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Comment by lukevp | Hacker News Reader

I could’ve written this. My goal of 2024 is to remove all emails, alerts, notifications that don’t truly deserve my attention. And as I’ve started doing that, it feels like a never-ending hole.

What can we do about this? With e-mail, we can create temp inboxes and throw them away.

What about phone? Is there an IPV6 for phone where we could have billions of throwaway numbers and use them as we see fit? Introduce a new country code that has 32 digit phone numbers and if you don’t accept those numbers, you don’t get our business?

At this point all of my personal, business emails, and phone numbers have been bought and sold a million times, and there’s no recourse or penalty for people spamming them. What can we do about this? It’s oppressive.

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I’m having some positive experiences with Firefox Relay and Apple’s Hide My Email services. They are pretty similar but Relay works in any browsers that can use its extensions and HME works on iOS devices which use Safari. Relay also supports phone masking where they give you a single proxy phone number you can use for signing up for online forms.

Negatives so far:

1. Relay costs money for continued use

2. Not every site supports a Relay email with the default domain or phone number (it is a VOIP number I think)

3. I am not sure what will happen to my HME emails if I ever stop using iOS / iCloud

4. My single Relay support request was not responded to in a useful way

5. I still have a ton of accounts that predate my usage of these services

6. Sometimes when a service is really important or I am dealing with a human being I will just give my direct info to try to make sure things work smoothly.

I bet a Relay or HME compromise would be an interesting thing from a hacker’s perspective. But I still like the services.

I love when I have a generated email alias like “wonky.hatmaster069420@icloud.com” to make an appointment and the barber shop cashier is like “is your email address… ummm ‘wonky… harasser?’”

Even when you stop using iOS, you can still access the emails on the web interface. Should give you plenty of time to update the accounts you want.

The problem with phone is bad VoIP verification. For a while, I tried to call back unknown numbers who had called me. A lot of them were just not assigned. But a less reputable telco company can still allow their customers to use it as the "from" field for a VoIP call. Otherwise, the solution would be very straightforward: Allow regular people to sue a given phone number for spam/fraud and then the government (who has that info anyway) will disclose the phone number's owner to the judge. But that only works if the "from" phone number cannot be as easily falsified.

Why not just A number that is Not in the contacts will simply not ring your phone?

This works for me, but many people who run their own business expect calls from unknown numbers since they are potential customers.

I’ve also had it backfire when my doctors office calls and they don’t use the same number that I called them from.

The whole issue with spoofing is that the caller has no relation to the number they claim to be calling from, you can't "sue the number" because it's probably done unrelated 3rd party's number. The fcc bad been slow to act but stir/shaken should prevent this going forward.

> Is there an IPV6 for phone where we could have billions of throwaway numbers and use them as we see fit? Introduce a new country code that has 32 digit phone numbers and if you don’t accept those numbers, you don’t get our business?

This is my question too. I've always thought something like you describe would be a pretty good, fairly practical approach to phone/text spammers just guessing numbers in valid area codes. Yet I never hear the FCC and other 'powers that be' talking about this kind of approach. They only seem to focus on ways of stopping spam at the source or network edge, which seems like a potentially intractable problem. Conversely, approaches which make it impractical to reach targets seem like they would be nearly impossible to circumvent.

Yes, there are downsides in eventually displacing the 10-digit perma-number space but those could be mitigated by keeping the old number space but allowing users to quarantine inbound 10-digit comms that aren't already in their 10-digit address book (or don't have caller ID).

voip supports email addresses, the system is already in place, we just need broader adoption

> I’ve written this. My goal of 2024 is to remove all emails, alerts, notifications that don’t truly deserve my attention.

Me too. Even "We updated our T&Cs" is too many.

I went on an account deleting spree:

* accounts where guest checkouts are an option: eBay, Mouser, bandcamp, booking.com

* accounts of once-used online stores

* old email accounts

* Amazon, Airtasker, Uber, frequent flyer, ...

I'm down to ~100 passwords in my password manager which is still too many, but good enough.

Sometimes I wonder if T&C updates are just made to remind you you're in their system. I don't read them (except for work stuff, of course) so I probably wouldn't ever notice if anything actually changed.

I think the comprehensive solution is to insert an AI-powered agent 'shim' between us and the current user-interaction layer. Apart from the implementation, which is nontrivial, there are two problems:

1) This will be massively resisted by the current oligopoly of Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook. Eg, you could run a simulated Android phone, but licences prevent you from installing the google play store etc on it. And it's even worse with Apple.

2) how to prevent it from degenerating into another monopoly/oligopoly.

For phones it's even easier than email as you have to accept a call. Simply don't pick up unknown numbers/unexpected calls.

The incoming call alone is more of a disruption than an email, honestly.

Agreed. I finally just went with the nuclear option and blocked all calls that aren't already in my phone book. This has resulted in some missed connections and other inconvenience but I've decided the benefits are worth the downsides. More and more people I know are doing the same.

Some companies, like my dentist's office, are finally adapting and providing ways for their employees to text if there's no answer. I wish the FCC/phone cos would add some kind of 'return code' to callers who are blocked by this setting which indicates "This number only accepts calls from numbers in its phone book."

I permanently mute my iPhone and then I added "Emergency Bypass On" ringtones on the contacts that I care about so I hear when they call no-matter-what.

Otherwise, I call back when I am available.

I've found that searching my email for "black friday" throws up lots of candidates for unsubscribing.

As an aside, a few months back I dropped a new email address on the net as a mailto: link and it hasn't received a single spam email yet. I think maybe scraping for emails is dead.

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