This is a gen x complaint. Boomers would just ask their kids to set it up because they can't get it to work. Gen x realizes what is going on and that it is bullshit to need an account for a fucking lightbulb.
Somewhere between milennial and gen-z here. I can’t fucking stand making more accounts just because companies want to collect data. And neither can my gen-z younger siblings.
Used to it ≠ Not complaining about it
I meet a lot of overentitled Gen z. They remind me of the boomers that I also meet a lot of. Of course neither group can see it.
This might surprise you, but people are people no matter what generation they were born in.
Boomers is a name for a specific reason.
My late 50s mum happily signs up with her Facebook to everything. Meanwhile it's often the people in their late 20s to 30s who were introduced to computers during their youth before everything had super streamlined GUIs who know enough about software that they realize this is a privacy concern, what internet privacy means, and why it's important. People who are older or younger than that have to go out of their way to learn how and why to look behind the easy interfaces. That's my experience and explanation at least.
Remember when our parents were super nuts about keeping your info private online, not revealing too much info to strangers, and not signing up for stupid shit? My my, how the turntables.
My 70yo mom thinks I'm crazy paranoid because of my data privacy stances, while she's dealing with constant spam and account hacks. Guess who hasn't had damn near any info issues? :D
I was never allowed to be on Club penguin or the like. I also wasn't allowed to be on Facebook when it became popular around me, until I was 14. Mum, what happened?
Tbf you weren't missing much with Facebook. It was kinda cool in the early days when it replaced MySpace (like Reddit to Digg), but that went out the window pretty quick when all your extended family are calling your parents wondering why there are tagged pictures of you dancing around a fire half naked with a liquor bottle in your hand at 3am.
That's because for her the only risk is about getting kidnapped or killed, stuff that needs physical contact. Getting accounts hacked and phone scams are relatively new in her life span.
Not personally, but I remember the feeling
My mom never actually had any idea what the internet was. My dad bought the PC for me, so he probably would've doubled down if he knew what I was seeing and maybe would've even said it was good for me or not a big deal or something
It's weird to see my 11yr old brother now with the exact same access to YouTube which I'd ironically argue is a lot worse than old rotten.com. No idea if that's true but an argument could be made, for sure
Eh the internet was a lot simpler back then. Yeah there was fucked up shit around like there is today, but social networking imo is what really screwed the pooch. Back then, people just posted screwy shit for the sake of it and had varying degrees of influence, but now almost everything out there is intended to manipulate your behavior and worldview on a mainstream level. It's a shitton more dangerous than the weirdos in chatrooms asking a/s/l.
Then: Don't trust everything you read on the internet, and Wikipedia isn't legitimate because anyone can edit it
Now: Some loud moron on Youtube told me a thing and I believe it 100%.
Then: people on the internet were mostly technically adept and creating webpages because they enjoyed them.
Now: people on the internet are mostly ad tech attention economy scams and creating LLM spam blogs for PPC revenue.
It's just easier now for a conspiracy loon to find something that matches their preconceived biases.
It really sucks now for product comparisons. It used to be the you could look up productA vs productB and get an enthusiast going on about them, now it's purely AI generated crap.
My young family members are the worst, they just click "yes" to everything, regardless of any effort I've made to explain how things work.
Any barrier to convenience is too frustrating to them. They don't like even using full applications in their laptops, always say "wheres the app, this is too complex". 🤦🏼♂️
You're not wrong. Ffs.
I'd say you made the point better than any of us.
I know some network security folks, in their 40's, who've literally said "I don't want to be inconvenienced" when discussing why they tolerate this invasive shit.
Motherfucker, your job is securing networks. You know first hand the kind of shit going on out there.
I really wish more things just let me log in with Facebook, I don't want to fill out and make passwords for every pointless site. At least I can be somewhat confident that Facebook will follow security standards.
They dont care about your privacy, they do care about their security, which your account being compromised would hurt.
Might I recommend a reasonably secure browser with an in-built password generator and manager? I use Firefox. You make up a username and it generates a safe password and saves it so you don't have to remember it'd Just use a safe password for the browser itself that you can easily remember. I personally feel that's a decent compromise between secure and convenient.
I love the basic instructions for someone debating security policy nuance. It's like you don't get that he's way, way, way beyond "pick a password you can easily remember" despite the technical level of the discussion.
The person I'm replying to isn't the only one reading the comment. Chances are someone who's on the fence or hasn't interacted with the issue yet will benefit from it a little. That's what I like to think at least.
That's still shifting responsibility to the users, which is great for all these crappy products, but we should be demanding better.
Hahahahahaha Facebook follow security standards? Your fucking kidding, right?
Facebook, probably the first greatest scourge of privacy invading companies (worse than Google), follows secjrity standards?
The motherfuckers have a profile on me, and I've never once been on any Facebook website or service, let alone logged into any Facebook crap.
You’re probably aware, but welcome to third party tracking. You can’t truly get away from this trash unless you start doing some hardcore blocking at the network level (apps have tracking too).
Boomers would get the bulb set up by their kids, then something will happen, and you come over to find your parents sitting in a rave room because they need the light and can't fix it.
Nope. Mom's meross bulb got a little fucked in a power failure. She unscrewed its green self and put in a regular bulb.
Boomers WILL solve this. But they'll go low-tech even if it means unplugging the cord to turn it off.
what kind of lightbulbs are you guys buying? I've never had to set up an account for this kind of stuff
It's also a millennial complaint.
Sincerely, elder millennial who recently had to make separate accounts for a lightbulb and an air cooler and is sick of that bullshit.
Sadly these days, it’s a hold over from boomer managers making the decision that services require logins, which in turn require accounts and emails. So gen-x managers who were taught by boomers do the same thing. It’s systematic really.
Not wanting to be exploited by tech coorporations, technological literacy, is not a boomer thing.
Born too late to be blissfully unaware about technology
Born too early to be blissfully unaware about technology
Born in just the right time to have the cursed knowledge on how all of the cobbled together tech stack out there barely works
Every time I use an ATM I get the mental image of a 70 year old COBOL programmer desperately trying to patch holes in a sinking ship with a roll of duct tape.
Boomers were the generation that invented a lot of this tech. Most of them weren't literate, but I have known quite a few who were. Honestly same with Gen x, we grew up with it but, a lot of the good tech didn't come until later in our lives. There are tons of illiterate gen xers and millennials and gen y and z. Some people care and some people don't.
Laugh it up now. When we’re 50, our holoshere is going to require us to submit to genetic modifications to get our next soylent nutrition paste to dispense. God only knows how we connect to a person young enough in 2040 to know if it’s even possible to bypass. That kind of stuff was laughed at the last time we tried.
So they can sell it to spam companies obviously.
Er I mean... For better customer exploitation!
Shit, I'm really not good at this but they're going to send me to the
to exploit you. not being exploited at a molecular level is boomer shit.
now, are you an old, or are you gonna send me a copy of your social security number and complete sequenced genome?
now, are you an old, or are you gonna send me a copy of your social security number and complete sequenced genome?
Does email work or do you have a mailing address? I'll spit in a cup and send that to you if I need to but I'd rather not have to go to the post office.
do you have like a cloud storage with at least 1TB? if not, we're gonna have to sneakernet this.
I lack that much cloud storage, I'll see if I can track down a station wagon I can fill up with tapes.
I very much appreciate this. I mean, you are proving that you're not an old, but I won't be sure until you do it.
What I love was it is boomers that allows these changes so they gotta live with it. It's not like we all woke up and decided to start asking for emails for everything. It was sitting back and being cool with letting ads take over everything until they started needing more and more data so they weren't paying 30 million for beer ads to people who don't drink
Anything paying for ads shouldn't be worth it. We should be hostile to any advertising as stealing from us. They don't pay us to take our free time yet tell me anytime of your day where you are not experiencing some type of advertising.
I gotta go to work 1/3 my day. 1/3 I'm sleeping. 1/3 I get to myself except that 1/3 for me is taken up by lunches, kids sports, prepping for tomorrow's 1/3 work day. So of that 1/3 maybe I get a few hours to relax and enjoy something. So I sit down to the streaming service I cut cable for and and still get chunks of that time giving to company's Hawking me stuff I don't need wasting my free time. It gets worse when you think how much-needed of our day is being in front of some type of ads. Radio, TV, bus stops, magazines, going to kids hockey games, browsing the internet, watching movies. Even viral videos often are just paid commercials made to circumvent ad regulations and laws and to not pay websites for server time and big fixes.
It is insidious. We have been corralled into something we don't even know we're in. Like cows that don't realize are in a pasture. It all seems innocent like "I'll just ignore that thing I don't like" but deep down that thing is affecting every part of the society we are in and it's a root cause for most of what we complain about today.
For me it's that I don't want short form video anywhere near my view.
I went to a bar for a drink the other day. They had TVs all over the place which I normally don't care for but it looked like golf or something I could just ignore. After I ordered my drink I realized how wrong was.
It was actually some weird short form video TV channel. They croped the 16:9 screen into a 1:1 square with moving neon lines in the "empty space" where there was no video. Each video was about 5 seconds long and showed brainless content of people using a Rube Goldburg machine or doing card tricks and other such nonsense.
Once I realized what was happening it was too late as I got my drink and I felt compelled to finish it and pay. I tried to ignore the 5+ screens in my view but they were too big and eye-catching to really ignore. I kept catching myself looking at one of the screens after a minute or so. I felt like I was getting serotonin raped between ads.
Eventually I moved to sit by a window and stare at a tree. I'll never go back to a bar like that again.
This reads like a cyberpunk vignette; I enjoyed it. Thank you. I've started to take note when something decidedly cyberpunk happens in day-to-day life. I make a lot of notes.
I could increase the cyberpunk feeling by turning the TVs off with a flipper zero. I haven't felt the need to yet but it's always an option.
that's the direction we all need to be moving, if we're going to survive/avert the water wars.
Extrapolating a bit, here are the next steps
- screens in places where people might look at an ad will all have built in image recognition and eye-tracking.
- an algorithm/model will calculate the number of people within view and an acceptable level of eyes on screen per minute (or some other time increment tbd by an industry leading marketing psychologist) depending on the task they are doing.
- the algorithm/model can also calculate the local demographic
- the short format video content can be easily tweaked to improve engagement. If the racing crash clips aren't generating enough engagement, then it can try indoor cat clips.
- when the eye to screen levels are at or above minimum advertising levels, display an ad that would best match the target demographic that the advertiser set. The ad contents will also match the actions of the local population.
Certainly. Having worked in advertising for 25 years, that's probably just phase one. Those short videos will eventually be different for each person seeing the screen... and largely A.I. generated with few humans in the loop. In the flip side, people will probably be able to program their smart glasses to hide all that shit. It's an arms race over our attention already. See: Trudell's "mined mind." Or Bo Burnham, for that matter.
I went to a restaurant awhile ago and they told me to order using the little screen on the table. I said "no thanks" and left.
I'm a grumpy bastard and hate similar things but honestly, this doesn't sound so bad that I'd be particularly bothered by it or leave if I hadn't already ordered that beer. It's just wallpaper. If I was by myself I'd probably appreciate it on some level and if I'm with other people I'd likely stop noticing. Overall I think I'd probably prefer the bar not have them at all but it's really not that bad.
Loud sports or music that can fuck right off but otherwise, meh.
Normally I would agree with you. But they had these 50" screens in every direction except for down. I was literally staring at the floor in an attempt not to look at them. The swirling colorful "boarders" of the short format square video was eye catching enough. But with the video changing scenes every 5 seconds it was a similar effect to the Eisenstein editing style in Battleship Potemkin. The screens were screaming at you to stare at it.
It was also just total garbage content, the type of stuff I left reddit for. It was just a step above what Americans of the future watched in Idiocracy. It was truly a bizarre experience for me and also one of the most "boomer" moments I've had. Although out of everyone else in the bar, only the boomers were happily watching the short format video.
@The_Picard_Maneuver I once bought a TV sound bar that wanted me to download an app, make an account and give it detailed location information just to use it as a wired speaker. I returned it.
The only radio with Bluetooth that fits my older car requires a fucking Android app to sync Bluetooth... Fuck you pioneer!
Thankfully there's a ton of workarounds for that.
If there's a tape deck, you can do headphone jack to cassette tape. If you don't have a headphone jack on your phone you can get a little bluetooth reciever to headphone jack type thing.
There's also the route of using a small device to broadcast your own little AM station (same deal, gets audio from jack or bluetooth), then tune into it with your existing head unit.
Best way is to just rig up your own aux in, but that requires some doing.
Was it a Bose? I once bought Bose headphones and downloaded an app to pair it. When Bose recognized the headphones, it told me that I had used the wrong app to pair to those headphones.
@snow_bunny Nah, it was Sonos. Which, I guess the app ecosystem is their whole thing - but I didn't know that at the time. I just wanted a basic sound bar, and the reviews didn't really mention that all that extra fluff was mandatory.
In retrospect Sonos sucks for a lot of other reasons too, so I guess it was a bullet dodged.
That's my pet hate with everything.
A mouse doesn't need an account. Just let me install the shit and configure it you fucks.
Linux has built in drivers for most shit with no account necessary. Logitech (for example) has a third party app called Solaar that does everything Logitechs own crappy mouse/keyboard software does.
Getting away from the endless hassle of popups and drivers was my biggest motivation for switching to Linix way back in 2008.
You just connect them as everything Bluetooth in Linux and they work
Then I though it would be nice to see battery levels and stuff, and installed Linux solar and now I have dumb pop ups every once in a while.
Not only an account. The Razer Naga needs connection to the cloud so the macros work properly
They get processed locally. It's just that some macros are stored in the cloud (except the simple remapping s). So Razer synapse downloads them every time you turn on the computer.
I didn't make a razer account, therefore I had to remake every macro that wasn't a remapping.
I had the same question.
I tried so hard to ask razer support. But I couldn't get a reasonable answer out of them.
I would have returned that instantly upon discovery. I'll add Razer to my denylist of brands.
Bro we need to track you in every way possible so we can sell you even more shit, what’s the big deal?
Um, how about no Scott, okay? You got my money, if you wanna keep pestering for more money, I'm gonna return this original item and you aren't getting shit.
Ladies and gentlemen, Scotty don't.
The Olympics required four apps. Five if you count Visa Go, which just outright didn't work. All of them want you to make accounts and send you shit.
- Itinerary, account optional
- Tickets, account required even though the tickets were on the phone
- Transport, account required even though the tickets were in the
- Metro app, for which it told you to NOT DELETE THE DATA BECAUSE THE TICKETS ARE ONLY ON THE DEVICE
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I think it was requested on mine for the sunrise/sunset feature, but let me just put in a zip code after I declined location access
That and they can turn on when you get home after sunset. But they could do that with simple wifi connection or something. Unless your wifi is unstable I suppose.
For Android, the location permission was(is? not sure right now) basically required for anything that wanted WiFi or Bluetooth. As getting access to that, could in theory be used to locate you
Not that this was necessarily the case here, but an explanation
"required"
Required by Google, yes, but not actually required in any functional sense of the word other than the function of spying on you in another insidious way. It worked without invasive permissions for a long time and you absolutely won't convince me it wouldn't now if data collection weren't a priority.
(This isn't directed at you personally; apologies if it seems like it is.)
Yeah, but the problem is, that app developers abused the WiFi/BT permission to locate people, without them knowing about it. So at some point the permission was changed to reflect the theoretical real world potential of abuse
The downside is, that apps that don't actually require your location, will still need to ask for it
Yep technically it's called coarse location which in theory tells apps what neighborhood you're in, but can be exploited by marketing to know if you're in front of a shop stand. At least it won't drain your battery with GPS usage.
Lots of times devices need access to a thing called location just to detect certain kinds of Bluetooth. I don't know the specifics but it's a trend I've noticed. It might not be the fault of the light.
That's not even a boomer complaint. Zoomer here. I fucking hate how everything needs an account. I recently started cleaning up my mail box and this shit makes that nigh impossible. I especially hate it when it's just a shitty novelty site, if it needs an account, you bet your ass I ain't ever using it, piss off!
make an email for different things, such as one for subscriptions, one for things like this, one for professional use, etc. it's annoying but also helps 🤷🏻 i hate that we're at this point lol
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I just auto tag using the term "unsubscribe". It tags as "automated/spam" unless another filter such as banking, games, or in contacts triggers
My trick is that I use a domain name I've bought for my personal emails which is a catch-all address, and I sign up to websites with "(websitename)login@domain.url", so I'm assuming I'll know who the culprit is when the time comes and I can do something about it with relative ease. I don't know if that's actually smart or not but I'll see how I get on.
The real solution: Buy your own domain name, and make a catch-all email address. Every account gets a new address with that account’s company in the email. Target is target@[your domain].[tld]… The benefit is that you can see exactly who is selling your info to spammers, and easily burn those accounts. You start getting spam sent to that target address? Congrats, now you know Target has sold your info and you can set a rule to automatically send any target@ emails straight to your trash. Also, get a damned password manager so every account has a unique password.
Create a fake persona. This persona has a fake name, birthday, favorite food, first pet, etc… Memorize everything about this fake person, or even just make a note about them in your phone. And none of it is real. This fake person’s info is used for all of your signup info. So when shitty fucking companies get hacked and lose all of your info, the hackers never actually got any of your info. And if you ever see spam addressed to that fake persona, you know you can immediately discard it.
Between the catch-all email address and the fake persona, you’re basically immune to all of the typical ads, phishing, data breaches, etc…
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Bitwarden can do both automatic email creation and also store the identity(s) and fill them in for you.
So it doesn't need to be a ballache, can be one-click transparent.
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Commercial email providers will typically provide some number of aliases aimed at doing this for you.
Proton Mail's a popular provider in Switzerland, for example:
https://proton.me/mail/pricing
Their $3.99 /month service provides 10 aliases.
Their $9.99 /month service provides unlimited aliases.
And will work with a domain you own, so it's not like you're locked to them if you want to move to somewhere else down the line.
Abine (now IronVest) just sells the privacy aspect. They aren't an email provider -- that is, they don't give you an email box -- but provides this "masking" service to forward it to your regular email provider, if you already have email service.
Their $39/year service provides 50 aliases.
Their $99/year provides unlimited aliases.
They also do some other stuff like provide masked phone numbers that forward to your real number. They have provided masked, temporary credit card numbers with charge limits and a bogus name and address, so you don't even need to give your real name to someone you purchase something from online (though it looks like that's currently not available, says that they're bringing it back. I have used a masked credit card number from them in the past, so I know that at least some merchants will accept it, though I'd think that it'd tend to trip anti-fraud stuff at merchants, but...shrugs).
That being said, while I think that this sort of thing is a way to reduce the increasing degree of data harvesting -- you can't always choose whether-or-not to use certain services -- I think that if you have the option to choose a product or service that doesn't harvest data on you in the first place, that's really a better option.
Fyi, this can be done with Gmail as well. Just add a plus sign at the end of your email. I.e. your_email+target @ Gmail.com
Except most companies have wised up to this, and automatically scrub anything after the +. Because why wouldn’t they?
You can also do this with dots in various places in your email with gmail. Not as descriptive as the plus sign thing but still can be useful as you can create different filters based on the location of the dots.
What service do you use for the catch all emails? I use "simple login" currently with my own domain. But, I'd love to look at other options.
It depends on the mail server/provider. As a datapoint, I use Zoho Mail with 4 of my domains and they all have a catch-all that points to a single inbox.
Using Zoho, too. Unfortunately, the free version does not have IMAP or POP3. (Still does hate SMTP, though, which is fantastic for my self-hosted services)
https://www.migadu.com/ is a cheap and reliable one. Used YandexMail for years for free before, but they were shameless about reading the contents of emails and then had the audacity to remove the free tier and demand money for it.
I have one of the yearly deals on MXRoute. Unlimited domains. Been using them for almost 3 years.
That's a great idea! The fake information won't work for things that require real information, but it's otherwise great! Is there any retaliation you can take against companies that sell your information? I guess you could forward all of those emails to their sales address.
Or better yet try making your accounts for fake characters like Goku or ash catchem so with enough people doing the same thing we can get spammers to look at the data they bought and think hey wait a minute I've been scammed
Or just stop buying useless products that demand internet access when they dont need it, and stop making those accounts.
If you set it up as a catch-all email, then anything going to the domain will hit the same inbox. From there, you can set filtering rules to send emails to whichever box you want.
I was going to buy a really sweet drone. Then I watched the Getting Started video and there was an app and an account thing, and I realized the second they shut down the service, that drone would be a paperweight.
I'm back to building my own because I'd like to use it for more than a year or two.
Far from being a boomer, but 100% agree with it.
It is sad to think there are people who don't think this is ridiculous and are just accepting that.
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That's not a boomer thing. Boomer will be like "sure, I'll give you all the informations you want, even the name of my dog and my credit card number".
How else are they going to email you 20 times about changes to their privacy policy?
And then the inevitable email when they have to admit that all the data they gathered on you was stolen and that there is nothing you can do about it.
"We've updated our privacy policy and want to let you know we care about and value your privacy. You now agree that we can sneak into your bedroom at night and take videos of your genitals while you sleep, for sale on OnlyFans. If you disagree with this policy then we will brick your device."
I wish we could go back to the 90s as far as this shit is concerned.
Just take it out of the box and it works.
Send in a registration post card if you feel like bothering, but thats about it.
I am so sick of everything, especially shit that has no conceivable need to be online, not only demanding an internet connection, but demanding accounts and shit too.
Cause you know why they do it. They want to track you, harvest your data, and monetize it. Its not about selling you a good product, its about selling you a good listening device.
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honestly this shit is so ridiculous, a fucking toothbrush wanting wifi and an account so people can spy on you even more closely than they already do, hell when it comes to regular internet services i 80% of the time nope out when they ask for an account...how do people WANT TO buy this shit 😭?
Exactly - it's not about selling you a product, it's about you becoming a product they can then sell to third parties.
That's not really a boomer complaint, that's just a pro-privacy pro-internet security kind of complaint. Everyone of all ages hates having to have an account for everything and its mother
I wrote an email app called Port87 for this. Every account gets its own address, and everything to that address goes in its own label.
Just chiming in, if you’re using + aliases for privacy some people can just remove the plus and see your email
For example if you sign up with supercoolemail+spoof@beans.com the service can remove everything between the + and the @ and see your real email is supercoolemail@beans.com
It kinda isn't, however I found that some websites refuse to acknowledge that plusses are valid. I see this one uses dashes which might have a similar issue. Only thing I think is universally accepted are periods
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I found that some websites refuse to acknowledge that plusses are valid.
I'm not saying that they won't, but they're non-compliant then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Local-part
The format of an email address is local-part@domain, where the local-part may be up to 64 octets long and the domain may have a maximum of 255 octets.[5] The formal definitions are in RFC 5322 (sections 3.2.3 and 3.4.1) and RFC 5321—with a more readable form given in the informational RFC 3696 (written by J. Klensin, the author of RFC 5321) and the associated errata.
Local-part
The local-part of the email address may be unquoted or may be enclosed in quotation marks.
If unquoted, it may use any of these ASCII characters:
I don't want to try to escape the following for Markdown, so I'm just gonna dump it in a blockquote:
uppercase and lowercase Latin letters A to Z and a to z
digits 0 to 9
printable characters !#$%&'*+-/=?^_`{|}~
dot ., provided that it is not the first or last character and provided also that it does not appear consecutively (e.g., John..Doe@example.com is not allowed).[8]
If quoted, it may contain Space, Horizontal Tab (HT), any ASCII graphic except Backslash and Quote and a quoted-pair consisting of a Backslash followed by HT, Space or any ASCII graphic; it may also be split between lines anywhere that HT or Space appears. In contrast to unquoted local-parts, the addresses ".John.Doe"@example.com, "John.Doe."@example.com and "John..Doe"@example.com are allowed.
It is plus aliases*. It’s got additional features for them that other providers don’t have though. Like for each label (alias) you can toggle whether to get notifications, mark as unread, screen new senders, and show them in the “aggbox”. The aggbox is like an inbox, but since you don’t ever use your “bare address”, it just shows the labels you want. Your bare address autoresponds with a list of your public addresses.
* It’s technically subaddressing, using either a dash or a plus as a delimiter.
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From what I can tell, not much. They use dashes "-" instead of pluses "+".
But neither of these two options provide you with much privacy. Plus addresses, as others have pointed out, can be automatically stripped (just delete everything after the plus sign) and you get the real email behind it.
This service specifically I dont know the details, but it seems there is a unique prefix per user, but no "real email". So for instance if you use gmail you can have "sunnie@gmail.com" as your real email. You then use "sunnie+lemmy@gmail.com" for your lemmy account. If that email gets leaked out somehow, people can easily tell your real email address is "sunnie@gmail.com"
This service seems to do something very similar with the difference there is no base email, so there isnt a "sunnie@port87.com", there will only be "sunny-lemmy@port87.com". It is worth pointing out you might still be tracked because all your emails will be prefixed with "sunny". So although spammers wont be able to figure out your real email address they can just try something like "something-reddit@port87.com", and if multiple of your addresses leak it will be easy to link them all up to the same person.
This also creates A LOT of lock in. Because if the service shuts down you now have dozens of services for which you don't have means to access the emails anymore.
Thank you for the feedback. These are all really good points that I’d like to address.
The vendor lock in part I agree is very important. I’m working on adding support for custom domains, which would let you migrate to another provider if Port87 ends up not working for you.
Regarding the privacy part, a long term goal is to let you create private aliases for your labels that are randomized addresses on a different domain. I haven’t started working on that yet, and supporting enterprise features will take priority.
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Thats really nice. I appreciate your concerns with privacy and user experience!
Ill be sure to keep my eyes on the project
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If anyone is interested in this, check out addy.io and simplelogin, which provide this exact service and are seen as privacy friendly by the community. Remember that any email service like this has the potential to read all your email, so pick a service you trust.
Those are email forwarders. Port87 is an email service. They provide a similar feature, but it’s not the same. They still rely on you to organize your email with filters and labels in your downstream email service.
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Thanks for clarifying.
Yes, you do need to organize your stuff downstream if you so desire (I personally prefer not to). I will leave the comment though because they provide similar funcionality and might be helpful to someone.