My burner email blocklist blocked me(benjamin.piouffle.com) |
My burner email blocklist blocked me(benjamin.piouffle.com) |
It’s definitely against the ToS for the ones I’ve used.
One could give the same argument for blocking Gmail. You can create Gmail accounts in bulk, you can’t resolve them to an identity, and you can’t compare them to determine if they’re the same person.
The difference is that you trust Gmail to enforce their ToS, do KYC and ban people abusing their service. Should you?
How do you do that with gmail addresses?
You can accept privacy enhancing measures but doing so hurts your ability to filter spam and other abuse.
I use these burner email services all the time because nobody on the internet can be trusted. Especially not the ones that try to lure you in and pop up an email registration box at the very last minute.
Turned out to be a friend that installed an app to watch soccer matches for free and in return he became a node of one of those services.
I personally use burner emails when I want an account somewhere but would prefer not linking all of my personal interests and necessities to the same few email addresses. It just seems smart.
It is frustrating to try to make it clear you are not attempting to bypass authenticity controls, especially when AI can so frustratingly create text posts that can seem realistically 'human'.
Maybe someone will come up with a better way to attempt to add privacy back without ripping it away in the name of attempting to add it.
Though, I mean, that's been the issue since the 1990s: security or privacy, hard to have both, and yet difficult to have either without the other.
notably, micro center _was_ an issue but had to raise exception.
There has never been a good argument for attempting to filter email addresses based on domain. Check address syntax on interactive forms purely to help users (did they fat finger something). Whatever well-formed address you've got, fire off emails and if they can receive them then it's a legit address. If you want to rate limit signups, then do so per-domain or per-mx, the same way you might limit incoming connections per-ip. That is the extent of guarantee that email provides you - trying to step over that demarc point is a control delusion.
Even outright throwaway domains like mailinator.com - if a user is giving you this type of address, it says more about your own requirement demanding an email address rather than the user themselves.
But I do sympathize with the stupidity of marketing email madness.
If you give a business a hide-my-email address, they can reach you at that address indefinitely.
The other was ferguson.com, so that I could order specialized furnace parts and larger diameter plumbing fittings than I could order from Home Depot. I don’t remember the details, but I think the Ferguson business application kept trying to autofill an address for me. It probably would have required a confirmation from the person who had been turned into the administrator of “fastmail” before I could have been added to their organization and been able to make purchases using their account.
It might not be a problem at larger suppliers like Grainger or Digikey, but it does suggest a vulnerability if you set up a corporate account at a small supplier using a fastmail address. Their backend could assume that anyone able to receive emails on “your” fastmail.com domain is at least authorized by your IT department to use email. If they assume your IT department has an email retention policy, then they might default to treating it like your problem if one of your employees makes an unauthorized purchase.
The plus address convention is just that, a convention, widely implemented by many email programs and servers, but not required by any standard, nor universally implemented.
If you’re trying to avoid email spam, there’s not much difference in giving someone myname+foo@gmail.com versus just myname@gmail.com.