Comment by ezl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ezl | Hacker News Reader

I will pay for Craigslist style email obfuscation as a service.

Problem:

I have a marketplace type website where my users would like to be contacted but not have their emails be made public.

How it works:

I set a subdomain of my site, mail.mysite.com to an ip address you designate. On demand, i make an API call to your service (www.emailobfuscationasaservice.com) with

    {
    real_address:foo@bar.com,
    expiration_timestamp:2014-01-20T00:00:00.000Z,
    obfuscate_replies: true / false,
    callback_url: (optional)
    }

www.emailobfuscationasaservice.com responds with either:

(A) a success message and an anonymized, temporary email address like 239fag72wa@mail.mysite.com (the subdomain i gave you), or

(B) an error message like "no such user at that domain" or "domain doesn't exist" or something.

The email address lives until the expiration timestamp. If the obfuscated email receives a message, you forward it to the "real_address".

If "obfuscate_replies" was set to true at email creation time, then if the person responds, you play middleman for both parties and force all their emails to go through you (basically you create another obscured email for person who writes to the obscured email).

If "callback_url" was set, that means that I, the operator of www.mysite.com, want to be notified of activity at the obscured email address, so you POST activity to the specified url. That lets me do things like update activity feeds in my app for the user.

If you build this, I will pay for it. It seems to me that many other startups could use something like this as well.

edit: formatting and owning up that this is me re-posting this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024718 in hopes that somebody will build this so I can pay for it.

Like a temporary e-mail service that contacts your regular e-mail service? There is countless versions of those like 10minutemail.com or something.

This could be done by running an automated script that makes an e-mail address temporarily adds it to your site. Then another script that check's said e-mail address.

This is a problem with e-mail spam, but I think hiding your real e-mail from spambots is the main concern in this if I am understanding you right.

He wants more than that. He wants it craigslist style, on demand from an API, and forwarding to your real email. 10minutemail.com does none of those things, and doesn't cover the other features he requested either.

AH, nevermind. I think his idea is a bit more elaborate after seeing updates to the post. You are right. It is a decent idea though and it protects businesses from spam. I like the idea.

As far as I know, 10minutemail does not do this. I personally use 33mail for this sort of forwarding.

However these are designed around obscuring MY email address, and using 10minutemail.com or 33mail.com's domains.

I need to create emails for my customers that will forward to THEIR email addresses when another party contacts them, preferably using my own domain.

While I guess I technically could figure out a way to use something like 10minutemail and register accounts for all of the users of my site, it would probably require:

1. the users of my site to tell 10minutemail that it's ok to forward to them (during 10minutemail's registration process)

2. i would have to post 10minutemail.com domains as the contact info for the customers of my site, which is an undesirable UI.

If I'm missing something and I can in fact use existing services to do what I want, please fill me in, because I want this, I just don't want to build it (yet, anyways).

One issue I see arising is your e-mails that are sent back obfuscated, would have trust issues, and be marked as spam in most cases because that is how it is handled. That's the biggest issue you will have with this idea.

yes, fair enough. even without the 2 way obfuscation, I'd still pay for this.

craigslist implements something like this now. If you email a CL anonymized email address and email back and forth, you never get the counterparty's email address.

Basically craigslist just acts as a relay, so all communication actually happens between $PERSON_A and Craigslist and separately between $PERSON_B and Craigslist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com