If you have a hundred aliases on say, Fastmail, and someone reports one of them, Fastmail can investigate the abuse you are involved in and can suspend your account. But the places you are using those aliases have no way to identify the main account of an alias, they can only report the alias, and Fastmail, the company providing your core service, is the only one that has the ability to deanonymize that relationship. Most of the services who allow these excess aliases are paid services or have identity checks, so other service providers can trust they will do a reasonable job to prevent abuse.
Meanwhile, if you bother to investigate how your service is being used, the percentage of users using it to abuse other sites will inevitably approach 100%. As bot spammers realize you're another set of free email addresses they can stack up, they'll swarm to each new domain you rotate to. If you are as privacy focused as you say, you'll have no tools at your disposable to regulate this either, they have plenty of IP addresses to work with, mostly compromised devices on residential IPs that are part of botnets, that will look like real users from a cursory glance.
> This kind of reasoning is why people can't run their own email servers anymore and instead have to rely on the big services.
That's why it's so fundamental that you understand rotating your domains is abuse, and it hurts the email ecosystem. Every time someone like you thinks this is okay, you make more service providers lock down what email domains they accept, punishing folks like me who just want their own domain on their email. Because disposable mail services do this, we all get punished for your bad behavior.
> Why not use phone numbers instead
Well, that's what a lot of major providers do. Gmail makes it much harder to get going without a phone number these days, mostly for that reason. I certainly don't want to have to give my phone number to every site I sign up with, but if that is, in your opinion better for privacy, by all means, enjoy the fruits of you screwing over email for this.
> Fastmail can investigate the abuse you are involved in and can suspend your account.
What if the Fastmail account is simply just using their free 30 day trial, how will they track the user then?
My point is that the malicious user will still have a way, while the legitimate user is punished by having to pay a fee to the email provider.
> Every time someone like you thinks this is okay, you make more service providers lock down what email domains they accept, punishing folks like me who just want their own domain on their email.
How about no one gets punished and service providers verify phone numbers instead of emails and we get to keep our inboxes clean?
I honestly am very concerned you are releasing this with clearly... no understanding of the Internet abuse space. To be honest, good luck, you will need it. Make sure your cloud service allows what you're doing, make sure you have cost controls in place, and make sure you already have a relationship with a good lawyer.
(Trials usually both restrict features like this and require valid payment info is already entered, having websites all ask for people's phone numbers is way more privacy-invasive than asking for their email, and of course... you can keep your inbox clean without disposable email.)
> I honestly am very concerned you are releasing this with clearly... no understanding of the Internet abuse space.
I've given this some thought over the years so I know where I stand morally. As I've mentioned several times already, the issue lies in the service provider for forcing the user to give up their email address, in the majority of cases it will end up with you receiving spam from many different sources as your address will be sold, leaked and more.
>good luck
Thanks for the motivation!
> Make sure your cloud service allows what you're doing, make sure you have cost controls in place, and make sure you already have a relationship with a good lawyer.
Yeah, it's an expensive service to run (if you want to run it properly at least), but as long as it helps users and I see people sending in positive comments through the contact form, it will give me the motivation to continue.
A close friend of mine is a lawyer also so the day it becomes illegal to receive emails, I'll have to give him a call.
>Trials usually both restrict features like this and require valid payment info is already entered
That's good at least, but what I'm trying to say is that anything can be abused, the same way that the
>having websites all ask for people's phone numbers is way more privacy-invasive
It costs sites way more to send out texts than it does to send out an email, I'm sure that if we were to look at the overall amount of spam one receives in their lifetime, then we would see a great decrease. It's also a lot easier to stop spam coming from phone numbers as they are all registered and regulated compared to emails that aren't.
> you can keep your inbox clean without disposable email
You can also walk to the destination without taking a car, you can get fit without going to the gym and you can cook a meal without a recipe, but it won't be as convenient.
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I'm starting to sound like a broken record as I'm just repeating myself, but to summarize things, we are both on the same page as our goals are to stop spam to users and abuse of services. The majority of the times an email address shouldn't even be needed and when it comes to sites where spam is more prevalent (e.g you mentioned The Verge), then they could simply verify your phone, payment details and a ton of other measures (captchas, checking IPs, rate-limiting, etc).
If you have a hundred aliases on say, Fastmail, and someone reports one of them, Fastmail can investigate the abuse you are involved in and can suspend your account. But the places you are using those aliases have no way to identify the main account of an alias, they can only report the alias, and Fastmail, the company providing your core service, is the only one that has the ability to deanonymize that relationship. Most of the services who allow these excess aliases are paid services or have identity checks, so other service providers can trust they will do a reasonable job to prevent abuse.
Meanwhile, if you bother to investigate how your service is being used, the percentage of users using it to abuse other sites will inevitably approach 100%. As bot spammers realize you're another set of free email addresses they can stack up, they'll swarm to each new domain you rotate to. If you are as privacy focused as you say, you'll have no tools at your disposable to regulate this either, they have plenty of IP addresses to work with, mostly compromised devices on residential IPs that are part of botnets, that will look like real users from a cursory glance.
> This kind of reasoning is why people can't run their own email servers anymore and instead have to rely on the big services.
That's why it's so fundamental that you understand rotating your domains is abuse, and it hurts the email ecosystem. Every time someone like you thinks this is okay, you make more service providers lock down what email domains they accept, punishing folks like me who just want their own domain on their email. Because disposable mail services do this, we all get punished for your bad behavior.
> Why not use phone numbers instead
Well, that's what a lot of major providers do. Gmail makes it much harder to get going without a phone number these days, mostly for that reason. I certainly don't want to have to give my phone number to every site I sign up with, but if that is, in your opinion better for privacy, by all means, enjoy the fruits of you screwing over email for this.