Show HN: Throwaway – open-source disposable email checker and API | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Throwaway – open-source disposable email checker and API

github.com

14 pointsweddpros14 comments

Website looks clean, but the second disposable email address I tried showed up as "legitimate" while clearly being a disposable one. The service I tried with been online and active since at least 2018, so clearly not the problem of being too new.

You might want to find new sourcing of domains flagged as disposable :)

Hi thank you! Can you share what domain it is? I'll add it to a regression test and make sure I find a more recent source of domains! I had found one, but it contained microsoft.com and google.com so...

That'd kind of defeat the purpose of that service, wouldn't it? :)

I tried again, this time just searching HN for services that offers disposable emails, I think the 3rd or fourth I tried worked, so seemingly you aren't finding them via HN comments at least, might want to go through those too.

I'm now using https://github.com/disposable/disposable which should be a pretty decent option

> Why 0.1% false positives are acceptable: Disposable email signups are low-quality. A false positive means one legitimate user retries with a different address — a minor inconvenience. False negatives (letting disposables through) are the real problem, and bloom filters guarantee zero false negatives.

this typical insane techbro considerations, would rather inconvenience REAL potential customers, than a TINY inconvenience for themselves for someone thats almost certainly not gonna be a customer.

it is disgusting that anyone thinks like this, let alone spends the effort to implement it.

Let me explain: I'm operating a free cyber security service and 22% of users use a disposable emails. 22% of emails bouncing is not a TINY inconvenience. Hackers using my service incognito isn't a TINY inconvenience. If you're hiding your identity, I can't offer a safer internet to everyone.

I respect your disgust, and I feel the same towards your entitlement and presumptions.

I'll fix the percentage, it's 0.01%.

i am not entitled, however, you are still punishing real users to catch those that are not your users.

even more, your false sense of security here makes it WAY worse, we just saw how someone was able to find a service you didnt catch in almost no time. in addition to that, are you willing to block @gmail, @protonmail or those? which you can sign up with in NO time. essentially your disposable email filter doesnt help you AT ALL stop someone that has even the tiniest of motivation to sign up without giving their real email address.

Just be aware that you are choosing to do actions that are roughly equivalent to what dvd manufacturers do, with unskippable intros telling you to not be a pirate, while the pirates just get contents without this.

Doesn't even flag the first result for "temp mail" on Google

Well it's blocking the second one. You can't win them all.

I've added support for an adhoc list in addition to the list I'm getting from the disposables... so now it's recognised as a throwaway address.

Disgusting.

You've developed a tool to stop people from protecting themselves online. You should not be proud of it.

As I've said in another comment, I'm offering a free cyber security assessment tool online and 22% of people use a disposable address, meaning they remain anonymous yet they have me scan the internet for vulnerabilities. They're not protecting themselves from me, they're protecting themselves from the consequences of their actions.

You could have asked me what reasonable use cases exist.

There are extremely valid use cases for anonymity in B2C, most likely none in B2B.

Killing people on death row is legal in some states. One should still not be proud of making weapons. I maintain my original statment: you should not be proud of what you did. Downvote me all you like.

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