Show HN: Hidnchat - Send anonymous mails, receive replies | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Hidnchat - Send anonymous mails, receive replies

hidnchat.com

7 pointsshibendu26 comments

Is there a reason you called the email field "Email Id" instead of "Email address"? Also, people read pages from left to right. So a first-time visitor would see the "Check reply" section first, which is useless for all first-time visitors. Did you consider swapping the left and right columns?

Thanks for this reply. will soon change it.

My test went into spam as well. As others have said, though, interesting concept.

Is it only for one exchange (e.g. message sent and reply)? Also, the background was a bit distracting - but it's an interesting concept.

Yes. right now its for one pair of exchange. but will soon be extended to instant messaging. Thank for commenting.

This kind of thing is an incredibly bad idea.

There is not even a captcha to reduce abuse by spammers; just punch in an e-mail address, and click "Send", wee!

I sent myself an e-mail, viewed it raw, and promptly updated my mail server configuration to drop SMTP connections from that same sender/host.

And say someone uses this for mailing an anonymous threat (bomb, death, ...); why would you want to expose yourself to any such trouble.

will soon add captha. Thanks for this great advice.

Come on this is just an idea. spam and legal stuff later.

An idea it is, but not an original idea.

By the time you properly deal with the spam and legal stuff, you're on your way to cloning Hotmail. (Gmail, if you do a better job of it.)

What, those are not anonymous, you say? Yes they are, to a degree; anyone can make "fake" throwaway addresses with the free online mail services. The inconvenience of having to register (as opposed to just filling in a form and clicking Send) reduces abuse. These services also don't promise anonymity to anyone; do something illegal an they will reveal to the authorities your IP address and all access logs pertaining to it.

(Are these hidnchat guys willing to provide anonymity assurances greater than that?)

Normally, I would agree with you. But let me tell you how I found out about this service. It was not through HN. It was by getting two emails from hidnchat. Five minutes apart. Emails that I am quite confident are not legit. (If you think I'm wrong, then I can post my reasons for saying they are spam.) And since the mail headers look much more legit than what a typical spammer sends, my spam filter did not even catch it. I googled hidnchat and found this HN thread.

you can always unsubscribe from this service if you want. Also there are some multiple filters inbuilt into the service restricting you to send multiple mails to the same id.(hourly freq limit, daily freq limit etc.)

Interesting. The frequency limits are a very good idea, and I thank you for them.

Unsubscribing on the other hand, seems strange to me. What exactly does it mean to unsubscribe? Normally, "unsubscribe" means something like "I once gave you my email address because I wanted to receive your weekly newsletter, but I don't want it anymore, so stop sending it to me and remove my address from your records".

This seems different: "Somebody else gave you my email address so that you could email me on their behalf. I did not like their email, so please add my email address to your permanent records, so that if anybody ever tells you to email me again, you can block that request".

Imagine I got some spam from spammers@gmail.com, and at the bottom of the message was a link: "click here to unsubscribe from Gmail". If I click on that link, nobody with a Gmail account can reach me ever again. I hope we both agree that Gmail will never do this. Instead, they try to make sure that spammers can not send emails using Gmail.

Your service is pretty cool. I doubt I personally will ever it, but I like the idea a lot. Just add some spam control.

Oh, and one more thing: I sent myself a couple of test emails to get a sense of how your service works from both the sender and receiver perspective, and I have one piece of advice. The animation in the background should not loop forever. Ten or twenty times is more than enough, after that it gets distracting and annoying like a broken record. I could barely focus on my email, even though it was just basically "test <a href=/>test</a>". I was pleased to find out that it gets sent as plain text. Keep it that way. :)

You could have just unsubscribed. It was a much simple option.

I didn't fucking susbscribe - what am I unsubscribing from?

dude its simple. you received an email you don't like or you simply don't like the website. just click on the unsubscribe link down below. done.

I clicked "resport as spam".

Because it was.

so clever for opting a larger spam box

You're ignoring advice that will help keep your service running.

kazinator has a point. mail servers run on reputation. more ppl tag your email as spam, the mail server is going to get blocked out from reaching the inbox. unsubscribe link will not cut it.

soften your language my friend, we discussing an idea here.!

Unsubscribing from your system actually means "opting in" not "opting out". You have to store my e-mail address somewhere in a list so that you avoid sending to it.

I have been a follower of justleak.it. Would you run into the same issues as them?

No. we have our own mail server setup. we are not dependent on any third party services. so will never run into same issues. thanks for commenting.

I checked with gmail. Initial email is getting caught by spam filters. Nice site, good luck with this.

Your delivery address seems to indicate otherwise: mail comes from "<blah>.members.linode.com" which appears to be a cloud hosting service. That would seem to fit the definition of reliance on a third-party service (unless you own and operate linode.com).

A problem you may run into, if your system takes off and attracts many users, is abuses which result in you being black-listed by anti-spam databases like SORBS, SpamCop and Barracuda. I suspect it will be hard to get de-listed, based on the service that you operate.

Since black-listing is by raw IP address, you might make your hosting provider upset. Suppose linode.com dynamically reshuffles a pool of IP addresses among users. You could get some IP addresses black-listed, and then those IP addresses could be cycled to another user under members.linode.com, who then has a hard time sending mail because of you.

Just a thought.

I meant to say that I am not using any third party mail service api for sending mails. and yes you are right that I am hosting it in linode which is a cloud hosting service provider. But I have tried to put multiple filters inbuilt into this service to make sure that chances of arising above mentioned situation is low.

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