Are you keeping a copy of everyone's emails so you can mine them and sell the data? You'd make a fortune. That stuff is worth a lot.
Also, can you prove that's not happening?
I hide my email address by using Fastmail which supports wildcard users e.g. *@example.com so I can effortlessly assign a unique email address to anyone who asks for one.
FYI, after years of running this experiment I’ve found that vendors don’t tend to share their email address lists. One of the only exceptions that comes to mind is someone scraping my LinkedIn email for e-commerce marketing.
1 Register a new Gmail account
2 Redirect all incoming mail from that account to your already existing, personal account
3 Set a filter so all redirected mail gets a label and is archived automatically
4 Only look at that label when you need to
You're welcome, guys!
I'd love to see a simple browser addon that takes care of generating an email for new sites, because there are several similar services out there and I think on all of them you have to manually go generate an email.
Kind of a silly preference maybe because it's still easy to do manually, but it would make the paid service more attractive I think.
This reminds me of anonaddy.com. It's free for some basic features which I've used and I'd highly suggest it. You can use fake emails to avoid spam and turn them on, off, or eliminate them entirely.
Great for a particular watch store that LOVES to sell your data.
If I'm seeing this correctly, the free https://mailhide.io/ seems very similar
Keep in mind that this sort of email "cloaking" will cause false positives in fraud prevention systems. Especially if coupled with using a VPN or Tor.
Why would I use this over Firefox Relay? (free)
Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. This appears to be a commercial site that requires an account and payment up front.
Full disclosure, I did a Show HN some time ago(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23131035)
It worked, some of my friends were using it, but I never really improved on it although it was always in the back of my mind to do so at some point. So December 2020 seemed like a good time to do this.
I completely rebuilt it, but again, did not really expect that there will come much of it, it is really just for myself. It seemed that the problem I was solving was really just a problem that I had.
But then Apple announced their Hide My Email (albeit just on Apple devices) service at WWDC 21. I was like: "Hey, if Apple thinks there is something here, maybe other people would start thinking about it too."
I want to continue building on this; I've had some ideas (browser extensions, Mobile, business plan, etc. etc.) that I want to implement sooner rather than later. There is a small fee for using the service and I believe that there may now be some people, non-Apple or otherwise users, who would start to see the value of this and be willing to pay for this service.
I have not tried Apple's Hide My Email, but I think what makes Mailphantom different is that:
1. You can reply to an email; and 2. You can also add your own custom domain which only you will have access to