Do you know of any obscure useful websites?
SEO has essentially destroyed search engines, what are some very useful websites that you might not get given by Google?
You are viewing a single comment
SEO has essentially destroyed search engines, what are some very useful websites that you might not get given by Google?
https://port87.com
An email service that uses addresses like yourname-appname@port87.com to organize all your email into a folder for every app/service.
You can also make these addresses screen senders before their email goes through, for something like yourname-friends@port87.com.
You can mark them as public and they’ll be included in a list if someone emails the bare address (yourname@port87.com), so you can share your bare address all over the internet without getting spam.
(Full disclosure: I created and operate this service.)
So, you can do this with gmail already. What's your pitch on why someone should use Port87 instead of Gmail (besides the obvious Google is evil, etc.)?
A lot of services have stopped accepting + addresses as valid, or even stripping them before saving. So at least for a while, - addresses could be more useful
For nerds like us there's a cool article at https://people.cs.rutgers.edu/~watrous/plus-signs-in-email-addresses.html that covers this in detail.
You can also do it with Protonmail. myname@protonmail.com turns into myname+service@protonmail.com
I think outlook also accepts it.
Personally I just bought a domain and have a catch all that redirects everything to my email.
Was that hard to setup? Do you need to pay for server hosting or anything? That sounds pretty useful.
If all you want is to receive emails and forward them to another email (like Gmail), it's straightforward and free. If you want to send using your domain, you usually have to pay someone or spend a bunch of time learning how to set up a mail server on your own and how to get your mails out of people's spam box. Or you have to find an easy-to-use workaround (I know there is one for Gmail but it's a bit annoying to set up and use)
Here are the steps to setting up a catch-all using Cloudflare:
you can also just buy your own domain and set it up your gmail/whatever as the catchall, then use appname@mydomain.com
Last I saw, Google charges for this. More than this guy's service.
Also, it seems like his service is about automatically having username-category email addresses. Definitely not hard to replicate, but it circumvents the common blocking of plus-signs in email addresses you see nowadays. And while not hard, it's a bit less trivial to catch any old email with a dash in it and "magically" convert it to a category in the main inbox.
Google doesn't even factor into this. Go to your registrar of choice (namecheap, etc), buy a domain, and setup that domain to forward all emails to your email address.
So if you have abraxas@gmail.com and you just bought abraxas.me, in namecheap you can setup *@abraxas.me to go to your gmail account, and then sign up for sites using whatever@abraxas.me you want. There's no + or - involved, use any word you want. Signing up for lemmy.world? lemmyworld@abraxas.me will go right to your gmail (or whatever email you use)
Are you able to differentiate between emails as they come in? E.g., seeing an email was sent to lemmyworld@abraxas.me vs spammynewsletter@abracas.me?
indeed. It comes in as reallyshadywebsite@squidspinachfootball.xyz, so not only can you easily filter/label them, but you can immediately tell who had a security breach and/or sold your email.
Fair point. That is free. I guess it would boil down to what the mail categorization would look like in this guy's service. I will say I thought it was odd that it isn't just mail middleware with the guy struggling with having to build his IMAP in node.js.
It's not Google. I'm sold.
It is trivial to strip +xyz from all of the email addresses in a list.
Same for -xyz...
Buy a domain, set up a catch-all and use servicename@yourdomain. Boom.
If you read the website they have a workaround. Email sent to the bare address will Be denied and receive an automated response.
Where is the pricing?
I don’t have it on the promotional site right now, but here’s the breakdown:
There are upcoming features that I haven’t done the market research and cost analysis for yet to determine pricing, but these are the features that are still in development:
* The reason for charging $1/month to send email is so that spammers won’t use my service to send spam. A spammer is very unlikely to divulge their real payment information.
That sounds reasonable! Though personally, I definitely wouldn't use an e-mail service without IMAP support.
I feel you. Technically, the service is in a public beta test, only because I don’t have all the features complete yet.
I have the IMAP spec printed out in a binder at my desk. I have to write the server myself because of how Port87 works (I can’t just use an off-the-shelf server, like Dovecot). But I’m working hard to get IMAP support out soon! :)
PS: also, once I do write it, the IMAP server will be open source, just like the CardDAV server I’m working on.