AltMails - Stop giving out your email address online

@kesara good work : )

@saegis_batch4 Thanks 💙

@al_gepe Thanks for you feedback

@al_gepe It's true what you're talking about. We are trying to figure out how to avoid such cases.

@al_gepe @kesara I think so far most of the solutions other services have come up with are simply giving the user the ability to use custom domains, or frequently add new domains. However to truly hide one's identity for custom domains, it's likely that a service like njal.la would be needed, or perhaps you can expand towards that direction, just a thought.

@fnando Hey, I made this already https://www.validator.pizza ;)

@kyler_walden Thanks : )

@peter_gilbert thanks 💚

@mira_markle thanks 👍

@janerette Why does use of this service imply that the customer doesn't "give a crap about you"? Their email won't expire in 10 minutes—it's no more disposable than a Gmail account. You still have a unique identifier for your prospective customer. ...unless your problem is that their identity is less valuable for you to sell to potential advertisers when they have their privacy intact?

@abignell Do you really know the mailing list market, Alex? I don't know anyone "selling" their list to advertisers. In fact I'm quite sure the proportion of people conducting such a transaction in the days of CASL and GDPR are taking quite a risk into their own hands; they have to be absolutely transparent who THEY are when they use the email addresses they have to send out an email through their list. *people don't make money from selling emails.* They're the ones who end up spending on advertising - if someone signs up on to a list, the tracker or FB pixel that gets associated with the subscriber then means - unless the list owners know how to exclude it - that they'll be spending more money on display ads to recruit them into a "sales funnel." How does your burner email app address this? "Privacy" from an email address? Do you really think marketers start doxxing their subscribers? At best, they get a public social media account. All they get otherwise for details is what the subscriber reveals themselves, the location of the signup, and whatever amalgamated demographic data that Google Analytics surmises. Marketers create business by building up relationships with their readers with appropriate client-centric content and offers. Obscuring whatever data that they possibly can have about their readers means they publish blind, or publish to an imaginary customer avatar going on the fumes of assumptions. This can result in low quality, desperate content, and an endless cycle of more, more, more email. In addition, the time spent "cleaning" your list of known fake addresses - spam addresses that join for let's-have-fun-with-bots purposes, as well as dead emails from people who are no longer interested in your content, is actually the same amount of time spent creating content for your list members, only more discouraging. It's an obligatory waste of time, because if the quality of your recipients is low, the chances increase that you become scored as a spammer. If I saw a known burner account and MailChimp wasn't doing something about the domain, I have to hack my way with another plugin to reject the domain just to save myself the time and bother of having to clean it later. And finally there is the offputting the quid-pro-quo violation that I've seen on my own list about a half-dozen times: people signing up to grab the freebie, then immediately unsubscribe. (That's what people using your plugin are really setting out to do. That, or lurk for competitive intelligence. Both cases are non-goodwill in intent.) They don't even give people's content half a chance. Fair enough if one starts getting thrice-weekly or even daily emails that are hard sells for webinars and stuff one doesn't need. Using a burner means you'll still be logging into your burner email account to see the same email - the marketer has no idea if you're in their target market or whether their assumptions as to who their ideal clients are true or if they need to change their content strategy or use case. How does that help either one of you? Your product is addressing a fear that, at least on the non-dark-web (as I don't know anything about the dark web), is unfounded. Take some responsibility for increasing the quality of interactions between subscribers and email marketers by trying the other shoe on for size. People could stand having a tool that adds some discipline to how email is sent or received and read. Lord knows that's why CASL and GDPR came in, and it's needed. Also: Look up the Disapproval Matrix. Stop assuming that Critics are merely Haters and refrain from saying impertinent things to other people just because you don't like hearing what they had to say.