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.
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.