, I hear you on potential abuse and part of the service
would have to be ways to address that. I'm no fan of spammers and my primary
interest in this is to manage the rapidly increasing insight that companies
such as GOOG and MSFT have into their users by way of providing "free"
services. Google Buzz and Latitude honestly creep the heck out of me.

Wrt to spam filters, you can easily add the "to" addresses inside gmail as
approved addresses so that should not be too much of an issue.

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petercooper
Gmail lets you do something like that already with the +anything suffixes on
the end of the e-mail username.

Also, in a slightly similarly vein but if you want to have stuff on a separate
domain with a message limit: <http://www.spamgourmet.com/>

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newman314
Well, it would be sort of like spamgourmet except these would be ongoing
honeypots. Most of these sites use a standard set of signals to try to
identify you

i.e. \- cookies \- IP address \- physical address \- telephone number \- ssn
\- email address \- name \- dob

This would be just one of the ways in counteracting such intrusive tracking
behavior.

