from Hacker News

Throttle – Control who can send you email

by metabren on 1/12/16, 7:47 PM with 36 comments

• by kazinator on 1/12/16, 9:37 PM

  This is just anonymizing of addresses. Through your throttle account, connected to a convenient browser extension, you can conveniently generate throwaway addresses which forward to the real inbox. These addresses can be shut down and since they are unique, they identify misuse.

  Anonymizing isn't new. For instance Craigslist generates an anonymized e-mail address through which people interested in your ad can contact you. (Of course, if you reply to it, then you reveal your real address.)

  People who run their own mail domains do this kind of thing on their own.

  I have the following system: the local part of the e-mail address has a four digit security code. If I give such an e-mail address to some vendor, it serves two purposes: the address bypasses spam checks, so I'm sure to get the e-mail. (Usually transactional e-mails are important and not easy to re-send.) Secondly, I can change the code to shut down senders who abuse the the address.

  Some banks offer throwaway one-time-use credit card numbers linked to your real credit card. That is very similar to this.

• by ryan-c on 1/12/16, 9:22 PM

  Seems fairly similar to sneakemail[0] (which I have been using for more than a decade), but with more polish. Looks like Throttle's basic service doesn't handle attachments or replying (sneakemail does), which is unfortunate.

  0. https://sneakemail.com/

• by 55acdda48ab5 on 1/12/16, 8:29 PM

  I discovered that when you delete your email address for a week almost all the spam and newsletters disappear. I don't know exactly how it works, but it does. So every couple years I just completely disable my email address for ten days, or whatever, while on vacation.

• by cromulent on 1/12/16, 8:47 PM

  Takes about 5 pages until you get to the little price tag. I wonder how many abandonments they will get. Personally I like seeing the price up front.

• by rshaban on 1/12/16, 8:24 PM

  Sounds great but I'm nervous to trust personal communications with a company that seems to be so new – what if they fold? I lose all the emails I might be getting sent. Without information about who's behind this, I probably won't sign up

• by simmons on 1/12/16, 8:28 PM

  I love the concept. In fact, it's somewhat similar to the manual, ad-hoc scheme I've been using for years. It's always interesting to see exactly who is leaking your email address to spammers (whether intentionally or otherwise).

  Edit: It does have the slight downside to making some human conversations awkward. "Just to confirm, the email address we have for you is... wait, what?"

• by kazinator on 1/12/16, 9:44 PM

  I like the browser plugin here which lets you generate these e-mails easily.

  An open source version would really be handy for people who host their own domains.

  I could use a FireFox extension which lets me click next to some e-mail field to generate an address by talking to some web shim on my server at home, which generates the alias and binds it to my e-mail address via /etc/aliases, and restarts Exim.

  The generated e-mail could actually be a cookie which contains not only some random ID but an encoded version of the domain name of the site against whose page it was generated. So later, when that address is being abused, you can tell where it came from without looking up any association in any file or database.

• by jkldotio on 1/12/16, 11:12 PM

  The video on the landing page doesn't play properly and surprise surprise it's Vimeo. People need to stop using Vimeo, they have incredibly bad service.

  I have had problems with Vimeo for years now across multiple desktops, multiple browsers, multiple mobile devices in multiple locations (across Europe and Australia). It happens on both popular videos and videos in the long tail which aren't being linked to at that moment by popular sites. It happens on free Vimeo accounts and on premium Vimeo accounts. I give Vimeo a pass when YouTube HD videos aren't working either but most of the time YouTube HD videos are working just fine on these connections and it's just Vimeo can't stream video reliably.

  In this case the video wasn't even full motion, the background is static and the keyframes and audio should have been a large slice of the bandwidth. But it was stuttering at the start and now even after letting it load in the background on a 70Mbps connection while typing this comment it's still stalling near the end of the video. What are the Vimeo alternatives besides YouTube?

• by mecer on 1/12/16, 8:49 PM

  Am I missing something? Why not just create a filter that permanently deletes or marks emails from a certain sender as spam?

• by hawski on 1/12/16, 10:48 PM

  I was thinking about similar service. What would be different is that I would give user subdomain and redirect all incoming traffic on SMTP SSL port to connected client. I would give access for user to get SSL cert from Let's Encrypt.

  All this would give something better than promise that I would not look at private emails, but I would have to build client application that would be SMTP server inside. Handling LE automatically and all other seemingly unrelated things.

  Main use would be to use generated by application unique addresses for registration purposes.

• by noja on 1/12/16, 9:17 PM

  I don't know who wants to send me e-mail.

• by hammock on 1/12/16, 9:31 PM

  No idea how it works (can't watch a video where I am and it isn't explained anywhere else), but it does seem to consolidate a few useful features that I currently get elsewhere:

  -Combine mass mailings in to a single daily digest email (Unrollme)

  -Find out who tries to sell your email address (Using email+website@gmail.com)

• by ptype on 1/12/16, 9:35 PM

  To achieve the same cheaply and without lockin, simply have your own domain with a catch-all email forwarding to your real email address. Then always give out your email address for a specific site as <site>@yourdomain.com.

• by RyanShook on 1/12/16, 9:35 PM

  It's been around forever but a basic free way to mask your email address is Spam Gourmet https://www.spamgourmet.com/index.pl

• by nikolay on 1/12/16, 7:52 PM

  Great, but they seem not to have plans to create recyclable emails for person-to-person communication, which is sad.