Tmpmail: Temporary email right from your terminal written in POSIX sh

by thunderbong • 2 years ago

157 53 2 years ago

vessenes• 2 years ago

Love this. Nota bene, it uses 1secmail.org’s API on the backend. Still love it.

xelxebar3• 2 years ago

Started running my own email server about 10 years ago for essentially this use case. Every entity I need to give an address to gets a unique, randomly-generated one. I figured this would let me spot the leaks.

After roughly 1000 addresses handed out, surpisingly only two sources end up receiving spam: 1) addresses that I've posted on public forums, and 2) the address I use for patches to GNU software.

nobody99997• 2 years ago

Every entity I need to give an address to gets a unique, randomly-generated one. I figured this would let me spot the leaks.

I do the same, except I don't use a randomly generated address. Rather, I use something that identifies who it is. e.g., if I had a relationship with Tesla, the email address would be 'tesla@myemaildomain'.

What (if anything) is the advantage of using a randomly generated email address over the scheme I use?

N.B., I'm not dissing your strategy at all. I do exactly the same. I'm just curious about the "randomly generated" bit.

jmuguy• 2 years ago

I would guess just speed of creating the addresses/not having to worry about using same address twice accidentally

dasyatidprime• 2 years ago

Not the parent commenter, but I've encountered “people from the counterparty organization get confused and wonder whether you're part of it too / pretending to be part of it too”. This can be mitigated with some obscuring transformation.

xelxebar3• 2 years ago

When I started, I wanted the addresses to look as innocuous as possible in order to avoid unnecessary explanations. Filling out paperwork that people hand inspect is one case where that can cause issues. I have also heard of people getting filtered as potential spam accounts when the email address matches the service name or whatnot.

Anyway, I just use pwgen to generate plausible-looking addresses: pwgen -A0 10 1. They often look like realistic abbreviations of names.

Z7YCx5ieof4Std• 2 years ago

I do the same, except I don't use a randomly generated address. Rather, I use something that identifies who it is. e.g., if I had a relationship with Tesla, the email address would be 'tesla@myemaildomain'. I almost use the methodology except I add ramdom characters at the end. Tesla.ahcdk@domain.com

Reasoning is that its most likely if you have tesla@ you will have facebook@ tesco@. When adding characters you can filter on the . + 4 characters

ForOldHack2• 2 years ago

I cannot thank you enough for your contributions to GNU.

I always use the dingleberry subdomain that goes nowhere, except when an actual human interviense. Goes straight to the bitbucket, and 1 out of 10 gets a pervue to see if I need to add the source to my reject list which my ISP keeps peeking into for changes to their reject list.

JOnAgain• 2 years ago

The real value of this, IMHO, is that it makes it much harder to match you against services and in ad platforms. Hashing email addresses is the primary way user data is exchanged.

Szpadel2• 2 years ago

I use self hosted anonaddy instance for such purpose and have dedicated alias for each registration.

It forwards received emails to my main mailbox with added header telling me source email with note about where I used that address.

that way I discovered few sites that were bought by some entity and that sold my email to some crypto 3rd party

mvelbaum• 2 years ago

1. does anonaddy support ARC?

2. are you able to reply to the email?

alchemist1e97• 2 years ago

I’ve recently been the target of many attempts to hijack my gmail account, including even phone calls with live agents impersonating google “security team”. Successfully hijacking my gmail address could be catastrophic for me and others I assume.

Anyway I was wondering if self hosting an email server might allow for a security layer for those of us sophisticated enough. Especially if we own our own domain. Ideally my email address with access to financial services would have 2FA to both read and send emails for example. Don’t even think there are clients or protocols but perhaps with self hosting this can be rigged up with various tricks like port security opening only with a 2FA message.

I’d be curious what other perspective on this issue is.

jamal-kumar• 2 years ago

It's a decent amount of upkeep and cost, but I get paid do it for a bunch of clients who desire this for their companies and have my own which is humming along great. If you go the route of a script to set everything up I found iredmail to be the most mature and reliable solution, even if the upgrade path is super manual at least it gives you a chance to know at what point things went wrong rather than having to pour over logs to fix something broken that is running in production. It also pairs nicely with open source failover solutions and if you need enterprise support they're extremely responsive. Bonus points for getting it working with your phone for backups of contacts, calendar and notes with CalDAV or whatever to really decouple yourself from cloud services with shady terms (I had to pay for an app on my phone for this to really work, but it works great). Setting your whole mailserver up manually is also an option , but be prepared to sink like a month of time into learning how the hell to do that. This is technology from the 1970s with a ton to get it working in the modern world after all.

Just be wary that you'll have to upgrade kinda often. I keep subscribed to github alerts for iredmail as they're really prompt about notifying their customers when they need to patch security holes.

xp84• 2 years ago

A perspective I've read on this (Granted, this was at least 5 years ago) was that it was paradoxically much harder to compromise a Google account than it is to hijack a domain from many registrars. I read an account by someone who had a custom domain and the attacker had social-engineered the registrar into allowing him access, then he proceeded to update the MX, directing the email into the attacker's server.

This probably varies from one registrar to the next, and hopefully all have stepped up their game somewhat since that time, but it left an impression on me and caused me to update a lot of my accounts to my Gmail. Obviously, nobody is going to be able to call into a customer service desk and talk them into updating the gmail.com MX record, so for someone to illicitly gain access to mail sent to <me>@gmail.com either I have to be pwned myself (leaked a credential somehow) or there has to be a global 0-day exploit affecting it. In the latter case I am personally willing to bet that mine would not be the first one (or even in the top 10 million) accounts that the hackers would try, so I sleep pretty well.

singron• 2 years ago

I do the same, and the only leak was target giving my email to a pork-related class action lawsuit.

dspillett3• 2 years ago

surpisingly only two sources end up receiving spam

Quite a few of mine get junk:

* A couple that have been subject to leeks or hacks, that I haven't got around to changing yet (linked-in for example)

* A fair few were given to businesses that are no longer in operation (hosting providers, online stores) who presumably sold their contacts databases to make a few pennies before finally closing up

* Also some junk senders seem to have worked out that the sub-domain I use for the per-entity addresses is a catch-all, I need to address that at some point.

data_maan• 2 years ago

Also some junk senders seem to have worked out that the sub-domain I use for the per-entity addresses is a catch-all, I need to address that at some point.

Could you elaborate how you'd address that?

sam_perez• 2 years ago

Hah, that is much fewer than I would have expected.

Too bad you can't do the same with phone numbers.

ForOldHack2• 2 years ago

Imagine a threaded mail reader with this feature from say, 1987? I would pay for a threaded HN news reader.

nextos• 2 years ago

Gnus is not too far from that if someone maps HN to NNTP.

I think there are some HN to NNTP bridges available.

xelxebar3• 2 years ago

After trying a few different CLI mail clients---mutt/neomutt, s-nail, etc.---I've come to love the approach of mblaze[0], _i.e._ just a collection of commands to interact with maildirs, which can be separately managed by OfflineIMAP or whatever.

I'm curious how mblaze+offlineimap compares to other similar setups: nmh[1], fdm[2], and getmail.

[0] https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze

[1] https://www.nongnu.org/nmh/

[2] https://github.com/nicm/fdm

rakoo3• 2 years ago

Shameless plug because tpis is also my approach: combine with fzf and a few shell scripts and the sky is yours

https://sr.ht/~rakoo/omail/

nonrandomstring• 2 years ago

Nice use of Unix philosophy and some well said things about why. Thanks for sharing these.

JoosToopit• 2 years ago

I want to express just pure love towards your idea that software should be simple.

user3939382• 2 years ago

I wish there was a CLI imap client with a conversation view as seamless as Fastmail or Gmail. I found mutt to be very clunky.

katzinsky• 2 years ago

Have you tried using threads in mutt? Having them collapse by default seems to reproduce what I remember the gmail experience being.

tetris11• 2 years ago

gnus was pretty good for conversation chains

rakoo3• 2 years ago

Try sup: https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup

or its spiritual successors based on notmuch

3np• 2 years ago

aerc is pretty good.

https://aerc-mail.org/

jonstewart• 2 years ago

I thought from the headline this was about _sending_ email right from the terminal, and I thought, well that's easy, just telnet to sendmail on port 25 and say HELO.

xk_id• 2 years ago

Just wanted to say I really appreciated the readability of your code. It was very easy to dive in, understand how it works and how to modify it.

Tmpmail: Temporary email right from your terminal written in POSIX sh

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