
Show HN: Kopi – safeguard your email address and help manage the email firehose - Shorn
https://kopi.cloud
======
paulfurley
A few bits of feedback:

* I was confused by the idea of making a “keyword” (no explainer) and why I then had to “create account” (I thought I already made an account by verifying my email?)

* I love the concept of burner emails and i’m a happy user of 33mail.com for this purpose, particularly because you get [anything]@[someusername].33mail.com. I tend to sign up for things with an email like amazon.com.274652@[myusername].33mail.com

* using my own domain is critical since I can’t be sure how long your service will be around for: if you shut down tomorrow at least all the emails won’t bounce (which could be a nightmare)

* something I don’t currently have a solution for is self-deleting forwarders. I’d like to be able to sign up with eg petition.30d@[whatever] and have it make a forwarded that will self destruct

* your story / background is really important for a service like this: who are you? Where are you based? Why do you care? I couldn’t find this easily

* if you don’t know it already check out Michael Bazzell’s podcast on inteltechniques.com. I wouldn’t have tried 33mail or MySudo without his thorough background research

Thanks for working on stuff like this!

~~~
Shorn
> confused by the idea of making a “keyword” ....

Yep. I'm working on a "How it works" section that'll walk through the whole
process with screenshots, to hopefully make this clear before having to sign
up.

> using my own domain is critical

Yep, it's on the roadmap: [https://kopi-
cloud.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/kopiweb/pages/2...](https://kopi-
cloud.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/kopiweb/pages/259489793/Kopi+Roadmap) I felt I
really needed to get something out there to start gathering this sort of
feedback. I'm trying to get to an "MVP" where "viable" explicitly means
something people are willing to pay for. I'm not sure how many people really
want that (even though I know I do personally). Kopi already supports it on
the back-end - I run a personal domain on it separately from the ones users
can register. But having the core support the feature and having it be ready
for public consumption is a different kettle of fish. If you're interested in
guinea-pigging something, drop me a line and I can probably get it going quite
quickly - in a "do things that don't scale" kind of vein.

> something I don’t currently have a solution for is self-deleting forwarders

Yep, both keywords and addresses in Kopi support an expiry date on the back
end because I thought I wanted this personally. But it turned out I didn't
really want it enough to even implement it. As opposed to the RSS forwarding
that I smashed out in a weekend PoC for myself and now can't live without and
desperately want to expand >.<

> your story / background is really important for a service like this

To be honest, I never thought about this at all. Your comment made me think,
and it occurs to me I've actually been subconsciously avoiding associating
myself with Kopi directly. I'm wary of having much stuff about myself on the
internet. I guess I need to think carefully about this and pick a horse.

------
Shorn
Hi HN, author here.

I've been scratching this itch for a while, and now I think it's ready to
share: [https://kopi.cloud](https://kopi.cloud)

* Protect your real email address by handing out generated addresses that you can block in the (mobile friendly) web app with a single click. Sign up to mailing lists, product demos, etc. without fear.

* Mark email addresses to be viewed in your RSS reader - incorporate them into your downtime reading flow. I like to use this for notifications from StackOverflow, LinkedIn, mailing lists that get too chatty, etc.

* Uncouple from Google, etc by taking control of one of your fundamental contact points.

It's a paid service - currently priced at USD $2 / month with a free trial to
test if it works for you.

What do you think HN - is $2 too much to ask? Kopi will never have ads or
harvest people's data. I want to build a self-sustaining service that does
enough useful things that people are willing to pay a minimal amount.

All feedback appreciated - especially suggestions for features you might be
willing to pay for.

I don't have pre-existing accounts or reputation on sites like Product Hunt
etc. - if you think Kopi might be useful to folks, please feel free to share.

Also an "Ask HN": I see a fair few comments lately where Kopi might be helpful
to people. What's the HN community feeling about when it is or isn't Ok for
someone to post a comment reply pointing out their product might be able to
help? I've read
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html),
but it doesn't seem to address this question.

~~~
rovyko
>is $2 too much to ask?

I'd gladly pay $2 to retire my army of throwaway emails, assuming the service
remains as currently advertised. How many email domains do you have available
to choose from, and how do you plan to deal with vendors potentially banning
your domains?

This is more of a general thought, but privacy is another concern. There are
plenty of companies who took customers' money and then sold their private data
anyways. I'm more inclined to trust a startup like yours, but somewhere down
the line I see this as a possibility. Is there ever a way for a customer to be
sure a company isn't misusing their data? Are there any 3rd parties who can
confirm/audit their practices?

>What's the HN community feeling about when it is or isn't Ok for someone to
post a comment reply pointing out their product might be able to help?

I'm still new here, but from what I've seen it's probably okay as long as the
context is relevant. I see people pushing startup solutions on a daily basis
and it's usually cool stuff.

~~~
Shorn
> how do you plan to deal with vendors potentially banning your domains?

See other comment, but I do plan to implement a feature where customers can
bring their own domain. There's also a roadmap item to expose keywords as
"sub-domains" (i.e. "facebook@rovyko.kopi.cloud"). Of course, subdomains won't
help if they ban a top level domain.

Additionally, I use AWS Route53 and all domains are managed with a full
"infrastructure as code" approach. Having lots of domains won't be any kind of
serious overhead to manage, except for the 50cents/mth cost (and inconvenience
to users, but that pain can likely be mitigated).

