Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your email address

Re:Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your emai... by daxelrod on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @05:51PM (#14598931)

I used to do this. The amount spam of mail I received to mailbox names I had never used started to dwarf my actual email. This is apparently made worse because spammers take the fact that these addresses will receive mail as a signal that they're valid, causing them to send more mail to them.

A couple of years ago, maintaining the blacklist passed the point where this was a viable technique for me.

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Re:Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your emai... by jjnoakes on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @05:58PM (#14598976)

This is why you might consider maintaining a white list or white pattern instead.

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Re:Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your emai... by daxelrod on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @11:16PM (#14600389)

A white pattern is an idea that I'd considered but never actually tried implementing.

It has the advantage of being able to spontaneously create email addresses when signing up for things, while still blackholing most guessed addresses.

I like this idea a lot.

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Re:Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your emai... by rhizome on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @06:24PM (#14599101)

Easier to use sub-/plus-addressing rather than maintaining a list.

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Re:Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your emai... by jjnoakes on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @08:34PM (#14599718)

That seems like a white pattern to me.

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Re:Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your emai... by rhizome on Wednesday June 21, 2017 @02:54PM (#14606851)

If only delivering mail to existing email addresses is a white pattern, sure.

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Re:Show HN: NBox – Sign up anywhere without giving your emai... by jjnoakes on Thursday June 22, 2017 @04:17PM (#14614988)

I don't follow.

If I configure me.example.com to accept emails matching the pattern "me<anything>[email protected]", then I can generate as many on-the-fly unique emails as I want, without maintaining any lists, and without catch-all forwarding of random spam to my inbox.

If I use [email protected], I get the same exact feature, but the downside is "+anything" is recognized by some and either disallowed or used to generate more patterns.

If I use subdomains (like [email protected]) I have the spam issue.

With a white pattern scheme, you can choose your own pattern (so sites can't really catch on), not have to maintain any lists, and avoid spray-and-pray spam.

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