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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

How many websites ever get passed the signup stage? I often will leave as soon as I'm tasked with creating an account and I'm not likely to come back.

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What is especially frustrating that many sites don’t allow Mailinator and other similar ‘one-time’ email systems to be used for registering an account. No way I am going to give you my email address up front before seeing the product.

Now the solution is of course to have a separate gmail account to register. Most sites still allow user+site@gmail.com address syntax so that I can sometimes see who are leaking where.

I would be curious to know if there is some credible A/B testing showing that for a relatively unknown new product blocking Mailinators and it’s kin somehow results as a better conversion?

There is a lot of temporary email services constantly popping into the Internet every month. Some of them are open-sourced so one can make own quick disposable email or forwarding service with cheap domain. "Resistance Is Futile" - no way any exclusion list can keep up to cover them.

every time i do a search i find services that require registration or even payment, and rarely ever anything that supports making up an email address on the spot the way mailinator does.

Given how well known user+site@gmail.com is wouldn't many sites simply strip the +... part before selling the email data?

Yes, this is part of standard data cleaning practices. You always remove whatever custom formats a provider allows to get the raw minimum email address (this is only for export, you still send official communication with a user to their original specified address).

There's a simple solution for that: always include a label as part of your address, and treat any mail that doesn't include one as spam.

Not every service even allows you to have a label in your email address. So what then?

Get them to fix their broken systems? The concept of a "label" exists only in the user agent. To everyone else the '+' character is just part of the account identifier, and a perfectly valid element of any e-mail address. The entire portion before the '@' sign is potentially significant. If someone hands you an address abc+def@example.com, there is no guarantee whatsoever that mail sent to abc@example.com will end up in the same individual's inbox—that could be a completely unrelated account.

On the e-mail provider's side, one way to work around such broken systems would be to let users generate random, opaque aliases which do not contain their primary e-mail username but route to the same account, with a predetermined label applied on receipt. These would look just like ordinary addresses and there would be no way for services to strip out the identifying elements.

Why would they care enough to do so?

If I get a marked as spam notification, I'll strip anything after the '+' (and really any special characters that distract from the raw email address) to make sure I never send an email to the address again.

There is one surprisingly good feature in yahoo mail that I wish google would provide: the ability (requirement, actually) to create a custom prefix for disposable email addresses. Just pick something completely unrelated to your real username. You can only create it once and it is forever your prefix, so don't mess up this step! Also, unlike gmail, you have to register a suffix when you want a new address in the form of prefix-suffix@yahoo.com. But this has the added benefit that you can delete any of the suffixes from the list, thereby stopping incoming messages from that address. You can have up to 500 active suffixes.

Finally, since the format uses a dash rather than +, I have never once had a disposable yahoo address rejected.

Not sure if that made any sense, but here's a link to the docs:

https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN28338.html

Tangent: I've been using a nispam@inboxalias.com for years, and it's only recently that I've encountered validation rejections. (Ironically, both times that happened, the form in question did allow +foo@gmail.com.)

Yup. It's frustrating.

One benefit of switching to mail on my own domain (powered by FastMail at the moment) is that instead of username@mydomain, I can also use antispamlabel@username.mydomain. Which is hopefully less common and too dangerous to automatically filter out in "data cleaning".

Man I so want to do that, but the pricing just seems outrageous at minimum $3/user/month, standard $5/user/month.

I've been wanting to hack together some scripts to use a serverless cloud provider like SES. Since I rarely check my email and almost never send any, it's crazy to pay such a high monthly fee.

I use mailgun to forward mails incoming on my domain to my usual web mail accounts. Free tier is more than enough, since i don't expect hundreds of mails per day.

Sending is a bit painful, though. Also sometimes mails fail to be forwarded and get stuck for a while... annoying when you're waiting for some kind of link / code.

Interesting, thanks for the tip!

If you get a lot of spam and it's all forwarded than some providers like Gmail will treat your email address as the source of the spam rather than the original sender.

Register a domain name with mail forwarding and use wildcard aliases to forward all mail on your domain to your real mailbox.

Your email is public, there's no gain in keeping it secret.

For further reading: https://www.troyhunt.com/im-sorry-but-your-email-address-is-...

Yes but that doesn't mean I want my inbox receiving emails a year later from a service I used for 10 minutes. I generally trial services (that don't contain any personal information) with a separate mailinator email. If I feel like this is something I'm going to be using more of, I'll do a proper registration with my actual name and email.

> I would be curious to know if there is some credible A/B testing showing that for a relatively unknown new product blocking Mailinators and it’s kin somehow results as a better conversion?

Well, there's always this: https://articles.uie.com/three_hund_million_button/ -- trigger warning: that page has annoying delayed-by-few-seconds modal popup that begs you to subscribe and, incidentally, hand out your email address; the irony must have been lost on their marketing folks.

Unless your business is REQUIRED[×] to have user details on file, putting any kind of friction on the user's action path is equal to voluntarily giving up sales. No, I don't want yet another account on your shitty website, no matter what it sells to me. If I end up coming back often enough, then I may, voluntarily, create an account. But if your site requires to create one up front, I'm incentivised to take my business somewhere else.

The worst offenders try to do email domain TLD matching against country of residence. I've seen it only twice, but it's such a user-hostile pattern that it has seared itself to my memory (while mercifully having relieved me of the memory of where I ran into it).

×: cough gambling, financial services, insurance, etc.

What is it that makes you actually sign up for a service?

Either I'm already certain or it's necessity/desperation.

If I'm actively looking for an certain type of application I will usually dedicate half a day to sign up for bunch of different apps all at once. It's pretty time consuming and I'm usually left disappointed. I will then spend the next half a day trying to remove myself from them all.

Then 6 months later one of those app companies send you an email update, by which point you've forgotten what they do, and yet they give you no hint of what the app is in said email.

Or they email you 3x a day for something you were interested in for no more than 10 minutes.

Or year later they got bought by some other company and your account is transitioned to the new company but those emails automatically got sent to spam and now all of a sudden you’re a customer of a new company and you had no idea. It’s happened to me more than once.

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