3 ms·

> Email should have always been a bidirectional address, representing the relationship between the sender and receiver, and not a wide open receiver for anybody

by schoen 4y ago

> Email should have always been a bidirectional address, representing the relationship between the sender and receiver, and not a wide open receiver for anybody who happens to have your address. That does seem beneficial for the most part, but do you have ideas about how to handle the use cases like establishing new relationships (what, if anything, do you put on business cards?) or allowing the general public or a broad audience to contact you (what, if anything, do you put in advertisements, on your web site, on slides of a conference presentation, in an e-mail signature on mailing lists?).

al_borland 4y ago
The email service Hey (from the makers of Basecamp) has a feature where the first time someone emails you it goes into a screening bucket. You can then approve those senders who are allowed to email you. If you don't approve, you don't see the emails anymore. I initially signed up for the trail when the service launched. The first or second time I went to check the site/app it wasn't working. I was pretty much done with it at that point. I probably should have given it more of a chance and maybe they worked that out, but at $99/year for email my tolerance for issues is pretty low. They did (I suppose still do) have a lot of neat ideas around email though.
- Dyac 4y ago
  I effectively do this manually in Thunderbird. I have a saved search folder I treat as my "actual inbox" and I only add email addresses I want to receive mail from to the filter rule list.
hunter2_ 4y ago
I think it's simply a hybrid approach: you'd handle those unknown contacts with many:1 addresses (since there's no real alternative, as you imply), and you'd handle most known contacts with 1:1 addresses. A benefit is that you might let messages to some or all of those 1:1 addresses be sorted one way (e.g., they ping you) while messages to some or all of the many:1 addresses are sorted another way (e.g., you only check for them with a much longer interval). But then again, a diligently-maintained contact list can be leveraged to achieve same...
EGreg 4y ago
Actually, centralized databases like DNS are a symptom of a larger problem: society is so used to the idea that you can centralize power, votes, money etc. in one place. It is why we have celebrities and state governments, and privately owned social networks. It is also why smart contracts are still based around blockchains and they allow weird things like flash loans, because only one transactiom can run at a time for the whole world. So the problem is that bill.gates@gmail.com or bill@microsoft.com is accessible to anyone who can use the SMTP protocol. And a phone number is accessible to anyone who texts it. That’s crazy. Instead, we shouldn’t have DNS or centralized domains at all. DNS is just a glorified search engine that only really helps you find the root resource at a site, the /index.html thing. The vast majority of URLs on the Web aren’t going to be verbally shared anyway so you may as well store them as non-human-readable strings and let people save some local or hosted index. The titles and other metadata can be taken just like google does. In this case, sending an email would require the recipient to have given out a capability that was received by you. And if some capability was compromised, they’d just deactivate it. It’s like this dude’s email aliases, but far better
- thfuran 4y ago
  Better except that it completely and fundamentally breaks the internet as a side effect.
test6554 4y ago
Phone numbers too. Can you imagine if you could give out a different phone number to each company and you could put a call limit, allowed call times, as well as a date expiration on the phone number you gave out. It could all be linked to specific companies, where if you got a spam call, you could report it and the company you entrusted it with would get a fine, or possibly the call would simply not go through.
- efreak 4y ago
  Google voice allows you to set what times it will forward numbers, so that gives you a second 'group' of contacts you can assign call times to (give them your voice number, allow them through do not disturb if necessary). It rather surprises me that there's no app for granular ringtone settings to allow calls from certain contacts only at certain times or on certain days. - allow work calls and disallow family calls 9-5 weekdays only - allow family calls but not work calls to bypass do not disturb by ringing a second time - allow annoying acquaintance who wants tech support to only call on weekends, and to only ring on second call - if working two jobs, prevent each workplace from calling during other workplace's scheduled hours - add geofencing. don't allow community/neighbor calls while at work. Basically, just add rules for each contact/group for when your phone will ring. Android used to have multiple sound profiles available, and IIRC allowed you to change the volume and default ringer, these could be activated automatically on a schedule. Now we only have Do Not Disturb, and that's it.
vorpalhex 4y ago
hello@mycatchall.com Or if for a specific forum - hello_slashdot@mycatchall.com
ben0x539 4y ago
To take the tracking logic further, I think you'd do `businesscard-<date for that particular print run>@example.com`, `<name of conference>-<year>@example.com`, `<name of mailing list>@example.com` etc. Maybe come up with something snazzy yet still unique-ish for the presentation slides. In practice, I suspect the intention is mostly to use catch-all addresses for situations where the email address is a key in a database and like a login and stuff and not an entry in an individual's contacts list.

by schoen 4y ago

al_borland 4y ago

The email service Hey (from the makers of Basecamp) has a feature where the first time someone emails you it goes into a screening bucket. You can then approve those senders who are allowed to email you. If you don't approve, you don't see the emails anymore. I initially signed up for the trail when the service launched. The first or second time I went to check the site/app it wasn't working. I was pretty much done with it at that point. I probably should have given it more of a chance and maybe they worked that out, but at $99/year for email my tolerance for issues is pretty low. They did (I suppose still do) have a lot of neat ideas around email though.

Dyac 4y ago
I effectively do this manually in Thunderbird. I have a saved search folder I treat as my "actual inbox" and I only add email addresses I want to receive mail from to the filter rule list.

hunter2_ 4y ago

I think it's simply a hybrid approach: you'd handle those unknown contacts with many:1 addresses (since there's no real alternative, as you imply), and you'd handle most known contacts with 1:1 addresses. A benefit is that you might let messages to some or all of those 1:1 addresses be sorted one way (e.g., they ping you) while messages to some or all of the many:1 addresses are sorted another way (e.g., you only check for them with a much longer interval). But then again, a diligently-maintained contact list can be leveraged to achieve same...

EGreg 4y ago

Actually, centralized databases like DNS are a symptom of a larger problem: society is so used to the idea that you can centralize power, votes, money etc. in one place. It is why we have celebrities and state governments, and privately owned social networks. It is also why smart contracts are still based around blockchains and they allow weird things like flash loans, because only one transactiom can run at a time for the whole world. So the problem is that bill.gates@gmail.com or bill@microsoft.com is accessible to anyone who can use the SMTP protocol. And a phone number is accessible to anyone who texts it. That’s crazy. Instead, we shouldn’t have DNS or centralized domains at all. DNS is just a glorified search engine that only really helps you find the root resource at a site, the /index.html thing. The vast majority of URLs on the Web aren’t going to be verbally shared anyway so you may as well store them as non-human-readable strings and let people save some local or hosted index. The titles and other metadata can be taken just like google does. In this case, sending an email would require the recipient to have given out a capability that was received by you. And if some capability was compromised, they’d just deactivate it. It’s like this dude’s email aliases, but far better

thfuran 4y ago
Better except that it completely and fundamentally breaks the internet as a side effect.

test6554 4y ago

Phone numbers too. Can you imagine if you could give out a different phone number to each company and you could put a call limit, allowed call times, as well as a date expiration on the phone number you gave out. It could all be linked to specific companies, where if you got a spam call, you could report it and the company you entrusted it with would get a fine, or possibly the call would simply not go through.

efreak 4y ago
Google voice allows you to set what times it will forward numbers, so that gives you a second 'group' of contacts you can assign call times to (give them your voice number, allow them through do not disturb if necessary). It rather surprises me that there's no app for granular ringtone settings to allow calls from certain contacts only at certain times or on certain days. - allow work calls and disallow family calls 9-5 weekdays only - allow family calls but not work calls to bypass do not disturb by ringing a second time - allow annoying acquaintance who wants tech support to only call on weekends, and to only ring on second call - if working two jobs, prevent each workplace from calling during other workplace's scheduled hours - add geofencing. don't allow community/neighbor calls while at work. Basically, just add rules for each contact/group for when your phone will ring. Android used to have multiple sound profiles available, and IIRC allowed you to change the volume and default ringer, these could be activated automatically on a schedule. Now we only have Do Not Disturb, and that's it.

vorpalhex 4y ago

hello@mycatchall.com Or if for a specific forum - hello_slashdot@mycatchall.com

ben0x539 4y ago

To take the tracking logic further, I think you'd do `businesscard-<date for that particular print run>@example.com`, `<name of conference>-<year>@example.com`, `<name of mailing list>@example.com` etc. Maybe come up with something snazzy yet still unique-ish for the presentation slides. In practice, I suspect the intention is mostly to use catch-all addresses for situations where the email address is a key in a database and like a login and stuff and not an entry in an individual's contacts list.