The article author attemps to make a distintion between "burners" and "aliases" but I don't believe one exists for this usecase. Let's say for the sake of argument that you think blocking burner emails provides meaningful protection (I don't, but services using such a list obviously do). From your perspective, an "alias" is the same as a "burner". Both can be easily generated in bulk by a human or bots, cannot be resolved to an identity, and cannot be compared to determine if two emails are the same person.
The easiest and best way is to rate limit the number of signups from a domain per day. You might still get people trying to bulk signup but as the article states, most large spam operators do not really use those domains anyway. Of course there are plenty of small time scammers to make up for that lack, so to speak.
I personally use burner emails when I want an account somewhere but would prefer not linking all of my personal interests and necessities to the same few email addresses. It just seems smart.
It is frustrating to try to make it clear you are not attempting to bypass authenticity controls, especially when AI can so frustratingly create text posts that can seem realistically 'human'.
Maybe someone will come up with a better way to attempt to add privacy back without ripping it away in the name of attempting to add it.
Though, I mean, that's been the issue since the 1990s: security or privacy, hard to have both, and yet difficult to have either without the other.
IDK man .. many services really just don't even want to deal with a sign up they are never going to reach. By using a disposable email, you're telling the business, I want to use your service, get value, but I don't really want you to reach me. To them, it sounds like a loss loss situation. Business are there to make money, and they offer a signup/trial/free account so they can give you access in exchange for being able to reach you.
But I do sympathize with the stupidity of marketing email madness.
Reminder that apple provides burner emails that are effectively unblockable (because they use the @icloud.com domain, at least for now[1]), for $0.99/month.
$50/year and Fastmail will let you alias anything@yourdomain.com to your inbox. I use a different email for every company or website I interact with, so I know who spams me.
Services like this are great for some things, like adding and removing forwarding, and vacation mails, and organising mails to make life and work easier, but the provider still links everything. It is only, at best private in a single direction. That is fine for some things, not so great for others (and it has nothing to do with legality).
I’ve surprisingly found that I have started to have to use mydomain.com with Fastmail. Sometimes banks used for a business account, or accounts at b2b companies don’t treat fastmail.com as a large email provider, and otherwise try to associate me with other fastmail customers as though we are colleagues at Fastmail.
This is genuinely hilarious. Are you able to elaborate? Which banks? Which B2B? There is probably a shared product stack here that is making some hilariously poor decisions.
My domain at Hetzner including mail costs less than 20€/year and all emails to <whatever>@mydomain.com which are not part of predefined mailboxes land in my catchall@mydomain.com mailbox.
I love this feature from Fastmail but I have used a few websites (smaller of course) that will not accept anything outside of the big few email domains.
Are you implying that plus addresses are part of RFC 2822? Because they aren’t. AFAIK, no RFC documents specify the plus address convention. The RFCs merely specify that, in an email address, whatever is to the left of the @ sign is to be interpreted by the receiving system, and nobody else should make any assumptions about any of it, and certainly never alter it. And also that the + character is one of the many permitted characters to the left of the @ sign in an email address.
The plus address convention is just that, a convention, widely implemented by many email programs and servers, but not required by any standard, nor universally implemented.
It's become a fairly regular occurrence that any email with + just shows an error saying the email isn't valid. Bad actors can also easily strip it out after
"I never thought the leopards would eat MY face," sobs dude who contributed to the leopard-owned face eating industry.
There has never been a good argument for attempting to filter email addresses based on domain. Check address syntax on interactive forms purely to help users (did they fat finger something). Whatever well-formed address you've got, fire off emails and if they can receive them then it's a legit address. If you want to rate limit signups, then do so per-domain or per-mx, the same way you might limit incoming connections per-ip. That is the extent of guarantee that email provides you - trying to step over that demarc point is a control delusion.
Even outright throwaway domains like mailinator.com - if a user is using this, it says more about your own requirement demanding an email address rather than the user themselves.
Haha. I run a service that compiles IP addresses used by proxy services and a few months ago my own IP got there.
Turned out to be a friend that installed an app to watch soccer matches for free and in return he became a node of one of those services.
The article author attemps to make a distintion between "burners" and "aliases" but I don't believe one exists for this usecase. Let's say for the sake of argument that you think blocking burner emails provides meaningful protection (I don't, but services using such a list obviously do). From your perspective, an "alias" is the same as a "burner". Both can be easily generated in bulk by a human or bots, cannot be resolved to an identity, and cannot be compared to determine if two emails are the same person.
The easiest and best way is to rate limit the number of signups from a domain per day. You might still get people trying to bulk signup but as the article states, most large spam operators do not really use those domains anyway. Of course there are plenty of small time scammers to make up for that lack, so to speak.
I personally use burner emails when I want an account somewhere but would prefer not linking all of my personal interests and necessities to the same few email addresses. It just seems smart.
It is frustrating to try to make it clear you are not attempting to bypass authenticity controls, especially when AI can so frustratingly create text posts that can seem realistically 'human'.
Maybe someone will come up with a better way to attempt to add privacy back without ripping it away in the name of attempting to add it.
Though, I mean, that's been the issue since the 1990s: security or privacy, hard to have both, and yet difficult to have either without the other.
IDK man .. many services really just don't even want to deal with a sign up they are never going to reach. By using a disposable email, you're telling the business, I want to use your service, get value, but I don't really want you to reach me. To them, it sounds like a loss loss situation. Business are there to make money, and they offer a signup/trial/free account so they can give you access in exchange for being able to reach you.
But I do sympathize with the stupidity of marketing email madness.
i have my own custom domain with a non ".com" TLD for e-mail and the number of services that reject sign ups for this purpose are way too high.
notably, micro center _was_ an issue but had to raise exception.
Reminder that apple provides burner emails that are effectively unblockable (because they use the @icloud.com domain, at least for now[1]), for $0.99/month.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48559935
$50/year and Fastmail will let you alias anything@yourdomain.com to your inbox. I use a different email for every company or website I interact with, so I know who spams me.
Services like this are great for some things, like adding and removing forwarding, and vacation mails, and organising mails to make life and work easier, but the provider still links everything. It is only, at best private in a single direction. That is fine for some things, not so great for others (and it has nothing to do with legality).
I’ve surprisingly found that I have started to have to use mydomain.com with Fastmail. Sometimes banks used for a business account, or accounts at b2b companies don’t treat fastmail.com as a large email provider, and otherwise try to associate me with other fastmail customers as though we are colleagues at Fastmail.
This is genuinely hilarious. Are you able to elaborate? Which banks? Which B2B? There is probably a shared product stack here that is making some hilariously poor decisions.
ImprovMX will do that for free...
My domain at Hetzner including mail costs less than 20€/year and all emails to <whatever>@mydomain.com which are not part of predefined mailboxes land in my catchall@mydomain.com mailbox.
Do you have sending from the incoming address setup? If so, using what?
I love this feature from Fastmail but I have used a few websites (smaller of course) that will not accept anything outside of the big few email domains.
Fastmail costs $60/year now, at least for new signups
Apple (like any email provider that conforms to RFC 2822) supports plus addresses as well.
Are you implying that plus addresses are part of RFC 2822? Because they aren’t. AFAIK, no RFC documents specify the plus address convention. The RFCs merely specify that, in an email address, whatever is to the left of the @ sign is to be interpreted by the receiving system, and nobody else should make any assumptions about any of it, and certainly never alter it. And also that the + character is one of the many permitted characters to the left of the @ sign in an email address.
The plus address convention is just that, a convention, widely implemented by many email programs and servers, but not required by any standard, nor universally implemented.
its talked about in a proposed standard, at least.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5233/
TIL, thanks!
Any illegitimate email collection service already knows to strip out email subaddresses.
If you’re trying to avoid email spam, there’s not much difference in giving someone myname+foo@gmail.com versus just myname@gmail.com.
You could just use my.name@gmail.com for the no-alias version. So myname+foo@ works and my.name@ works but myname@ goes directly to the trash.
That can also be normalized.
Yea, gotta take all dots out on the username portion of Gmail address
It's become a fairly regular occurrence that any email with + just shows an error saying the email isn't valid. Bad actors can also easily strip it out after
Bad actors can just strip the plus part of the address
Cloudflare offers this for free as well.
proton too
His own petard?!
He was petarded quite hoistily.
"I never thought the leopards would eat MY face," sobs dude who contributed to the leopard-owned face eating industry.
There has never been a good argument for attempting to filter email addresses based on domain. Check address syntax on interactive forms purely to help users (did they fat finger something). Whatever well-formed address you've got, fire off emails and if they can receive them then it's a legit address. If you want to rate limit signups, then do so per-domain or per-mx, the same way you might limit incoming connections per-ip. That is the extent of guarantee that email provides you - trying to step over that demarc point is a control delusion.
Even outright throwaway domains like mailinator.com - if a user is using this, it says more about your own requirement demanding an email address rather than the user themselves.