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Ask HN: Would you pay for a 1Password-like service for email?
Given the privacy concerns around Buzz and Facebook's purchase of Ocatazen, it is more than likely that you can be tracked across different social networks if you use the same email address.
Would people be willing to pay for a service that does for email what !Password does for passwords? That is you provide a different email per site but it funnels all back to a specific email of your choosing.
Of course, this is not a Tor like service but at a minimum creepy services such as Intelius and Pipl would have a harder time of mapping out your activities in an aggregate manner.
- there 17y agointeresting idea. a few issues come to mind: - people concerned enough about privacy to use such a service might have concerns about their emails being passed through your service as well. - the domains of that service might get blocked on certain sites due to abuse and people using multiple email addresses to create multiple accounts. - spam filters might block the inbound emails because the 'to' address doesn't match up to the user's. though i can't imagine many would place a high probability on this metric since mailing lists and such would act the same way.
- newman314 17y agoWell, given that this would be a hosted service, the revenue model would be the redirect service and not name scraping. I have no interest in scraping names and think that that is completely unethical behavior. However, to further address your concerns, email addresses could be stored in such a way that the provider does not match or log any email transactions and acts strictly as a forward only model. Domains getting blocked is a fact of life and is something that will have to be managed. However, I hear you on potential abuse and part of the service would have to be ways to address that. I'm no fan of spammers and my primary interest in this is to manage the rapidly increasing insight that companies such as GOOG and MSFT have into their users by way of providing "free" services. Google Buzz and Latitude honestly creep the heck out of me. Wrt to spam filters, you can easily add the "to" addresses inside gmail as approved addresses so that should not be too much of an issue.
- petercooper 17y agoGmail lets you do something like that already with the +anything suffixes on the end of the e-mail username. Also, in a slightly similarly vein but if you want to have stuff on a separate domain with a message limit: http://www.spamgourmet.com/ http://www.spamgourmet.com/
- newman314 17y agoWell, it would be sort of like spamgourmet except these would be ongoing honeypots. Most of these sites use a standard set of signals to try to identify you i.e. - cookies - IP address - physical address - telephone number - ssn - email address - name - dob This would be just one of the ways in counteracting such intrusive tracking behavior.