Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made an open-source anonymous email forwarding service

anonaddy.com

393 pointswillbrowning178 comments

Delivering mail services on the Internet is hard. Really hard. It's even harder to do correctly, and harder yet to prevent abuse. It is quite likely that you're going to end up in a game of whack-a-mole with abuse issues, and that's going to be your primary fight. The moment somebody abuses the system, your IP gets RBL'd or DNSBL'd and it's game over until it's fixed.

It's a cool product that has a lot of great legitimate uses, no doubt. I just hope you've baked in security at the core, and that you have a contingency plan for when your IP's get blacklisted. I fear for your sanity, but wish you the best!

Maybe he's using some cloud provider smtp/api to send mail in which case it's not much of a headache, just a few lines of code.

If a spammer is able to exploit his system he'll either run out of money and/or his hostname will be blocked. His challenge is to filter spam before those few lines of code.

The mail still has to come from a domain, which is one of the things that can show up on a blacklist.

I agree there may well be some challenges along the way but I'll do my best to prepare and prevent them. I'm always reading and learning more about the best measures to have in place for the server.

Thank you, hopefully I'll be able to stay sane!

It really doesn't take much at all to get blacklisted by Gmail or others. Companies like MailChimp have agreements in place with Google.

Unfortunately, mail delivery is far, far harder than it should be.

> Unfortunately, mail delivery is far, far harder than it should be.

However, we still receive spam e-mails to our inboxes.

According to a friend at a large ISP who engineers their anti-SPAM, 93% of all email they receive is SPAM and dropped before routing to your junk folder. So for each 1 you receive, several dozen were sent to the bit bucket.

I work for a company that sales anti-spam and this is absolutely true. It is an unending battle between spammers and the people building the filters. We are also constantly getting RBL'ed by groups including Google and Symantec who know who we are as we have had business agreements with them in the past.

Anecdotal but I never receive spam in Gmail, neither in my GSuite inbox nor Gmail.

Also anecdotal, but I get maybe 1 spam/month in my GMail inbox and the same amount in my fastmail inbox.

But how many important real mails have you lost because you didn't check the spam folder?

I use SendGrid and STILL have to ask major companies to fix their spam filters.

I trust that you've planned for the inevitable demands from criminal investigators. And perhaps seizures.

Example: https://cock.li/transparency/

Hey mate, it looks polished. I hope it gets traction. As my way to help you, I'll feature it on SaaSHub (https://www.saashub.com). If you get it verified, I can promote it on the tribune as well.

Good luck!

Could you please stop posting links to your company? You've been overdoing it, which is why your comments are getting downvoted and flagged.

OK. You are right. I understand that I might have been overdoing it. Bth, it's just the easiest way to contact the OP. I will try using different channels.

Or maybe do not contact him at all. I am not sure he'd appreciate the spam.

My mail server got blacklisted because of backscatter. That is where the sender sends spam to an address that doesn't exist on your server, but they also forge the "from" address, so the "this message could not be delivered" response, complete with the spam message, is sent "back" to the forged address (the spammers real target)

It took several months or a large payment to the people maintaining the blacklist for my server to get unblocked (it wasnt critical so I didnt pay). Seemed like extortion to me, but Google and others respected this particular blacklist.

Im not sure if this list still exists. It was on the blacklist checking websites at the time

Which blacklist was it and how much did they charge? I have always wondered which are more mafia-esque and which less, as they all act so innocent but are also so adamant about hiding their pricing.

I'm guessing backscatterer.org

The fix is to configure your MTA so that it doesn't send backscatter

It was backscatterer.org. I don't recall how simple the fix was, but I couldn't find much information on it at the time. The list appeared last in the blacklist tools so I figured it was a fairly new thing.

How can you know when you're about to send a bounce to a backscatter? I'd love to know this!

Sorry for the extremely late reply, but you can test using http://its-netzwerk.com/bscatter/

Alternatively attempt to send a message to a nonexistent address on your MTA using telnet which should throw an error after "RCPT TO" if the server is configured correctly Steps to test SMTP via telnet: https://my.esecuredata.com/index.php?/knowledgebase/article/...

Thank you for your reply. From my understanding, what you suggest is that a backscatter uses a return path email that does not exists?

My understanding was that a backscatter uses an email that is not his, in order to deliver a message without sending it directly (and making the bounce server act like a spammer).

Am I missing something?

Here is a good blog post [1] that explains backscatter and some ways to help prevent it.

[1] https://willem.com/blog/2019-09-10_fighting-backscatter-spam...

Thanks!

It was backscatterer.org. I seem to recall it was in the low hundreds, but it was quite a while ago now.

Looks nice.

I already made this: https://idbloc.co/

Good luck! It's unlikely you'll be able to keep it free for long due to the volume of spammers who will dive in once they discover it (speaking from experience).

"Anonymous email forwarding" is probably a bad way to describe this service, since it is likely to make many people think (as it made me think) "isn't this just a more efficient tool for sending spam?".

What this really is is an easy way of setting up email aliases. I think that should be the tag line.

Yeah but only geeks like us know about alias files

I didn't mean email alias files. The article explains what it means by "email aliases", and it's something different.

I meant the files that contain aliases which are used to configure MTAs, which thus create email aliases.

I actually use the database to store all the different aliases, then Postfix does a database lookup to see if they exist or not.

Still not what either I or the article is talking about. Yes, the person designing the service has to know about alias files (or whatever other back end is being used), but the user doesn't have to know or care. I'm talking about what the user sees.

quite. I was like "congratulations, you've made a spam, here's your blacklist"

Fair point, I'll try to emphasise the ease of alias creation instead going forward.

There's a much harder problem, granted, but the world needs a throwaway SMS service. Even Imgur needs a phone to sign up now :(

There are already some services like this, however it seems they have a smallish pool of phone numbers. Eventually everyone uses those to sign up, one time, somewhere (like Imgur) and that number is then useless for that site.

Is there a better way?

Not really that I know of apart from this site[1].

Or you could just get a pay as you go sim card and use a cheap phone to read messages (or use dual SIM if your phone supports it).

The main issue is the finite number of mobile numbers like you say.

[1] https://crypton.sh/

If you successfully manage to establish this, then you'll ruin the point of asking for SMS as an antispam measure, and eventually providers will move to something more intrusive.

I agree. Why does everything ask for phone numbers these days? What's next, a picture of my government ID?

So many companies are under the impression that a phone number is a unique, secure identifier for their users when in fact it's fairly easy for a knowledgeable attacker to hijack a phone number for calls and SMS.

Things are always fairly easy to the knowledgeable or experienced. It’s definitely a better practice then not asking. Lots of medium sized businesses can’t implement a cyborg biometric MFA solution. So they easily ask for a phone number. Most don’t make it mandatory, but I think generally it is the best current realistic solution.

Because disposable emails are trivially used by casual users and companies see phone number as harder to falsify (correctly, IMO). It's not impossible, obviously. We know SMS can be hijacked and spoofed, but the casual user won't be doing this, today.

If the point of requiring an ID is to prevent abuse, why do I care about what casual users are doing? What I care about is preventing signups from people who want to abuse the service, but presumably making things harder on casual users doesn't work toward that goal.

Still, it raises the bar.

But why phone? Why not something more specifically set up for the purpose, like Google authenticator or 2fa keys?

Not exactly throwaway per say, but I have a Google Voice VOIP number that I usually use when I'm signing up for services that require a phone number. Some services seem to be able to actually detect that it is a Google Voice number and will reject it, but it works the majority of the time, and I believe it has helped in keeping my main phone number from receiving as much spam. One plus about using Google Voice is that I can access it later if I need to use it to regain control of an account if I lose a password or whatever. That number predictably gets a fair amount of spam now, but another nice thing about Google Voice is that I can quickly use full text search on the entire call history, voicemail, and sent/received SMS messages.

Actually are there a lot of services like this in Russia [0][1] and their pools of numbers is nearly unlimited. It's also super cheap for local numbers, but obviously much more expensive for non-CIS countries. Obviously it's all shady stuff and used mostly for spam or all kind of social media automation.

[0] https://sms-activate.ru

[1] https://5sim.net

I run a site [1] which is doing this, only more permanent. I am not nearly brave or rich enough to run a 10minutemail but for phone numbers.

The only issue is a lot of sites treat all VoIP numbers as second-class citizens and disallow them silently. You will be allowed to add the numbers, but the services will silently refuse to call or text them, locking you out of your account.

Let me know if anyone is interested in trying it out. I am relaunching PhonePrivacy after this weekend so lots of upgrades to come. :)

[1]: https://phoneprivacy.co

Check out mysudo.com or burnerapp.com.

I’m the founder of Unlisted (https://www.unlistedapp.com) and this is exactly the problem I was aiming at when building our private number service.

Unfortunately today, however, many sites will detect VoIP numbers and refuse to send messages to them. There are two reasons: 1) The app detects that it is not a “real” number and blocks its entry, or 2) the number is accepted but no message is ever received. In the second case, the “call with a code” option does usually work though. The reason is that short code providers negotiate delivery outside of the normal framework that long code (“normal”) numbers use. Most apps like Unlisted are using Twilio as a provider and these agreements just aren’t in place.

I’ve been running Unlisted for over 6 years so have a bit of experience around this space. Am happy to answer any questions!

The worst offenders are the ones that block Google Voice; As I understand it, Google Fiber/Google Fi users can't use these apps since the number system goes through G Voice.

Hi, I have some questions regarding your privacy policy. It appears that Unlisted maintains records of IP addresses, calls, texts, contacts, voicemails and lots of other metadata.

I admire the goal of trying to provide a convenient way to increase privacy when using SMS, but this feels a bit invasive. That's a lot of collected data. Unlisted has access to the entire history of all my conversations and calls. Why not encrypt most of the at-rest data with the user's password and decrypt it client-side? This is common practice for the more privacy-leaning email providers, such as ProtonMail. Similar SMS services have taken this approach as well, like crypton.sh.

You are leaving a lot of the privacy enthusiasts on the table (myself included). It may seem like a small market, but communities like /r/privacytoolsio are very active and constantly on the lookout for privacy preserving products.

One feature I'd love to see is automatic grouping, combined with the functionality you offer already.

So for example if you have an email (using a custom domain): email@example.com

You obviously will receive emails as you give out your email. Say for example you get emails from the following senders:

- mail@google.com

- azure@microsoft.com

- notice@azure.com

- ok@imgur.com

- hello@startup.com

It would be nice if the dashboard had something like the following (almost like meta emails):

  Email Address                       Enable
  email-mailgooglecom@example.com     [x]
  email-azuremicrosoftcom@example.com [ ]
  email-noticeazurecom@example.com    [x]
  email-okimgurcom@example.com        [ ]
  email-hellostartupcom@example.com   [ ]

The reason for this is that rather than deal with the flaky "unsubscribe" you can just disable emails from that sender. With what you have now you could accomplish the same thing by creating aliases for each service, but the issue is that sometimes you receive emails from unexpected address (e.g. you give your email to Microsoft for billing but start receiving from their marketing department).

The above, combined with intelligent grouping of emails and a uBlock Origin like curated list of "bad" emails could truly eliminate all spam.

You should introduce a 4th tier of payment if you have the above functionality, by the way as it's not that trivial.

The end result of this would probably look something like:

Your email (custom domain): mail@example.com

  Group                                Enabled
  Microsoft                            [o]
   - Azure Emails                      [ ]
   - Microsoft Store                   [x]

  Google                               [x]
   - Google Cloud                      [x]

And you then would allow people to customize what emails constitute "Microsoft", "Azure Emails", etc.

That's a really good suggestion!

I agree it would be great to be able to create a per alias blacklist of senders who the alias will block emails from.

That way like you said you don't necessarily have to deactivate the entire alias if you receive a couple of emails from an unexpected source.

I'll definitely add this to my to do list, thank you.

No worries!

I believe that you will be better served being more like uBlock Origin and less like traditional email alias services.

Once you implement the above, you could add a rich "rules" API and then you could do all sorts of interesting things:

- Forward emails as "spam" to the anondaddy database

- Don't receive emails marked as "spam" by at least X users using the anondaddy database.

- Queue all mail by [GROUP] and combine and send at the 1st of the month, etc.

- Queue all mail with [SALE] in the title and combine and send at the 1st of the month with subject line [Sales Newsletter].

- Remove all pictures from email before sending

You can seriously make some money off this. Think beyond traditional email aliases and think more about why people use email aliases to begin with - control over what gets in their inbox.

I'd implement what I suggest myself, but you'll quickly see that it's not trivial. I got to the point you're at now pretty quickly (weekend MVP), but implementing these other features becomes more trivial than doing it over an email (though it's not impossible by any means).

Clone Outlook's SWEEP feature. It's a simple but powerful tool for creating email rules.

I've not heard of that as I normally use Mozilla Thunderbird. I'll look into it.

"The reason for this is that rather than deal with the flaky "unsubscribe" you can just disable emails from that sender."

It would be convenient to be able to email your own forwarding email with the unsub email in the subject and a PIN in the body to turn off an of the forwarding.

https://idbloc.co already supports this, but does not support custom email aliases made up on the fly, only randomly generated aliases.

From the landing page it does not support that functionality. Perhaps you should update it if you does support what I'm describing.

Awesome idea!

I've been doing this exact same thing since march this year with my own domain using MailGun (Free) and custom forwarding rules.

Really amazing to see someone turn it into a product that can easily be set-up by the general folk. (And for a nice price!). Loved your UUID-alias idea.

May I ask however, how do you expect to handle a blacklist of your domains? I've had trouble in the past signing up to some websites that block any sort of custom domains (really bad) in an effort to block throw-away email, what happens if your domain gets blacklisted/categorized as a throwaway email? (Also forwarding to Google and such ends up in "email limbo").

It's pretty much impossible to avoid the issue you described.

When I did an MVP of something similar to this, I encountered the same solution. The only solution really is the following:

- Use a reliable email, e.g. mymail@gmail.

- Encrypt forwarded email and send to mymail@gmail.com. So in this case, spammer@spam.com goes to mymail@gmail.com.

- You then would have another email, realmail@mail.com that would receive email from mymail@gmail.com (you would set up the forward in Google).

- However, mymail@gmail.com would actually send to mailproxy@proxy.com, which would decrypt and forward to realmail@mail.com

TLDR: You need to encrypt the emails, pass through a service that won't be blocked, forward and decrypt to target destination.

Nice! I also plan to add random word aliases soon e.g. yellow.biker57@anonaddy.me etc. just because some people think UUID aliases stick out a bit and look odd.

To be honest the only true solution to that problem is to use your own domain. I will be adding more generic domains to use in the future so hopefully will be able to evade the majority of these blacklists.

A friend of mine was considering building an anonymous forwarding service and ran into this same question. He also considered allowing custom domains, but if a custom domain is used, is it really anonymous? Couldn't services coordinate to realize that all email addresses under whatever.com are owned by the same person?

Yes that's true you could be linked if using a custom domain and someone can determine that nobody else is sharing that domain with you.

That's why I added the additional username feature to compartmentalise aliases and also the UUID aliases.

The UUID aliases all share the same domain e.g anonaddy.me so it is not possible to link ownership of these to any particular user.

Do you support sending to email address with raw IP address or .onion domain as the domain part? Eg:

  test@192.0.2.4
  test@[2001:0DB8::0004] # or possibly
  test@2001.0DB8..0004
  test@l5satjgud6gucryazcyvyvhuxhr74u6ygigiuyixe3a6ysis67ororad.onion

Not at the moment I'm afraid. It would be cool to set up an .onion address, I'll have to look into this.

Surely against MailGun TOS?

Please explain me why? They got a permanently free plan, and they allow you to do a catch-all rule (it's an option in the dropdown!) for receiving emails.

You can then catch all for your domain and redirect to your inbox (or blacklist as needed and such).

It's literally a feature they provide.

Anyone here remember anon.penet.fi or whatever it was called? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer

It was shut down in the end, but I think some of the legal challenges it faced might be better handled now.

I remember penet from the early Internet, although I never used it...

I agree that the OP / Service Provider - should read up on the legal issues surrounding a service like this... The Wikipedia link above is a good place to start. Ideally get a good lawyer and give that link to them...

If I had to make a choice, I would choose any other SaaS business, due to the historically contraversial nature of this type of service -- but that being said, I wish the OP good luck in his endeavor!

One other thing... before users sign up, perhaps you could tell them what will happen to their data if you are ever served by Law Enforcement with a Warrant to give them some user's data... If the answer is that you're going to give your users' data to Law Enforcement (the right answer, as far as I know), then your "private" / "privacy protecting" service -- really wasn't all that "private" / "privacy protecting", now was it?

It would be far more honest and up-front to tell prospective users that their data will not be private in/under all conditions/circumstances...

If you lose would-be users because of this, well, at least you showed honesty and integrity...

Thanks for your suggestions, I agree. In the privacy policy on the site I do state that "information will not be provided under any circumstances to any parties other than when compelled by law." Logs are rotated daily and deleted after 7 days.

I'll do some more research on the legal issues you've mentioned above too.

You might very well have created the best anonymous email service out there, which will be used and cherished by many thousands of happy users who use it legally, ethically, morally, etc.

But then one day, you might get that one user, that one user, that just abuses all of that, and causes nightmarish legal problems...

So forewarned is forearmed, as they say...

Also, I would point out that your service is the only way to truly manage rogue emailers that don't respect unsubscribe requests. In other words, it has a very legitimate/lawful purpose other than mere privacy.

While rogue emailers might not exist so much in the U.S. due to laws, the rest of the world is open game -- there is no way (short of using your service!) to manage them appropriately.

If you should ever go to Court, that should be at least one of your arguments... basically ask the court/jury, "OK, well if a recipients email address can't be anonymized, then how else does someone manage spammers from other countries that get their real email address and keep mailing them from different addresses (and with different content) such that it bypasses their spam filter?" Simple answer: They can't! No one can! Done!

Disposable email addresses (for the recipient, when subscribing to various things on the Internet) are the only solution.

See, that's your legitimate/lawful purpose...

Anyway, wishing you luck!

Congrats willbrowning, this looks lovely!

I've been using Mailinator for this sort of thing but I'm finding most of their domains have been increasingly blacklisted on many lead capture forms. And their paid plan that allows custom domains is not priced for this kind of use case.

(Frankly I'm worried your pricing is too low.)

Looks like it's time to go dust off one of those domains I've been sitting on... :)

Awesome, thanks!

I did start the service with just the Pro plan at $36 per year or $4 per month.

I received quite a lot of feedback from users asking for a cheaper plan that would allow 1 custom domain etc. which is why I eventually added the Lite plan.

As long as it makes enough to pay for itself I'll be happy as I made it to solve a problem for myself initially.

Me too, I think I need to take advantage of the custom domain feature, too :)

As a data point.. Mailinator lets you point ANY domain to it (for free). Email sent there will go into the public Mailinator system.

https://mailinator.blogspot.com/2008/01/your-own-private-mai...

From the FAQ:

> Will people see my real email if I reply to a forwarded one?

> No, your real email will not be shown, the email will look as if it has come from us instead. Just make sure not to include anything that might identify you when composing the reply, i.e. your full name.

How does that work? Do replies actually go through your servers, so that to the outside world they appear to be a proper mail from someone at AnonAddy, with SPF and DKIM all in order?

> How do you prevent spammers?

> The following is in place to help prevent spam: [list of six things it does to fight incoming spam]

Can someone with an AnonAddy address send an outgoing mail to someone who has not previously sent a mail to that AnonAddy address? If so, how will you try to prevent outgoing spam?

If outgoing mail is limited to mail to people who have sent you mail, can you initiate new mail to those people, or must each outgoing mail be in reply to a previous incoming mail?

Yes replies have to be routed through the server in order to remove any trace of the real email address sender. They are currently sent from the domain anonaddy.me.

I will be adding the ability to send replies so that they come from a user's own custom domain soon. This will involve having to add an SPF and DKIM record as well as the MX one.

At the moment it is not possible to initiate an email conversation using an alias although it is a feature I would like to add. I'll have to think about the best ways to prevent spam when adding this.

Yes you could use the same Reply-To: name and email to reply to the same person more than once if you have already received a forwarded email from them.

Nice job! This looks really well done.

I'm just getting started on something quite similar that will let you create disposable email addresses that forward mail to multiple recipients (for shared hotel/flight bookings, etc.). I see you have this feature to a lesser extent too, which is super cool.

Again, great work and good luck!

This looks great!

The only note would be pricing? Margins look too low for the tech product? You need to sustainably acquire and maintain a very large user base in order to make it work, the larger the base the more expensive maintenance will be, can potentially be dangerous. Let me know if I'm missing something.

Thanks, to be honest the expenses for the service are quite low. It is just the server and domain costs at the moment and of course my time.

You're right as it scales I may need to upgrade the server etc. but I think it will cover its expenses quite easily.

I went through a very similar process when building a product as an engineer (albeit B2B, but I think the same ideas apply here). When I first started, I wanted to undercut the market and charge what I felt was an extremely fair price (I was charging $8/month when competitors were charging $500/month). After scaling the product for a few years, it was eventually acquired, but one of the biggest regrets I've had is not charging more sooner, especially because the market could clearly support it.

Anyway, it's a bit unsolicited, but I could definitely see this being at least $4.99/month for Lite and $9.99/month for Pro. Congrats on the launch!

That's an interesting story and has some good points.

My main concern would be the fact that complete email solutions such as Tutanota, Posteo are very cheap at 1 euro a month or so.

So I'm not sure users who aren't as concerned about their privacy would think it was worth it for $4.99 per month+

I mean I could be completely wrong, just my thoughts from some of the feedback I've received so far.

That makes sense. You (and your customers) definitely know the market, so data-backed decisions are best. Could also be an A/B opportunity for the future. Good luck, the product looks great!

You aren't selling to techies. This is super easy to set up for almost any engineer (beyond a few fantastic features you added).

What you need to do is effectively twist the knife, make the reader feel the pain. "Don't you think $10 / mo is worth your sanity and a clean inbox?" essentially.

$10 is basically nothing to your modern professional. That's 1 - 2 coffee runs.

$1 or free (!!!) is way too cheap for an indie maker. Ignore the people who complain about price. There are always going to be people complaining, fire them. Those types will always find something to complain and twist your arm about.

Even $10 / mo for me, someone who has set this up myself, might be worth it just for additional features and being able to easily add more domains.

EDIT: Save free forever for the VC-backed companies who are burning other people's money in the hopes of hockey stick growth.

Free trials are fantastic, but free forever is a losing gambit in my opinion.

Well, general suggestion is to build pricing model that is relative to what users (businesses?) can afford and not relative to the cost.

Hi all, creator here. I've been working on AnonAddy (short for anonymous email address) for the past few months with the vision of creating a privacy friendly, transparent and easy to use email forwarding service.

The web app is built using Laravel, Vue.js and Tailwind CSS. Source code is available on GitHub[1], also mirrored on Gitlab[2]. The server is running Postfix, MariaDB, Nginx and Redis.

I know that there are already a number of other services available that do a similar thing, but I wanted to address a few issues with them, such as:

- Proprietary source code

- Adverts, analytics and trackers used on the sites

- No option to encrypt emails using a GPG/OpenPGP key

- No option for multiple recipients

- No API

AnonAddy protects your real email address from spam and allows you to identify who has sold your data by using a different unique email address for every website.

Here's a highlight of some of the features so far:

- Add your own GPG/OpenPGP key per recipient to encrypt all forwarded emails

- Custom domains

- Anonymous email replies

- UUID aliases that look like - 94960540-f914-42e0-9c50-6faa7a385384@anonaddy.me

- Add multiple recipients per alias

- Add additional usernames to compartmentalise your aliases

- Browser extension for Firefox and Chrome

- API

New features are added regularly, here are some potential future features:

- Tags/folders to help organise aliases

- Random word aliases e.g. yellow.biker54@anonaddy.me

- More brower extension functionality to manage existing aliases etc.

- Send from aliases e.g. initiate email conversation

- Send replies from custom domains as opposed to from an AnonAddy domain

One of the most frustrating challenges was sorting out CORS issues with the API whilst building the browser extension. I noticed that only Firefox seemed to be enforcing the policy and not Chrome (Brave) which caused some confusion. In the end I looked at this awesome package by Spatie - laravel-cors[3] and was able to solve the issue. An important thing to note is that the Cors middleware needs to be included in Laravel's global middleware stack for it to work.

I've learnt a lot about Postfix, DAME, DNSSEC etc. whilst building this but I'm always looking to improve things so I'd love to hear if you have any suggestions or feedback at all.

Thanks, Will

[1] https://github.com/anonaddy

[2] https://gitlab.com/anonaddy

[3] https://github.com/spatie/laravel-cors

I am not a huge fan of the name just because it stands out too much. Companies will see that in their db and think its a fake temporary email.

That's a fair point. I've already added an additional domain to the site and will add more that look "generic" soon too.

And custom domains already cover that. This looks really great and thorough, congratulations!

That did occur to me too, but if they demand an email address, there it is. You can also set it up with your own domain. It just takes some effort.

If you setup your own domain, then its a lot less anonymous :)

Nice, looks good. Can you comment on what logs you keep and how much of users communications you're privy to? Is everything e2e encrypted?

Cheers! Nginx access and error logs are kept which do record IP addresses. Default log settings are used for Postfix. The logs are rotated daily using logrotate and retained for 7 days, old log files are deleted.

Log files are only ever used to diagnose any errors/bugs.

Emails received are not e2e encrypted unless they have already been encrypted before arriving to the server.

Users can add their own PGP key to the site for each of their recipients and then the server will encrypt all forwarded emails with it.

Emails received are immediately piped through to the Laravel application by Postfix.

Have you included ARC support for forwarded email? This is pretty important for not getting blocked as spam when there's strict DMARC enforcement while also not getting your "friendly-from" blacklisted as a spammer.

At the moment received emails are piped to the application where they are then forwarded on as a new email from an AnonAddy domain. So they currently pass SPF and DKIM checks as my DMARC reports show.

Just a small tip - nobody outside of developers are going to know what UUID means. Maybe have a (?) hover explainer for that line on the landing page, with an example UUID-based email address, like you provided here.

That's a really good point, I often fall into the trap of assuming things like this, thanks.

Fantastic looking product, and the first year of service for the price of a beer is a great value. Just hooked it up with my own domain to track spam offenders and eventually migrate off gmail entirely.

Amazing, thank you! I use it myself alongside Tutanota, great combination!

I agree. I will say the price was at a point that I didn’t even have to think about it at 1$/month. I looked at the features, signed up promptly, and wired up a custom domain. The only thing I’m not excited about is rotating all my emails...

Thank you for putting this together. I love that you even have 2fa support.

I am surprised the people sending me physical junk mail haven’t lobbied the post office to provide all their customers with email boxes along with physical mail boxes and then stuff then with junk email along with important governmental notices only going through post office email boxes that have tiny storage quotas so you have to manually delete all the junk email, otherwise they will stop delivering the email that you actually care about and refreshing the junk email...

USPS' "informed delivery" service is headed in that direction. They email you attached advertisements along with the scanned mail pictures. Sometimes they just send you an advertisement when you're not even getting mail that day. It's atrocious

Got to compliment you for not having any external dependencies on the site. I really wish this were more commonplace.

Thanks a lot, on the landing page the only javascript included is on the blog and help pages for searching.

I have no idea how big the traffic spike is from this post but the server appears to be coping very well so far!

Do you have a plan for when the anonaddy.com domain is added to the blacklisted emails? For example, I know on some websites will just straight up reject addresses from Mailinator or Sharklasers. Is there a way to prevent this from happening to you as well?

As I mentioned in another comment the only true solution to that problem is to use your own domain name. I will also be adding more generic domains to use in the future for users to choose from.

Which will all be blacklisted as will the subnets within which your IPs sit and then your hosting provider or ISP will terminate service.

I know this is kind of a disparaging comment, but I would really like to hear their response to it. There have been numerous good services similar to them in the past and all have been placed on spam listings and blocked by most major services. Mixnet solutions have worked for over 30 years, they aren't particularly novel, what is novel is having an email service that allows reasonable privacy whilst not ending up on a spam listing.

I'll do my best to prevent spam being sent by the service and therefore avoid being placed on a blacklist in the first place. I know it may be difficult to avoid landing on any blacklists but the server does currently have some reasonably strict anti-spam measures in place and I'm constantly looking for ways to reduce any spam to a bare minimum.

All forwarding addresses (recipients) on the site must be verified in order to receive forwarded emails.

This looks interesting. For now I've been using the + suffix on my G Suite account: name+alias@example.com. The only downside to this is the fact that some websites don't have proper email validation and say that this email address is invalid.

Thanks, I wrote a blog post[1] recently about the benefits of using different aliases as opposed to plus-addresses and that was one of the issues I mentioned.

[1] https://anonaddy.com/blog/why-you-should-use-a-different-ema...

In addition to plus addressing (+stuff) you can insert periods anywhere on the LHS -- they are all you.

y.ou@gm yo.u@gm you@gm

See <https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150>.

Beautiful site. Can I ask how you made it?

I see some mention of a Tailwind template for the landing page, but how did you do the secondary pages and the admin interface? The blog?

Also, I see some mention of Vue. Did you do the admin interface differently than the main site?

Thanks a lot.

The other pages e.g. the blog, FAQ, posts etc. are just very simple layouts along with the nav bar and footer.

I'm using Jigsaw[1] which is a static site generator that allows you to use Laravel's blade templating engine, it's awesome.

The admin interface I made myself using a few Vue components, it is a reasonably simple layout to be honest.

Yes the account site where you login (everything at app.anonaddy.com) is completely separate from the landing page (anonaddy.com).

The first is a Laravel app, the second is a static site. They both have different repositories on GitHub. Feel free to browse through all the source code to get a better understanding of how it works. Just let me know if you have any more questions about it.

If you are looking for some help or inspiration with UI design I highly recommend the Refactoring UI book[2] by Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger.

[1] https://jigsaw.tighten.co/ [2] https://refactoringui.com/

This is great! Props for getting it polished and putting it out there. Also I was really pleased to open the GitHub repo and immediately recognise it as a Laravel app! :D so I’m looking forward even more to giving this a good go

Great stuff! Let me know if you have any questions.

Love the idea. However, what happens if the anonymous email forwarding service disappears (e.g. shuts down)? Does it mean users won't be able to access any online service they signed up for with an anonymous email address?

Nevermind, it's all on github and seems pretty well documented. Great work!

That won't help though, as emails will still go to the old domain.

Which is exactly why you use your own domain so that you have the control.

Thanks, this will always be a concern for these types of services. I will be keeping this service running indefinitely as I use it myself everyday along with friends and family. I originally created the service to solve my own problem.

The best way to mitigate against the risk of a service shutting down is to use your own domain name. That way, by simply changing your MX records to another email provider, you can continue to receive emails as normal.

The only way to prevent the issue you're describing is to use a custom domain.

Cool. I've had a similar idea kicking around in my head for a few years. How do you think about the compromise/disclosure risk of the data you keep that associates the subscriber account with aliases?

I encrypt as much sensitive information in the database e.g. recipient email addresses, descriptions etc.

Someone suggested the idea of creating hashed aliases, that are generated and hashed on the client side so that even I do not know what they are, then incoming emails are compared against this hash to determine where to forward emails.

The only thing is there would probably need to be an additional column on the hashed alias that is client side encrypted so that the user can still view the actual alias in their dashboard.

I was interested in hashed aliases as well, though I haven't had any terribly bright ideas about how to mesh platform-blindness with a revenue model that at least covers costs.

I've thought about tokens or credits that get consumed by checking/sending on the hash, but I imagine they'd be most-used for fire-and-forget stuff...

Spamgourmet been doing this for free for must be about 10 years I think https://www.spamgourmet.com/index.pl

Spamgourmet is amazing and has been really responsive when it comes to fixing the sorts of issues that come up when running an email service (e.g. blacklisted IPs, messages getting shunted to spam, etc). I've been using it since 2007 and it's kept more than 10,000 junk emails out of my inbox. I think it actually started almost 20 years ago.

Unfortunately the operator of the site is really sick and has talked about shutting the site down. Last I heard he'd found someone who seemed trustworthy to run the site when he isn't able to, so we'll see.

Great product and clear marketing website. I particularly like how focused the product is.

One thing that really stands out for me is the detail and effort you've put in to the help and privacy documents. Good job!

Thank you! The help centre is still a real work in progress, I have a load more help articles I need to add there.

I based the help centre on Mullvad's as I really love how simple and easy to navigate their website is!

Just got your email:

First "As a thank you for being an early beta tester..."

After that "If you have any more than 20 UUID aliases they will be deactivated"

Should I go with you anymore? Never treat your customers as beta testers. My data come with UUID are gone.

A picture is worth a thousand words

https://framapic.org/FLlGZzLBLQ9x/n4QO1aGPDt7V.png

I apologise if there has been some sort of misunderstanding. When I first launched the site I publicised the fact that it was in open beta whilst I was ironing out any obvious bugs and testing things out. I also had a banner message in the settings page stating this.

The message stated: "You are currently on a Free Pro Subscription as a thank you for being a beta tester. This free subscription will come to an end on 5th December 2019. You can still start a subscription now if you wish to support AnonAddy."

When the site's open beta came to an end I sent an email to all those who had signed up. As a thank you, this email let all users know that they would have an additional 3 months to continue using all the Pro features of the site for free.

I then sent 2 more emails shortly before this free subscription came to an end which is shown in your screenshot, giving users the choice to update their emails if they didn't wish to subscribe.

I have also offered all beta users a discount on both Lite and Pro plans.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Best, Will

Thanks for your reply and your service. Done.

I wish 1password integrated this so that I could have both random email addresses and random passwords for accounts all stored in one place

As a small SAAS owner I’m always very ambivalent about these things. I use throw away email addresses myself but there is nothing more annoying than seeing the same users sign up over and over again for trials.

I think 1/4 of my signups are anonymous accounts.

Only upside is that they are a dead giveaway for non converting users so there’s that.

I’ve been using Inbucket[1] for a few years as a self hosted temp mail service. I wouldn’t use it for permanent addresses but for testing and burner-like uses it works well.

[1] https://www.inbucket.org/

> Our system will then silently discard any further emails and you won't be forwarded anything else for that alias.

Be careful you don't run into legal issues here. I remember reading somewhere recently that silently dropping emails isn't allowed in some jurisdictions.

I'll have to do some further reading on this. Do you vaguely remember where you read this and why it was not allowed?

I feel like it was either here on HN, or on some article linked here, a few weeks/months ago. But I could be wrong... vague recollection at the moment. I don't think the reason was mentioned explicitly but to me it's pretty obvious that it would be a question of accountability.

Isn't that what spam filters do though? Or is there some technicality since they're technically not silently dropped but instead in a folder that you don't care about.

Yeah I think it's something like that. Actively rejecting on an SMTP level is fine too, since the sender is now aware. Just dropping it completely silently seemed to be the problem from what I recall.

Awesome! I wanted to have something like this for ever and planned to build it myself using a combination of gmail and Flow or something. Now LastPass , 1Password etc. need to integrate it so every time you generate a new password you can add a random email to the mix.

Yes a few other users have mentioned integration with password managers. I agree that would be extremely convenient, but this would obviously be up to the password manager to integrate it using the API.

Hey, been using this for a few weeks now. Been an absolute game-changer. So refreshing to have something open-source with privacy at the heart of it.

Super user friendly, great dashboard. Considering upgrading to the pro version - how long is your black friday offer available?

Thanks a lot! I've tried to be as transparent as possible along the way.

That would be great, it is valid until midnight this Friday PST. The coupon code is BLACKFRIDAY50

Welcome to HN, an account created 9 minutes ago.

Do you find it impossible that someone would read a thread without an account, find a topic they want to comment on, create an account and then post a comment?

Given style and contents of the comment - yes, I think that's very unlikely. The comment looks orchestrated.

"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You seem to be ultra paranoid about astroturfing.

This is pretty cool. Do you have any info on how you set up all the email infrastructure?

Thanks, I do have a small number of instructions for self hosting[1] they're still a work in progress and you'll need to know how to manage a server from the command line etc.

A few users have asked for me to create a Docker image that can easily be deployed, however I'm not familar with Docker so I'll have to learn how to do this first.

[1] https://github.com/anonaddy/anonaddy#self-hosting

Really polished, congratulations!

I agree with the anonaddy.com alias, and saw that you added another one for people on lite/pro plans.

I'm just unclear on how the bring-your-own-domain feature works.

Thank you very much.

When you create an account there is a page called domains, it provides instructions on how to add the correct MX record to your custom domain in order to allow the server to handle inbound emails.

Can I pay with monero (privacy friendly crypto currency).

Yes you can, although at the moment it is done manually as I haven't got round to implementing a proper crypto checkout flow!

There are instructions on the subscription page of your account.

nice, looks better than https://www.maskmail.net/

Each pricing tier lists "everything is free" in the top line. Do you mean, "no usage fees"?

It actually says "everything in free" meaning you get everything that is in the free plan plus the rest of the items in the list.

Perhaps I could make this more clear?

Perhaps "Everything in the Free plan"? I read it correctly, but it would be a pretty easy mistake to make.

How are the monthly limits on bandwidth calculated? Does it include images and attachments?

Each time a new email is received Postfix calculates its size in bytes. A column in the database is then simply incremented by that size when the email is forwarded or a reply is sent. At the start of each month your bandwidth is reset to 0.

Yes the size does include images and attachments.

I saw this in WIP. Looks good!

Is WIP https://wip.chat/ ? First I have heard of it. Are there other well-known communities doing this sort of thing?

Other than being OSS (w00t!) how does this differ from inboxalias?

I've never heard of inboxalias to be honest with you, so can't comment on that.

I want a service like this for credit card numbers.

I haven't used it myself but I think Privacy.com[1] does this.

[1] https://privacy.com/

Nice lot of features! :)

Thank you! I've got a long to do list with more to come.

Welcome to HN, an account created 17 minutes ago.

Thanks.

I just got to do my first real world use of an on-the-fly created anonaddy alias, with this website's account.

Haha, awesome!

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