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Comment by deanclatworthy | Hacker News Reader

Regarding the issue of having your email address in the open. This could easily be solved by requiring registration and generating an encrypted URL for each email address that a user associated with their account. I know this highers the barrier for entry, but putting an email address in the open is foolish and making it too easy for the dumbest of email harvesters.

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This is what I was thinking as well. An account isn't even necessary, just have a two step process on Formspree.

1. Enter your e-mail address. Click next.

2. Copy the generated code, //api.formspree.com/Kn2JanlPkZ into your form as the action. Obviously this code and e-mail combination is then stored in the Formspree database.

These are for static websites. The idea of an "account" doesn't make sense.

Edit: Ah, you mean that formspree should allow site owners to create accounts. Carry on.

I'm thinking he means registering an account on the formspree site. So your form's `action` attribute doesn't require the inclusion of a plain e-mail address. Instead it gets some encrypted string, which is uniquely tied to your formspree account.

Exactly. And you could generate as many tokens as needed

He's referring to accounts for formspree, not the static sites.

Alternatively, formspree could publish a public key which you could use to encrypt your email address. To make it easy, they would just have a form on their website which does the encryption for you, giving you the opaque string to use in your form.

The UX for the user is the same if Formspree were to just generate a random token and store in their DB mapping it to an email, but this way Formspree doesn't need to store anything in their DB.

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