Show HN: maskedmail: craigslist style email anonymizer web service

http://www.maskedmail.net/

by bobbywilson0 • 16 years ago

16 14 16 years ago

Looking for honest feedback if this is useful to anyone or not.

bwr• 16 years ago

Just thought I'd mention that when I hit "sign up", Firefox prompts me with the "open with/save file" dialog. I am using Firefox 3.5.9 on Ubuntu 9.10

isthisanything2• 16 years ago

Ah, thank you, content-type was set to json. Fixed now.

noelchurchill• 16 years ago

It would be great as a browser plugin for creating new accounts and not needing to give them my real email address.

isthisanything2• 16 years ago

I thought of that too, there are a couple of services that do this, although not as a browser plugin. I thought it might be more compelling for people to be able to use this service to add this functionality to their application, if they were using a provider like heroku where you don't get a mail server with your hosting.

Thanks for the feedback.

PostOnce• 16 years ago

I think it would be better marketed as a tool for initial contact with people you may not necessarily want to have long-term knowledge of where to contact you.

For signing up for stuff, there is mailinator/bugmenot/etc., and many sites block such services anyway.

bobbywilson05• 16 years ago

I thought similar, that this would be useful for community type sites where you need someone to contact you but don't want to share your email address.

Thanks for the feedback

Brushfire• 16 years ago

This is neat, but I'm really only interested in the source to use in my own projects.

I wouldnt want @maskedmail.com, I'd want @app.mydomain.com or whatever. I guess thats trickier becuase I'd need to provision a catch-all account and then have something parse through all emails to any address.

bobbywilson05• 16 years ago

Yeah, I do realize that this would be ideal for people. It would be possible to point an mx record at me, and I could add your custom domain. So you could point your app.yourdomain.com MX record to my IP. I would know that based on your api key that requests coming from you should be created with the 'app.yourdomain.com' address and not maskedmail.net. That capability is actually built into how I have it set up now. If you are interested I would be happy to talk more about how we could get that set up.

Thanks for the feedback

noibl2• 16 years ago

For email, anonymity and disposability go together IMO. The main problem you want to avoid is getting spammed or harrassed through an address that you can't afford to turn off. I currently pay Sneakemail a yearly fee for a service that helps me do that.

So I would love to see this API fleshed out with some management features and maybe support for self-hosted MX.

bobbywilson05• 16 years ago

This idea was originally geared towards people building applications that would provide users of their site with an anonymous alias. So that you can get anonymously contacted, and then depending on how it is configured trash the alias. I guess it could potentially work for personal use too.

noibl2• 16 years ago

Sure, I get that. But my point was that I don't see the trashing.

Mc_Big_G• 16 years ago

I'm probably the perfect fit for this service, but I have a few concerns.

1) Reliability

Your site is sparse and I have no idea who you are. I don't have a lot of confidence at this point that I can use this service reliably for my company.

Also, your site says I can try it now at http://api.maskedmail.net/beta which gives a 404. Not good.

2) Attention to detail.

"Thanks for your interest maskedmail we'll let you know when you we are ready for you."

One too many you's.

3) I thought when I signed up I could start to use it and the "We'll let you know" was a let down.

4) I assumed I would have to roll me own in a day or two and I probably will. I'm not sure the pain point here is strong enough to make a business. I would open-source it as a rails plugin since it seems to be in ruby. You'll probably get some interest and side work out of it.

Even though it would be extremely useful for me, the price point would have to be pretty low and the reliability extremely high for me to not just roll my own.

Sorry if I'm being overly negative, but I do hope that helps you.

bobbywilson05• 16 years ago

1.) good point, I need to have a redirect for a get reqeuest on api.maskedmail.net. Right now it only accepts posts to test the service.

2.) thanks for noticing I will change that.

3.) I am going to provide sign ups with an API key to with a few more features. If you do want to give it a shot now just send a post request with a JSON body of the email address you want to test.

4.) Rolling your own has more to do with setting up a mail server than writing any code. The example is in ruby but it is just an example of consuming the service. Rolling your own at this point might be fine for you, I think the value is the convenience of not configuring a mail server, or if you don't have a mail server as part of your hosting (like heroku).

The critical review is definitely helpful. I appreciate you taking the time to give such thorough feedback.

Show HN: maskedmail: craigslist style email anonymizer web service

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