Remix.run Logo
Terr_ 4 hours ago

IMO a better approach would be individualized addresses.

Imagine someone visiting your blog who wants to e-mail you can burn some CPU cycles to "earn" an address that hasn't been given out to anybody else, e.g. user+TOKEN@example.com, where it is algorithmically-unlikely for them to be able to guess a different TOKEN that will work. Then if abuse occurs, you can just retire that one address. (In a non-interactive context, like a paper ad, you could just generate one yourself.)

Naturally, this would be best with an e-mail client that is aware of the scheme, and with a mail-service that has some API for generating new addresses, such as if you want to cold e-mail somebody and use a new from/return address.

Some years ago I had the fanciful idea of doing it with a phone-app, where it manages creating new addresses as-needed, disabling them, and keeping notes about who you gave them to.

terrabitz 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

Sounds like a similar approach to this service: https://addy.io/

I use it all the time in conjunction with Bitwarden to generate unique emails per site. You can have notes in each email, and they show up in a small banner on in the forwarded email. And each one is individually disable-able, so you can easily cut it off if you see spam from it.

I was really interested in this space and made my own homegrown tool for this. I used it for a while until I discovered Addy and switched over. IIRC there are similar services by Mozilla, Apple, and Proton.