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Comment by TZubiri | Hacker News Reader

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TZubiri

I feel that that's not what email is for. Any communication method needs a return address, otherwise spam and abuse.

Email has two very distinct purposes, not 1, not 3.

1- federated pseudonymous identity protocol for internet(ip/http).

2- medium-length business time insensitive communication.

That's it.

This sounds like a free experimental product aimed at improving 1, but most service providers will either have to block it or face abuse from users of your domain.

What OP doesn't know yet probably is that they will not be the ones under dos/spam,rather they will be used to DoS, spam, simulate traffic, scam, etc...

Edit: the ToS outlaws spam, so it is possible they will cooperate with spam blacklist providers like spamhaus ( not sure how). Not sure how businesses will block the domain for acct creation, probably as a whole, Ive seen websites use a whitelist approach like gmail, or outlook.

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As long as service providers demand that you give them a "valid" email address to create an account, and as long as a significant proportion of those providers sell those addresses to other spammers, services like this will continually be created. It feels like a bit of an arms race.

> I feel that that's not what email is for. Any communication method needs a return address, otherwise spam and abuse.

I don't agree. Email addresses are sometimes used for ephemeral tasks, like buying concert tickets and items in online stores. You need an email address, so they can send you the tickets or the receipt, but then you don't need this address anymore.

Actually that is not true:

Concerts could be rescheduled or cancelled, and emails would be the only easy to contact customers for arrangements like refunds.

Similar for online shopping, and in addition, emails could be used for notifying product recalls or class action resolution.

While these cases are relatively rare, it illustrates it is hard to know when an email is "done" -- it could be useful after a purchase itself, or even long after a transaction has finished.

Also, email accounts are linked to account/identity not to transaction/purchase.

That's a good counterargument, I agree.

They seem to be using cloudflare to verify the users are human. That's something in the way of protection against automated spam.

This comment seems to have far too much trust in Cloudflare. A more accurate statement is probably something like "They use Cloudflare to slightly increase the cost to spammers while only rejecting a small number of individual users."

Also cloudflare is on the other side of the trenches as well, one of their main services is protecting websites against bad actors, which love using these tools as weapons.

The whole deal reminds me of hobby file host projects.

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