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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Nice idea, but I suspect if it gets any traction, many services will just block maskmail addresses. That's why mailinator uses 100s of different domains and makes it really hard to get a list of all of them.

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(co-creator of Maskmail here). That's in our plan for future updates, at the least allowing users to opt in to using many different domains. Many other features in the pipeline too, please feel free to send any ideas you have to support@maskmail.net, or tweet at us @mask_mail

Hope you find value in the service!

Will you add support for Bring-Your-Own-Domain? This HN commenter is definitely interested.

We hadn't considered it, but it's an interesting idea. We'd have to think through how to make it work, there'd be some interesting interplay with routing and mail servers.

Yea I would want this too. I think it makes more sense than Maskmail just adding a bunch of other domains that can get blocked too.

Many services block all mailinator domains by simply doing a live MX record lookup and noting the domain is pointed at mailinator (there are SaaS companies that offer this via an API). Another thing I've noticed is blocking email addresses on domains that do catch-all receiving. It's really frustrating.

I've used sneakemail for a very long time, but I've found that it's actually been resulting in worse things than simply having my registration blocked.

* Credit Karma banned my account (that I'd had for eight years)

* HP canceled my order for a laptop AFTER IT SHIPPED, recalling the package

I've had to switch to sneakemail only for things that I wouldn't provide my name to anyway.

I don't really know anything about MX records or email in general, but couldn't maskmail just always point to the forwarder domain (yahho, gmail, etc) instead of their own hostname?

No, the forwarder has to re-send the message with different envelope information.

Which also means users can't use them either. Sometimes I want to use a different mailinator domain, but loading the homepage usually only shows the known domains.

You could always point your own domain at it instead.

That's a good point. I'd let users pay for using their own domains.

That could be interesting, but then what do they need you for? I can already do that with gmail. I just set up a domain on google apps and then tell it to deliver any email address to my main email. In fact I do that already (see my profile).

Price, convenience. Google Apps is not free. For this particular use case you might be able to provide better user experience. Maybe integrate the custom domain registration and automatic DNS config to the UI.

The convenience factor is definitely there. A browser plugin that automatically creates an email address that you can later turn on/off with a couple clicks instead of going through the domain setup in gmail (or in my case fastmail)? I'd be interested in it.

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