Ask HN: Do you find this app or startup idea valuable? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you find this app or startup idea valuable?

The idea is - an inbox app like Gmail, where you can create multiple email ids like username.id1@zmail.com, username.ide2@zmail.com and so on. Each id will be single purpose only, meaning it is only capable to receive emails from one sender like ...@amazon.com. If someone else sends email to that id, it will simply be dropped. It will be a receive only app with no email sending feature. It will have a Whatsapp like UI and chat like bubbles where emails from the sender will be summarized. Further, financial insights can be provided based on the emails in future.

What do you think about it? Would you willing to use it for free or a small fee?

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Well, for a few pounds a year you can register a domain. I have mine at Fasthosts and they will forward all mail to that domain to a chosen address (in my case a Gmail). You can then use anything @your.host and it will come to you. Gmail can do the kind of filtering you plan to offer.

A problem with that is that some sites like GitHub run a check to see if you have a real inbox (no idea what that entails) and reject your made up address. You need to consider that.

Otherwise that is your tricky to set up alternative. Most non technical folks couldn't do all that.

This is partly possible with + symbol. For example, you have abc@somemail.com and you can give potential spammers something lime abc+amazon@somemail.com

True. However, recognising this feature of gmail, some sites now don't allow a '+' in the email id. And also, nobody can stop the service provider to just strip the '+amazon' part of the email.

Thats what a lot of people do with their own domains.

But how does that bind one email id to a single sender?

Postfix redirects the emails to my main account and sieve orders them into folders depending on the alias username. I only use one alias for one account. So when a thirdparty gets that alias i change the alias in database and the account and it gets mapped to my spamfilter.

Isn't this how email servers already work?

In regular email server, if it hosts an address like abc@zmail.com , then anyone can send email to abc@zmail.com. And as the owner of that address you have to go and block each of the email addresses that bother you individually.

As the owner of an email server can I not make whatever email address I want?

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