8 ms·

I love the idea of doing this. Just like I do the idea of using Apple's "hide my email" feature. But in reality you're completely locking yourself into that pro

by davzie 5y ago

I love the idea of doing this. Just like I do the idea of using Apple's "hide my email" feature. But in reality you're completely locking yourself into that provider. What if I want to change provider or the provider decides to sunset this feature. My logins are now split up so much it'll be a full time job getting them set back to my primary email address. It's a trade-off I guess because you can't solve it any other way from what I know of!

rntksi 5y ago
Exactly. For people who want to do this and care about retaining ownership, would be probably wise to run their own email servers and using different patterns of catch all addresses.
davidjfelix 5y ago
What do you do if you want to change email provider or your email provider decides to stop their email service. I think a lot of people have been spoiled by gmail's longevity. Unless you're using your own domain it's a wash anyways right? I think this is an acceptable trust. I personally prefer trusting something with more longevity than fastmail (apple hide my email).
- davzie 5y ago
  I have my own domain
- beyer 5y ago
  Buy a super cheap domain that you park all of these new email addresses at, like 7467j.com. Then, if you ever need to switch providers, take the entire domain with you.
- jorams 5y ago
  > I think a lot of people have been spoiled by gmail's longevity. > I personally prefer trusting something with more longevity than fastmail Fastmail launched 5 years before Gmail, in 1999. It's also a paid product with a sustainable business model. It's hard to get more longevity than that.
- apple4ever 5y ago
  > I think a lot of people have been spoiled by gmail's longevity. > I personally prefer trusting something with more longevity than fastmail (apple hide my email). Fastmail (launched 1999) is older than Gmail (launched 2004).
markild 5y ago
They actually seem to have thought about this. > New Masked Email addresses will be created @fastmail.com. You can change this in Settings → Domains I agree with you, and I'm looking forward to be trying this out.
codewithcheese 5y ago
Good point, i'll keep that in mind. It seems then, this feature is best for throwaway type accounts, where one could just create another new accoint if they want to migrate.
vmception 5y ago
HMM let's see Wait till 2038 so you can say "aha! I told you so!" or have peace of mind during the prime of my life for the next two decades
mkenyon 5y ago
Hi, one of the 1Password engineers who worked on this. Glad to hear that you like the idea! One of the really nice parts of building this out with Fastmail is that you can create Masked Emails for your own domain. So, if you ever decide that Fastmail isn’t right for you, then you still receive all of those emails when you set up a wildcard alias with your new email provider. Similarly, if you ever decide that 1Password isn’t right for you, that doesn’t stop you from receiving your emails. And the email addresses should still be part of your 1Password export.
- davzie 5y ago
  Hang on hot potatoes. I use 1Password. So are you saying I can generate a login that uses myaccount+alias@mydomain.com automatically?
  - pionar 5y ago
    With fastmail, you can do that already. I do that. I have addresses like some_random_list_I_joined@mydomain.com
    - mkenyon 5y ago
      True! I've been doing wildcard.company.name@mydomain.com for a few years now with Fastmail. This makes it one step easier to generate that email address, as well as one-click blocking any alias that starts receiving spam.
  - jtdressel 5y ago
    Settings -> Domains -> Team Settings -> Masked email domain. Disclosure - I work at 1Password, though I had only tangential involvement in this effort
    - capableweb 5y ago
      I ended up at https://$mydomain.1password.com/integrations/directory https://$mydomain.1password.com/integrations/directory and I can only see Fastmail as an option. Clicking there it asks me to Connect with Fastmail rather than that I can provide my own domain. I already have a wildcard domain setup so I'd like to use it as @davzie mentioned.
blfr 5y ago
For "hide my email"-like feature you can use a domain with a catch-all address and either use somehash@yourdomain.tld or just servicename@yourdomain.tld for every login.
xoa 5y ago
At the cost of manual effort or setting up a script (for registrars/mail providers with decent APIs), you can just use normal email aliases at a domain you own. That's what I do, most sites I register at get some sort of "sitetld_account@mydomain.com" alias. That's pretty portable, lots and lots of email providers (including standard "included with registration" ones at registrars like gandi.net) support essentially unlimited aliases (not like even tens of thousands of them represent any significant resource usage, they all ultimately feed to a single email account with said account's limits on storage and sending). I own the domain so I can point it wherever, and I can just copy/paste the entire list of aliases around. Again that is more manual effort, though I don't consider it much effort given that I'm only signing up for a limited number of sites per year. And I suppose a little extra friction in one respect isn't even that bad a thing, makes me think a bit about whether I do actually want to sign up there. Ideally I'd like to see more efforts about making such things standardized across providers so that even regular people can get the benefits from near any registrar or email provider at all with whatever tooling they like. I guess that's probably either infeasible, or if it happens it'll be out of a rise of competing centralized masking providers raising the issue high enough in the general consciousness that demand drives it. If there are any existing open efforts around that I'd be delighted to know about them though!
- distances 5y ago
  If you own the domain, you can just point the MX records to Fastmail/whatever and register to all the different service with, say, service@mydomain.com or you@service.mydomain.com. No need to set up the addresses or aliases, you can just make them up as you go and deliver everything for mydomain to your inbox.
- piaste 5y ago
  If you already have a custom email domain (which is a good idea for the usual portability reasons) _and_ you pick an email provider that supports 'catch-all mailboxes', you can make it entirely frictionless. When I sign up for a new service, I register on the spot as e.g. amazon@mydomain.com, the mails they send are considered as a 'mistaken sender' and are sent to the catch-all mailbox (which is just my regular mailbox!)
- 5y ago
oss2020 5y ago
I use Apple's Hide My Email to sign up on websites where I previously would have used a Temp-Mail-Service such as 10MinuteMail. These are websites I want to use anonymously (Hackernews for example). It's more convenient and they give you the option to reactivate disabled aliases later (useful if you need password reset). I don't think they made it to replace your primary email, although you could use it that way.
MrWiffles 5y ago
I already was doing something similar and have been for what…5 years I think? Anyway, I have an account with Fastmail and my own domain configured with their “catch all addressing” feature, such that anything before the @ doesn’t matter, it ALL goes to me and only me (I’m the sole user of said domain). So I can do things like apple@mydomain, microsoft@mydomain, playstation@mydomain and so on to both keep each address separate from the others and so if there’s a breach or other shady shit going down, I know at a glance who’s responsible and this have some idea of my exposure risk. Ideally though I’d like to be using UUIDs before the @ so specific targeting by guessing something like “I’ll bet his Venmo account is venmo@“ won’t be possible, I just haven’t started doing that yet. Lately I’ve been combining this with cards via privacy.com to further limit my risk in the event of another data breach, and so far it’s working quite well, though I do have a long way to go to fully convert everything. As for longevity, Fastmail has been around since 1999 in some form or another, and even made themselves independent again after being acquired by another company through an employee buy-out. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastmail https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastmail
- anonred 5y ago
  In addition, wildcard forwarding isn’t a perfect substitute because email spambots love sending to addresses like webmaster@mydomain.com or john.doe@mydomain.com. The number of permutations they try is varied enough that an explicit allowlist is a must.
  - Semaphor 5y ago
    Not an issue for me, so far. And I have been using that domain for over 5 years now.
  - propogandist 5y ago
    you can block a specific alias or address from receiving mail in the mail rules, even if you have wildcard rules setup
  - boardwaalk 5y ago
    I do what the GP said and I haven’t any problem with “guessed” addresses like that. I do have a problem with obvious spam from a GMail account (which is setup to forward to my domain), so, go figure.
brongondwana 5y ago
Yeah, you either have to use one of our (Fastmail's) domains, or your own domain in which case it's linked to you by the domain registration. Not much choice there! For sure we recommend (and make it very easy) using your own domain. We want you to stay because we're providing you enough value to be worth staying, not due to lock-in.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  To be fair, fastmail has a significant number of fun domains to create adddresses with :)
twobitshifter 5y ago
For cell phones we’ve legislated that you can take your number with you. Email can be portable, but I think it’s gotta be easier to come up with a portable email address than expecting everyone to buy a domain and set up the DNS records? Does a registrar of email only domains exist today?
diegorbaquero 5y ago
You can own the domain and use catch-all for the domain. Been doing that for years, works perfectly and it's super cheap.
unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
I really like fastmail as a service and business. It's being subject to Australian data laws that gives me pause. That's significant competitive disadvantage for fastmail when marketing internationally to privacy-conscious users.[1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_Australia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_Austral...
- fragmede 5y ago
  Which countries do you recommend using a similar service from? (And what are those services called?) OpSec is hard and sometimes you really do need perfect and not "good enough", but, like PGP, there need to actually be viable alternatives available today that you can make a recommendation for, unless you're just concern trolling. (Five Eyes countries are right out, fwiw.)
  - unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
    Maybe! But here's the rub-- a US person has some legal protection against surveillance directly by the US, in the US, but (maybe?) none against Australia, for data processed in country or by Australians. Australia then (maybe?) has no safeguards against sharing their surveillance of US persons back to the US. It's a legal and bureaucratic not technical puzzle. I wouldn't believe any comfort statement on the point either. This sequence isn't a bug, it's a feature of the Five Eyes configuration.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

by davzie 5y ago

rntksi 5y ago

Exactly. For people who want to do this and care about retaining ownership, would be probably wise to run their own email servers and using different patterns of catch all addresses.

davidjfelix 5y ago

What do you do if you want to change email provider or your email provider decides to stop their email service. I think a lot of people have been spoiled by gmail's longevity. Unless you're using your own domain it's a wash anyways right? I think this is an acceptable trust. I personally prefer trusting something with more longevity than fastmail (apple hide my email).

davzie 5y ago
I have my own domain
beyer 5y ago
Buy a super cheap domain that you park all of these new email addresses at, like 7467j.com. Then, if you ever need to switch providers, take the entire domain with you.
jorams 5y ago
> I think a lot of people have been spoiled by gmail's longevity. > I personally prefer trusting something with more longevity than fastmail Fastmail launched 5 years before Gmail, in 1999. It's also a paid product with a sustainable business model. It's hard to get more longevity than that.
apple4ever 5y ago
> I think a lot of people have been spoiled by gmail's longevity. > I personally prefer trusting something with more longevity than fastmail (apple hide my email). Fastmail (launched 1999) is older than Gmail (launched 2004).

markild 5y ago

They actually seem to have thought about this. > New Masked Email addresses will be created @fastmail.com. You can change this in Settings → Domains I agree with you, and I'm looking forward to be trying this out.

codewithcheese 5y ago

Good point, i'll keep that in mind. It seems then, this feature is best for throwaway type accounts, where one could just create another new accoint if they want to migrate.

vmception 5y ago

HMM let's see Wait till 2038 so you can say "aha! I told you so!" or have peace of mind during the prime of my life for the next two decades

mkenyon 5y ago

Hi, one of the 1Password engineers who worked on this. Glad to hear that you like the idea! One of the really nice parts of building this out with Fastmail is that you can create Masked Emails for your own domain. So, if you ever decide that Fastmail isn’t right for you, then you still receive all of those emails when you set up a wildcard alias with your new email provider. Similarly, if you ever decide that 1Password isn’t right for you, that doesn’t stop you from receiving your emails. And the email addresses should still be part of your 1Password export.

davzie 5y ago
Hang on hot potatoes. I use 1Password. So are you saying I can generate a login that uses myaccount+alias@mydomain.com automatically?
- pionar 5y ago
  With fastmail, you can do that already. I do that. I have addresses like some_random_list_I_joined@mydomain.com
  - mkenyon 5y ago
    True! I've been doing wildcard.company.name@mydomain.com for a few years now with Fastmail. This makes it one step easier to generate that email address, as well as one-click blocking any alias that starts receiving spam.
- jtdressel 5y ago
  Settings -> Domains -> Team Settings -> Masked email domain. Disclosure - I work at 1Password, though I had only tangential involvement in this effort
  - capableweb 5y ago
    I ended up at https://$mydomain.1password.com/integrations/directory https://$mydomain.1password.com/integrations/directory and I can only see Fastmail as an option. Clicking there it asks me to Connect with Fastmail rather than that I can provide my own domain. I already have a wildcard domain setup so I'd like to use it as @davzie mentioned.

blfr 5y ago

For "hide my email"-like feature you can use a domain with a catch-all address and either use somehash@yourdomain.tld or just servicename@yourdomain.tld for every login.

xoa 5y ago

At the cost of manual effort or setting up a script (for registrars/mail providers with decent APIs), you can just use normal email aliases at a domain you own. That's what I do, most sites I register at get some sort of "sitetld_account@mydomain.com" alias. That's pretty portable, lots and lots of email providers (including standard "included with registration" ones at registrars like gandi.net) support essentially unlimited aliases (not like even tens of thousands of them represent any significant resource usage, they all ultimately feed to a single email account with said account's limits on storage and sending). I own the domain so I can point it wherever, and I can just copy/paste the entire list of aliases around. Again that is more manual effort, though I don't consider it much effort given that I'm only signing up for a limited number of sites per year. And I suppose a little extra friction in one respect isn't even that bad a thing, makes me think a bit about whether I do actually want to sign up there. Ideally I'd like to see more efforts about making such things standardized across providers so that even regular people can get the benefits from near any registrar or email provider at all with whatever tooling they like. I guess that's probably either infeasible, or if it happens it'll be out of a rise of competing centralized masking providers raising the issue high enough in the general consciousness that demand drives it. If there are any existing open efforts around that I'd be delighted to know about them though!

distances 5y ago
If you own the domain, you can just point the MX records to Fastmail/whatever and register to all the different service with, say, service@mydomain.com or you@service.mydomain.com. No need to set up the addresses or aliases, you can just make them up as you go and deliver everything for mydomain to your inbox.
piaste 5y ago
If you already have a custom email domain (which is a good idea for the usual portability reasons) _and_ you pick an email provider that supports 'catch-all mailboxes', you can make it entirely frictionless. When I sign up for a new service, I register on the spot as e.g. amazon@mydomain.com, the mails they send are considered as a 'mistaken sender' and are sent to the catch-all mailbox (which is just my regular mailbox!)
5y ago

oss2020 5y ago

I use Apple's Hide My Email to sign up on websites where I previously would have used a Temp-Mail-Service such as 10MinuteMail. These are websites I want to use anonymously (Hackernews for example). It's more convenient and they give you the option to reactivate disabled aliases later (useful if you need password reset). I don't think they made it to replace your primary email, although you could use it that way.

MrWiffles 5y ago

I already was doing something similar and have been for what…5 years I think? Anyway, I have an account with Fastmail and my own domain configured with their “catch all addressing” feature, such that anything before the @ doesn’t matter, it ALL goes to me and only me (I’m the sole user of said domain). So I can do things like apple@mydomain, microsoft@mydomain, playstation@mydomain and so on to both keep each address separate from the others and so if there’s a breach or other shady shit going down, I know at a glance who’s responsible and this have some idea of my exposure risk. Ideally though I’d like to be using UUIDs before the @ so specific targeting by guessing something like “I’ll bet his Venmo account is venmo@“ won’t be possible, I just haven’t started doing that yet. Lately I’ve been combining this with cards via privacy.com to further limit my risk in the event of another data breach, and so far it’s working quite well, though I do have a long way to go to fully convert everything. As for longevity, Fastmail has been around since 1999 in some form or another, and even made themselves independent again after being acquired by another company through an employee buy-out. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastmail https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastmail

anonred 5y ago
In addition, wildcard forwarding isn’t a perfect substitute because email spambots love sending to addresses like webmaster@mydomain.com or john.doe@mydomain.com. The number of permutations they try is varied enough that an explicit allowlist is a must.
- Semaphor 5y ago
  Not an issue for me, so far. And I have been using that domain for over 5 years now.
- propogandist 5y ago
  you can block a specific alias or address from receiving mail in the mail rules, even if you have wildcard rules setup
- boardwaalk 5y ago
  I do what the GP said and I haven’t any problem with “guessed” addresses like that. I do have a problem with obvious spam from a GMail account (which is setup to forward to my domain), so, go figure.

brongondwana 5y ago

Yeah, you either have to use one of our (Fastmail's) domains, or your own domain in which case it's linked to you by the domain registration. Not much choice there! For sure we recommend (and make it very easy) using your own domain. We want you to stay because we're providing you enough value to be worth staying, not due to lock-in.

Aeolun 5y ago
To be fair, fastmail has a significant number of fun domains to create adddresses with :)

twobitshifter 5y ago

For cell phones we’ve legislated that you can take your number with you. Email can be portable, but I think it’s gotta be easier to come up with a portable email address than expecting everyone to buy a domain and set up the DNS records? Does a registrar of email only domains exist today?

diegorbaquero 5y ago

You can own the domain and use catch-all for the domain. Been doing that for years, works perfectly and it's super cheap.

unyttigfjelltol 5y ago

I really like fastmail as a service and business. It's being subject to Australian data laws that gives me pause. That's significant competitive disadvantage for fastmail when marketing internationally to privacy-conscious users.[1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_Australia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_Austral...

fragmede 5y ago
Which countries do you recommend using a similar service from? (And what are those services called?) OpSec is hard and sometimes you really do need perfect and not "good enough", but, like PGP, there need to actually be viable alternatives available today that you can make a recommendation for, unless you're just concern trolling. (Five Eyes countries are right out, fwiw.)
- unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
  Maybe! But here's the rub-- a US person has some legal protection against surveillance directly by the US, in the US, but (maybe?) none against Australia, for data processed in country or by Australians. Australia then (maybe?) has no safeguards against sharing their surveillance of US persons back to the US. It's a legal and bureaucratic not technical puzzle. I wouldn't believe any comfort statement on the point either. This sequence isn't a bug, it's a feature of the Five Eyes configuration.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]