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If your website will block me out because I used a privacy friendly email, I want nothing to do with your website.
by giancarlostoro 4mo ago
If your website will block me out because I used a privacy friendly email, I want nothing to do with your website.
- vinni2 4mo agoUnfortunately sometimes we are at some specific provider’s mercy for whatever reason like lack of appropriate alternatives.
- MoonWalk 4mo agoCOUGHredditCOUGH
- SV_BubbleTime 4mo agoIDK I’ve appreciated Reddit killing off good features like old version, putting a time-lock banner on mobile while logged out, trying to block VPNs when logged out, etc. I want that company devalued and bought by Verizon or AOL to die a Yahoo death. What is insane to me is how few people realize their stock has a higher P/E than nVidia… and it isn’t because of some bullshit minor AI data deals. It’s a youth-forward narrative machine, and everyone knows it.
- SXX 4mo agoRedReader still works. For now.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- pjerem 4mo agoFWIW, old.reddit.com is still there and working
- giantrobot 4mo agoShh, don't remind them.
- lenerdenator 4mo ago> I want that company devalued and bought by Verizon or AOL to die a Yahoo death. If the future's your oyster for what happens to Reddit, why stop there? If it's bought by somebody, that implies that Spez gets an amount of money that is greater than $0.00. Ideally, we avoid such a grim and unjust outcome. We want it to be made effectively worthless so he goes broke.
- al_borland 4mo agoI think Reddit falls under this category. > If your website will block me out because I used a privacy friendly email, I want nothing to do with your website.
- MoonWalk 4mo agoYep, toxic garbage staffed largely by same. Unfortunately, it has amassed quite a bit of potentially useful information.
- al_borland 4mo agoYou don’t need an account to access the information. It’s also all been sucked up my the LLMs, for better or worse.
- roboror 4mo agoIt's full circle now and a large portion of posts and comments are now LLM generated responses, whether by a bot or copy/pasted by a human.
- al_borland 4mo agoAll the more reason to stop visiting.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 4mo agoReddit doesn't even require an email address to make an account. You can just leave the email field blank.
- Ferret7446 4mo agoBut it does require a valid phone number which is worse. (I might be misremembering but they definitely require a valid something now, as I found out a while back creating a new batch of accounts to rotate)
- muse900 4mo agoYes but not always applicable unfortunately… e.g. the other day I was in Italy, I needed to park on the publicly available parking which was paid to the municipality. No other parking available anywhere near in 30 mins walking distance. (paid or free) I had to download a 3rd party app that asked me to register. This app isn’t by the Italian government, it’s affiliated though. So in that situation, I want nothing to do with your website or app, because I wouldn’t able to park.
- ivanjermakov 4mo agoHave exactly the same situation with parking in Italy. Having a private company operating all paid parking on an island is not very healthy.
- echelon 4mo agoHaving a handful of companies that can contact you has created a land of monopoly hyperscalers. It's so hard to build anything big and durable because they've created these steep gradients.
- KennyBlanken 4mo ago"They" didn't create them. They laid out the bait - free APIs to do all sorts of stuff, and lazy-ass programmers took the bait hook line and sinker without thinking through the consequences of everyone moving their sites into "the cloud." Or didn't care. Lot of people need to look in the mirror on this one - from programmers to execs.
- iamnothere 4mo agoI wouldn’t blame programmers. Free APIs and services were a great way to get bootstrapped, and nobody really understood why they existed: an extended period of low interest rates after the 2007/2008 crisis. The bait-and-switch wasn’t a conspiracy, it was a natural consequence of the unusual financial environment (which itself was a kick-the-can “solution” to cover up the damage caused by the GFC). Almost none of us were deeply familiar with how rates could affect the availability and pricing of services, and the implications for infrastructure. Many of us understand this now, but too late—it’s unlikely that we see rates that low again in our lifetimes.
- Bender 4mo agoI ran into this with an NVMO mobile provider. They did not like my personal email domains (assorted .net and .org) so I nagged their customer support until they manually added it. Their marketing team happily emails my personal domains once added. Some day this will probably cause a problem but my goal is to eventually get rid of my cell phone either way.
- reaperducer 4mo agoI ran into this with an NVMO mobile provider. As of about six months ago, AT&T's web site would not accept email addresses without a three-character TLD. I had to get a customer service person on the phone to manually change my address.
- toast0 4mo agoEven .us ??? Pretty sure I used my usual domain (enslaves.us) with them for wireless and california landline and u-verse.
- Bender 4mo agoJust a guess but .us does not permit whois privacy and perhaps that may be a factor but I am entirely guessing as all my domains have whois privacy enabled and they would not say why their system rejected my domains.
- badc0ffee 4mo agoDo you mean it was failing with a >3 character TLD?
- abirch 4mo agocould be < 3 .io .co .ai
- throw0101c 4mo ago> could be < 3 Or any ccTLD: .ca, .fr, .se, etc. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain
- joeyhage 4mo agoCompletely agree - have you encountered this before? The Gmail plus sign alias trick has been widely known for a long time and, to my knowledge, still works well today. It would be easy enough for websites to either block + in gmail addresses or instead grab the true email.
- SXX 4mo agoGmail also have "googlemail.com" alias and you can split your username with dots since they dont count like "user@gmail.com" and "u.s.e.r@gmail.com" are the same thing, Nothing of it solves privacy though.
- cloudfudge 4mo agoSome sites that block "+" in email addresses are actually just doing it out of incompetence. My credit union, for example, will actually accept an address with a "+" in it, but nothing will work because some broken bit of web 1.0 plumbing along the way converted it to a space (it shows up that way on my profile page). I wouldn't be surprised to see " " on my printed bank statements.
- janc_ 4mo agoOh yes, so many websites are incompetent like that. And of course after registering with foo+bar@example.com they will happily send invoices to bar@example.com
- autoexec 4mo agoSpammers know to just cut out the +whatever. It's a simple regex to keep those from even getting into a database.
- janc_ 4mo agoThe + has no special meaning in the standards, and thus removing it will just result in invalid addresses in many cases…
- 4mo ago
- HelloUsername 4mo agoIf your website needs an email address at all.. otherwise just use null@null.null, if it accepts and doesn't require a authentication code
- x0x0 4mo agoI used to run a hybrid mobile app + webapp company. Private emails regularly lead to awful customer service interactions because people cannot tell us the email they used to register. Fastmail at least is off the beaten path enough that people probably can understand. Apple, especially using sign in with Apple, is horrid. And not just people unable to tell us the email; they then create multiple accounts; try to sign in on web and use their actual email and then have 2 accounts and flip shit that their stuff is gone; etc. Oh, and regularly blame us for their confusion.
- trollbridge 4mo agoIt’s up to the app architect to make a way to make this work, and to stop using emails as anything other than a UUID type of token
- JoblessWonder 4mo agoSo I guess the solution is just to begin to allow accounts to always register multiple emails? Although I guess the issue of multiple accounts is still going to exist if the users don't know the initial (private) email that they signed up with though unless there is a different unique ID that everyone will be able to remember. I'm curious (and not trolling by asking) what a solution might be since email has been used as a unique account identifier for so long it is hard for my brain to think of another option at the moment.
- weakened_malloc 4mo agoJust a regular old username + password, kind of like HN allows?
- JoblessWonder 4mo agoI feel like email overtook usernames because it was more likely to be unique/memorable. I hate when websites ask me to remember a username (even though I'm using a password manager so I should really just calm down.)
- hamdingers 4mo ago[flagged]
- danudey 4mo ago> If you insist on giving me a fake email, your business is probably a liability I don't want anyway It's not a fake e-mail, it's a legitimate e-mail that you can send e-mail to and the user will receive, which has to be created by a paying iCloud user and not an anonymous rando off the internet. I'd be interested to know what downsides, if any, you see for a website to accept a private e-mail address like this. Do you have a legitimate complaint about these sorts of e-mails? Again, given that private relay isn't an 'anonymous e-mail service' (it's still tied to your iCloud account so spam, etc. shouldn't be any more of an issue) but merely an 'anonymous to the person you're giving the e-mail to' service. If your actual complaint is 'if you insist on giving me an e-mail that you can revoke unilaterally making me unable to contact you against your wishes, and which cannot be associated with other user data from other sources to build a profile of you, then you're not worth having as a customer' then that's a separate complaint - and one that means I want nothing to do with your website.
- hamdingers 4mo agoI'm curious what you think the difference is between "a paying iCloud user" and "an anonymous rando off the internet." How many Apple gift cards do you reckon get sent to fraudsters every day? Decades worth of iCloud+ surely. I'm running a business where I need to know who you are, because my platform can be used defraud other people. If you're trying to hide who you are from our very first interaction, that's a massive red flag. If you can trivially create hundreds of these emails, and fill in the rest of the required info with bought/stolen/generated PII, now I have a vector for mass fraud. Requiring you to use a recognized non-anonymized provider doesn't stop you, but it sure does slow you down. (It's not this simple of course, but all security works in layers) If these terms are not acceptable to you, then great! Don't use the website, there's no need to be salty because that's what you said you wanted. Isn't it? I don't mind either, because the number of legitimate users who are bothered by this restriction is infinitesimal compared to the number of fraudsters who would take advantage if it wasn't in place. It can be difficult to comprehend the scale of platform fraud unless you've worked in this area, many days fraudulent signups outnumber legitimate ones.
- fg137 4mo agoDidn't really have a choice with openrouter. I ended up using "Hide My Email" which gave me an icloud.com, which will likely no longer work according to this article.
- abirch 4mo agoI frequently buy a domain that I think is funny and use that to forward all my emails to my main email account. It's trivial to do from Cloudflare. Then after that 1 year is up, my domain goes away and so does all of the spam.
- pseudalopex 4mo agoAnd the not spam?
- abirch 4mo agoI use my real email for those or I sign up with a new email from my new burner domain.
- octoberfranklin 4mo agoI guess you don't use github. It won't let you sign up with @airmail.cc.
- coldtea 4mo agoIt's precisely when I want "nothing to do with your website" that I want to use a private friendly email if I'm nonetheless forced to interact with it...
- yalogin 4mo agoChatGPT doesn’t allow private relay and hasn’t allowed it since launch may be. So it’s not always possible to not use them, of course now there is no need to use ChatGPT and I have just stopped and moved on from it
- Rebelgecko 4mo agoIt's pretty common. Shopify blocks my email aliases. So does ikea
- paulddraper 4mo agoThat's probably WHY you're using a privacy friendly email. So...