Re:Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative t...
by StavrosK on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @10:45AM
(#14203385)
There are services like 33mail.com, which I've used for years, which do exactly that. You give a service an email like [email protected] (or a custom domain, if you're on a paid plan), and then you can block/unblock/track emails per username.
Re:Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative t...
by itissid on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @10:14AM
(#14203109)
Actually curious, so if I understand you correctly what you are saying is that a receiver had some software generated an address like [email protected] and then sent it to the sender for use, that would require email providers cooperation.
I am not clear on the "cooperation" parts work. I THINK its basically that email providers block emails based on other criteria like DNSBL. And the "cooperation" bit is to get the providers to manage these cryptographic email addresses like guard against their possible misuse?
Re:Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative t...
by jimktrains2 on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @11:31AM
(#14203801)
That's more-or-less what I was thinking. The receiver would require understanding of the signature to white-list the message; the sender just sends to an email address as they would normally. No or invalid sig would fall back to our current anti-spam methods.
Re:Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative t...
by masukomi on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @11:44AM
(#14203980)
why not just add +sitename to your email when you sign up..... eg [email protected] becomes [email protected] ? it's just a comment that will be ignored. I don't feel that we need software support to help with that. Your password manager will store that address (since it's probably your username) and help you fill it in / remember it when you come back to the site.
Re:Postal: Open source mail delivery platform, alternative t...
by hk__2 on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @03:03PM
(#14205959)
> it's just a comment that will be ignored.
It’s not a comment. Some mail services allow you to have aliases in the form of [email protected] but that doesn’t mean all do. If it were a comment the address [email protected] would be invalid but it’s not. Comments in email addresses are written in parentheses like username(i'm_a_comment)@example.com.
Your proposal requires at least the status quo (aliased email address at signup), but the problem is it also requires cooperation of the receiver's email provider (e.g. gmail) and the sender's email provider. You are unlikely to ever see any new standard adopted by all major email providers, unless it came through a standards committee.
But your idea is interesting. Perhaps you could lower the cost of adoption by replacing the dependency on TLS/SSL with some sort of pgp signing scheme. This way all the "protocol" happens within the message body, so email providers do not need to adopt a new standard. As long as at least one website and one user implement the protocol, it can work without any cooperation from third parties.
As an aside, it would also be nice if password managers included functionality around generating temporary/isolated email addresses.