Show HN: MailPhantom – Keeping your email address invisible

7 points by CryDeTaan 6 years ago | 3 comments

Been reading HN for some time now, but this would be my first post.

https://mailphantom.com/

Copy and past from the site: ######### The use of unique password are considered best practice, why are we not doing this with email addresses as well. MailPhantom aims to achieve this, with an added benefit, you'll see which service providers or mailing lists are sharing your email addresses. #########

This is basically a MVP, and may likely break somewhere. But if there is a lot of interest I may build/work on it more. I have used it in its current state for a few months now.

I welcome any feedback :)

lysium 6 years ago |

..How does it compare to other similar services, eg. mailinator, that provides one obfuscated email address?

.. How do I get the phantom address?

.. I hear people say, having multiple addresses is not worth the hassle as it enlarges your impact area for spam. I’m undecided but I’d like to hear your opinion on this.

CryDeTaan 6 years ago | |

How does it compare? > it's probably the same. This is not a novel idea. I wanted to learn something new and the solutions available had become bloated and I wanted something simple. I used something called maskme, which turned into something called Abine Blur in the past.

How do I get the phantom address? > Once you create an account and login, you will see an input where you add a description. Then a phantom address will be generated. https://imgur.com/a/yYHKoTF

I hear people say .... > I personally do not see this as a solution to spam.

I should probably add it to the TODO: https://mailphantom.com/#TODO

...But, lets say for instance I used a phantom address for some mailing list, and the company of this mailing list suffered a data breach, the email address would be obtain by the perpetrators, as an example. I don't want them to know what my actual email address is. If they know my actual email address, they can probably find out more about me.

This was my main reason for creating this.

I hope that helps

lysium 6 years ago | | |

Yes, thanks! Makes sense thinking about data breaches!