As usual, when Apple does something cheesy like this the go-to excuse is "But, but, the others do it too". Funny how it never seems to work the other way around on Macrumors forums.
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Apple Describes Disposable Email Solution to Combat Spam in New Patent Application
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As usual, when Apple does something cheesy like this the go-to excuse is "But, but, the others do it too". Funny how it never seems to work the other way around on Macrumors forums.
Switched to Airmail last week and haven't looked back. Best $1.99 I've spent in the app store in a while.
Wow. I've slowly been developing nearly the exact same idea for several years now. I suppose I have to give up now. There's no way I could defend against an Apple patent lawsuit.
The innovation here is that the aliases are bidirectional. Receiving mail for an alias is easy; that's been a standard SMTP server feature for decades. It's the sending that nobody has done yet. If you send mail to a particular recipient, the system should rewrite your email so that it appears to come from the appropriate alias. If done right, it's all automatic no need to manually set up each alias in your email system. You have one 'real' address, but every recipient knows you by a different, unique address.
I hope that they build this system so I can use it.
The innovation here is that the aliases are bidirectional. Receiving mail for an alias is easy; that's been a standard SMTP server feature for decades. It's the sending that nobody has done yet. If you send mail to a particular recipient, the system should rewrite your email so that it appears to come from the appropriate alias. If done right, it's all automatic no need to manually set up each alias in your email system. You have one 'real' address, but every recipient knows you by a different, unique address.
I hope that they build this system so I can use it.
Good thing two different people can't create both a john.doe@gmail.com and johndoe@gmail.com address, then, eh? If john.doe@gmail.com is receiving e-mails from johndoe@gmail.com, it's because the second guy gave out the wrong address (perhaps he is john_doe@gmail.com and forgot the underscore).
I can't believe this would be much of a problem, and I do speak from experience, having had one of the first Gmail accounts, a very common English first and last name, and a slight lapse of judgement when choosing my address.
It might prevent little errors from other people's accidents, but the bigger problem is that somebody else is typing (what they think is) their e-mail address wrong.
@Dr.Q: Sure, that's why I add some dynamic part in the address. Makes it (a bit) harder to guess. Not perfect though. And started too late as my regular adress is already "known" to spammer. But at least its a start.
Online ID's
IMHO the only way to fix the SPAM problem, it with some form of a reliable online identification. It doesn't even have to be a real personal name that is traceable for everybody, but it has to be traceable to get a fine or something similar, much like a license plate of a car.
As long as we keep using the decades-old mail protocol that has no security whatsoever, you'll never find the spammers, let alone stop them.
IMHO the only way to fix the SPAM problem, it with some form of a reliable online identification. It doesn't even have to be a real personal name that is traceable for everybody, but it has to be traceable to get a fine or something similar, much like a license plate of a car.
As long as we keep using the decades-old mail protocol that has no security whatsoever, you'll never find the spammers, let alone stop them.
I have been doing this for nearly two decades.
It's very little effort for me: I just give a business an email address consisting of their name @mydomain. It sometimes confuses them later, thinking someone mistyped the email address. But, I've caught multiple businesses giving the email address to spammers, including one car rental company that has done it twice.
(In all fairness, I don't think the company intentionally gave it away. I suspect an unscrupulous employee paid off by a spammer).
However, there's no need to worry about someone patenting it. The new patent law actually expands the definition of prior art. The technique has been in public use for years, by me and many others.
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No, similar systems have been provided by various websites for years. I think that even Craigslist does it.
Tried using this before, great idea but many websites won't accept + as being part of a valid email address. I used to have this problem with my old mailing address which happened to be ## 1/2 street, and I would have to write out "and a half" street which worked about...half the time.
I stopped using a catchall address many years ago, as I was getting spammed by dictionary attacks and bounced replies when spammers used my domain with a random name.
Now, I create an email address for each merchant, and only those are valid.
I manage my own domain since about a decade. How I never thought about using this feature to tag spam is beyond me
But registering on different websites sometimes requires you be able to send an email from that precise address. Is that even possible with a catchall arbitrary address?
Blissful ignorant asks what is better than SMTP to send emails?
Huh, no. I manage a Gmail mailbox for a lady who doesn't have a computer home, and many, many of the very legitimate emails she receives end up in the spam box.
I was a victim of this once. When I needed to switch domains registrar, the WHOIS privacy feature of one of them required the sender to click on a confirmation link, or enter a password (can't recall which). Of course, transfer requests are sent by automated processes. Not sure what point in the chain went wrong here.
I would add crappy display of emails corrupted through a failed migrations. Happened to me many times as I was switching hosting companies and had to send back and forth thousands of emails.
Actually a patent is an extremely expensive way to give someone a temporary marketable monopoly on something. It can be broken by even a slight improvement, and it is public, available for all to see.
On the other hand, copyright is permanent, and any idea expressed through a copyrightable works is protected for the lifetime of the author. Oh, and that's much less expensive also.
Would you please detail how'd you do that?
I have been doing stuff like this for decades. I have about 5 email addresses.
1. Spam Sink: A hotmail email address that I use for 90% of all of the forums, newspaper comment accounts etc that I have joined. It attracts a bit of spam but whatever arrives goes straight to the spam folder and I rarely have to even check the IN box.
2. Spam Sink (2): For better quality sites that I subscribe to, including false Facebook account. Same purpose.
3. Gmail account (1) for anonymous personal communication. I use it on dating sites from year to year when the need arose, to comm with potential partners ... and people I am getting to know but don't want to give my important personal email address
4. Gmail account (2): Personal Gmail with my name in the address. Real facebook account.
5. Core Personal Email using my name as my own domain name: As it says on the tin.
6. Business Email address
I'm not saying everyone should copy me but I have advised people for ten years to follow my address and have at least three email addresses for the above purposes.
1. Spam Sink: A hotmail email address that I use for 90% of all of the forums, newspaper comment accounts etc that I have joined. It attracts a bit of spam but whatever arrives goes straight to the spam folder and I rarely have to even check the IN box.
2. Spam Sink (2): For better quality sites that I subscribe to, including false Facebook account. Same purpose.
3. Gmail account (1) for anonymous personal communication. I use it on dating sites from year to year when the need arose, to comm with potential partners ... and people I am getting to know but don't want to give my important personal email address
4. Gmail account (2): Personal Gmail with my name in the address. Real facebook account.
5. Core Personal Email using my name as my own domain name: As it says on the tin.
6. Business Email address
I'm not saying everyone should copy me but I have advised people for ten years to follow my address and have at least three email addresses for the above purposes.
It was probably actually malware installed on one of their computers + customer data stored in cleartext. Small businesses are fairly notorious for having computers with minimal (if any) security software installed. I've done installations for clients that obviously converted their old home computers to a POS. They would have XP Home SP1 installed (when SP2 was out) and no antivirus.
After going through that I have a hard time being angry when companies have security breeches (Target) because at least they're trying...
PGP - Pretty Good Privacy
ThinkDifferent Big Brother. Introducing PGP for the masses, automagically.
The world's most private search engine, StartPage.com, has been working on an alternative to Gmail, Yahoo!, and Outlook (Hotmail) in terms of privacy. However, it will cost a nominal fee as it will not be supported by advertising (since its not reading your email to make suggestions).
This email service integrates PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) for encryption -- and be "user friendly" ... "for the rest of us." Two terms associated with Mac(intosh). The user friendliness is done by automatically setting-up the keys. No need to be a techie to make PGP work.
The service, StartMail, is currently in beta. Nice video on this webpage describing the service describing how none of the following will be able to read your messages:
Perhaps Apple can copy this with iCloud?
Think
The world's most private search engine, StartPage.com, has been working on an alternative to Gmail, Yahoo!, and Outlook (Hotmail) in terms of privacy. However, it will cost a nominal fee as it will not be supported by advertising (since its not reading your email to make suggestions).
This email service integrates PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) for encryption -- and be "user friendly" ... "for the rest of us." Two terms associated with Mac(intosh). The user friendliness is done by automatically setting-up the keys. No need to be a techie to make PGP work.
The service, StartMail, is currently in beta. Nice video on this webpage describing the service describing how none of the following will be able to read your messages:
- StartMail
- ISP
- Big Brother
- Marketers
Perhaps Apple can copy this with iCloud?
Prior Art
There is prior art and Apple should not be allowed to patent this. People have used temporary addresses linked to a main address for decades. Stop the patent nonesense.
There is prior art and Apple should not be allowed to patent this. People have used temporary addresses linked to a main address for decades. Stop the patent nonesense.
How the heck is this patentable? It already exists for credit cards and I do this all the time because I own my own mail servers. I have a handful of "real" accounts and create dozens of "dummy" accounts that I use for shopping, commenting, etc. If one is compromised, I kill it off, create a new one, and edit the remaining sites that are using it.
As mentioned, the biggest issue with this is the number of sites that refuse to acknowledge the +
Catchalls have their own drawbacks - namely you still get the spam.
A UI to make it more accessible? Either it's a simple trick (gmail and the + for example) or it's a little involved. This would be a bit simpler, seems like.
In this case the patent would seem to be on the interface, not the actual background work.
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Shouldn't be hard - most moderate-to-advanced email clients should let you set the "from" to be a custom address - it's how spammers fake From lines, basically.
this shouldn't be patented.
this should available to all services in the name of humanitarian and internet concern.
its a known fact spam clogs the internet and is responsible for trillions upon trillions of megabytes of useless traffic.
this should available to all services in the name of humanitarian and internet concern.
its a known fact spam clogs the internet and is responsible for trillions upon trillions of megabytes of useless traffic.
The number of people in this thread claiming they've been doing this for years makes me sad. At least a few folks read and understand the linked article. MacRumors supplied a partial summary.
How do you not get that "doing this" is not what's being patented? It's a combination of automating it and making it user friendly that matters, and neither you nor anyone else on this forum has ever done it, so you have no prior art.
Prior art?
I've been doing this since I got my first domain in 2002. And it was an old idea back then.
If Apple gets the application approved, it's just more proof of how defective the USPTO is.
I've been doing this since I got my first domain in 2002. And it was an old idea back then.
If Apple gets the application approved, it's just more proof of how defective the USPTO is.
