Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

One feature I'd love to see is automatic grouping, combined with the functionality you offer already.

So for example if you have an email (using a custom domain): email@example.com

You obviously will receive emails as you give out your email. Say for example you get emails from the following senders:

- mail@google.com

- azure@microsoft.com

- notice@azure.com

- ok@imgur.com

- hello@startup.com

It would be nice if the dashboard had something like the following (almost like meta emails):

  Email Address                       Enable
  email-mailgooglecom@example.com     [x]
  email-azuremicrosoftcom@example.com [ ]
  email-noticeazurecom@example.com    [x]
  email-okimgurcom@example.com        [ ]
  email-hellostartupcom@example.com   [ ]
The reason for this is that rather than deal with the flaky "unsubscribe" you can just disable emails from that sender. With what you have now you could accomplish the same thing by creating aliases for each service, but the issue is that sometimes you receive emails from unexpected address (e.g. you give your email to Microsoft for billing but start receiving from their marketing department).

The above, combined with intelligent grouping of emails and a uBlock Origin like curated list of "bad" emails could truly eliminate all spam.

You should introduce a 4th tier of payment if you have the above functionality, by the way as it's not that trivial.

The end result of this would probably look something like:

Your email (custom domain): mail@example.com

  Group                                Enabled
  Microsoft                            [o]
   - Azure Emails                      [ ]
   - Microsoft Store                   [x]

  Google                               [x]
   - Google Cloud                      [x]
And you then would allow people to customize what emails constitute "Microsoft", "Azure Emails", etc.



"The reason for this is that rather than deal with the flaky "unsubscribe" you can just disable emails from that sender."

It would be convenient to be able to email your own forwarding email with the unsub email in the subject and a PIN in the body to turn off an of the forwarding.


That's a really good suggestion!

I agree it would be great to be able to create a per alias blacklist of senders who the alias will block emails from.

That way like you said you don't necessarily have to deactivate the entire alias if you receive a couple of emails from an unexpected source.

I'll definitely add this to my to do list, thank you.


No worries!

I believe that you will be better served being more like uBlock Origin and less like traditional email alias services.

Once you implement the above, you could add a rich "rules" API and then you could do all sorts of interesting things:

- Forward emails as "spam" to the anondaddy database

- Don't receive emails marked as "spam" by at least X users using the anondaddy database.

- Queue all mail by [GROUP] and combine and send at the 1st of the month, etc.

- Queue all mail with [SALE] in the title and combine and send at the 1st of the month with subject line [Sales Newsletter].

- Remove all pictures from email before sending

You can seriously make some money off this. Think beyond traditional email aliases and think more about why people use email aliases to begin with - control over what gets in their inbox.

I'd implement what I suggest myself, but you'll quickly see that it's not trivial. I got to the point you're at now pretty quickly (weekend MVP), but implementing these other features becomes more trivial than doing it over an email (though it's not impossible by any means).


Clone Outlook's SWEEP feature. It's a simple but powerful tool for creating email rules.


I've not heard of that as I normally use Mozilla Thunderbird. I'll look into it.


https://idbloc.co already supports this, but does not support custom email aliases made up on the fly, only randomly generated aliases.


From the landing page it does not support that functionality. Perhaps you should update it if you does support what I'm describing.




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: