If you’re looking for an alternative to Gmail, may I introduce Port87.
I’ve been working on this email service for four years, and I just opened it to the public today. The way it works is a might different than other email services.
You still get an address like [email protected], but you don’t usually use that form. Instead, you add a label like [email protected]. This is often called subaddressing or plus addressing. With Port87, these addresses go into labels. Everything between the dash and the at is a label. When you sign up somewhere, you can give them a label, even if it doesn’t exist yet. Then it becomes a pending label that you can approve to move it in with all your other labels. This really helps with organization too.
You can also give labels meant for real people, like [email protected]. On labels meant for real people, you can enable screening that responds to anyone new with a link to prove they’re human. When they click the link, their email is delivered.
Lastly, you can give out your “bare address” ([email protected]) anywhere, because any email to it doesn’t get delivered to you. Instead, they get a response saying to email one of your other addresses, then a list of all of the addresses to your public labels. For example, I have a public label at [email protected] that’s meant for email about my open source projects. That gets included in the list in the auto reply when you email [email protected].
Oh, also, you can bring your own domain! The main benefit of your own domain is it prevents vendor lock in. If Port87 ever stops meeting your needs, you can pack up your domain and take it to another provider. It also prevents losing your address if Port87 ever shuts down.
If you can’t tell, I’m very passionate about email, and the more competition there is to Gmail and Exchange, the more they’ll be forced to actually stop trying to Embrace Extend Extinguish email.
You could use both. Mine isn’t meant to keep your address anonymous, and that’s specifically because those kinds of services get blocked. But you can absolutely use one of those services that does forwarding with Port87, and I’d encourage you to do so. I wish I could provide anonymous addresses, but the fact that big companies definitely will block my domain if I do means it’s a no-go.
But you can also set up a “personal” custom domain with Port87. Then, every address on the domain becomes a label on your account. So something like [email protected] would be delivered to the “anon123” label in your account.
Also label names (what you see in your account) and label IDs (what creates the email address) can be different, so you can have a label named “Netflix” with an ID “or6neb5cij0f4hwocjf9idn”.
They’ll do that with your regular domain regardless if enough people start using it, which is why I’m concerned this might result in your entire primary domain being flagged as a temporary email service.
For example, there’s no distinction from the perspective of the service to a domain creating aliases that are per-account, entirely random each time, and a domain creating aliases that use a standard format of yourname-service, because at the end of the day, users can still make unlimited emails for a given service (e.g. yourname-1, yourname-2, yourname-3, and they all sign up for the same site)
The reason why SimpleLogin, now owned by Proton, doesn’t offer proton.me addresses, and the reason why Proton, Tuta, and other email providers all limit the number of aliases you can make with the base domain to a set amount, and for paid users only (e.g. Proton limits you to 15 total, and you can only delete and replace 1 per year), is because, for example, if everyone could make unlimited emails on proton.me, then proton.me would get flagged as a temporary email service.
I’m not saying I hate the idea at all, I love to see more competition and useful tools coming to the email space when so much of it is dominated by just Google and a few more privacy-focused providers like Tuta and Proton, but I’m worried this mechanism will just get you flagged as a temporary email service by companies, just like most of SimpleLogin’s domains were on many services by default. (though they’re still quite usable on 99% of the web)
From the perspective of sites these emails will be used on, there’s no difference between how your domain acts, and how a temporary email service does, because no system exists that is implemented by all these companies to specially identify emails from your domain, know they’re using “labels”, and filter out duplicate registrations accordingly.
To do so would require scale, but you probably won’t get scale unless you can avoid getting flagged as a temporary email service, which won’t happen unless those services all had such a system in place to the first place.
I see what you mean, but the same would apply to any service that allows subaddresses, like Gmail for example. Yourname+1, yourname+2, yourname+3 on Gmail all go to your address. Many email services allow subaddressing, and some even use the dash, like Port87. In terms of the addressing format, there’s nothing new about Port87. It’s everything that happens behind the addresses that’s new.
However gmail is a large, incredibly well known service, and many sites understand that the + on gmail specifically is for subaddresses and will deny using the same email with subaddresses different times.
Contrast that with just using dashes like Port87, and most systems don’t have anything made to parse for dashes, as it could then result in problems where an email service like Gmail, or any other provider out there, allows people to put dashes in their base email, and someone can effectively block someone else from signing up for a service by making a new account named theirname-1, signing up, then the service would think that theirname-1 is also owned by theirname, and block theirname from signing up later.
The + is a relatively well known standard for email subaddressing, but dashes are primarily used by people just inside their email addresses instead of a space, for example. Thus, most server side implementations will never be configured to understand dashes as indicating a label, specifically for your domain, they’ll just see a large volume of constantly created new emails, that act like a temporary email service, and assume you’re one.
This has the same problem as before, where you’re not large enough to justify being specially considered by login pages that will understand what your labels are, but are also not going to get to that scale if you get filtered out as a temporary email service.
I’m probably going to stop responding now, as I think that’s about all I can contribute, but I’d just say that if this is the exact mechanism by which you plan to implement subaddressing, make sure you’re frequently checking any widely used blocklists online for temporary email domains, because someone will probably end up submitting your domain there at some point based on the behavior of the service, and it’s incredibly hard to get off once you’re on. (and consider making a page on the site explaining why you’re not a temporary email service, like SimpleLogin has)
That’s a good idea. I’ll add that to the website to explain why it shouldn’t be used as an anonymous or temporary email.