Apple Describes Disposable Email Solution to Combat Spam in New Patent Application

[rboy505]

Well, the good news is you have hardly any junk mail.

The bad news is it's still Mail, we removed some of the features you loved, broke a few others and added some new ones in the name of streamlining your experience that make it less of a streamlined experience.

Oh, and it asks for your password twice a day.

 

[IGregory]

I've been doing this in yahoo for years.

Well, looks like Apple can't lay claim to getting there first.

 

[djgamble]

As somebody who receives ~30 e-mails from his ex-wife a day (all obscene/abbusive and all using different names/addresses) THIS is cool!

When I report it to the cops they say 'just change your address'. I've done that multiple times and it's a bear!

One thing people must understand is that spam isn't just companies. Spam is crazy ex's who devote 24/7 to stalking you and cannot be stopped.

 

[sigma8]

[snip] In any case, I already have the perfect spam solution similar to what Apple is doing here. All it takes is to purchase your own domain name and use the catchall email feature with forwarding to your real email address. [snip]

Been doing this for years.

Yeah, I've got my own domain and just make a new alias for every site I sign up for. If I get spam at one of them? I'll know who ratted me out. Strangely, it hasn't really worked yet, all my spam goes to the "main" email, which leads me to believe that spammers get their lists not from websites and cross-marketing but from big cc:'s, chain mails, other malware, etc..

Hopefully if Apple gets a patent, I won't have to pay them to keep doing what I've been doing.

 

[Ramchi]

How this is different from Google alias

I though Google already implemented alias in your email by linking to another email id, without having to create an email id, though the purpose of it never meant to combat spam, the technology still exist in one form or the other. Patenting this for spam is ok but linking it with e-commerce, not sure!!

 

[doctor-don]

I've been doing this in yahoo for years.

Really?

Yahoo cannot deliver valid email to my Inbox consistently. I have to search both my Spam and Trash folders to see if important email was put there when I don't find it in my Inbox.

 

[MacMan988]

I'm proposing a new email system with a "mark as spam" button which will mark the email as a spam and dispatch a small group of robots to find and kill the spam sender.

 

[alphaod]

I've been using a service like this for years. Nothing new at all.


Now if only Apple could actually filter spam better? I've been marking tons of emails as junk for ages, but it just seems anything similar never gets filtered out.

 

[Parasprite]

I disagree, the biggest problem is the number of corporate/mass email solutions that consider "doing a poor job at spoofing outgoing to make it look like it is coming from your main address, not making sure it works, and using old and somewhat half-baked software years later" to be an acceptable practice... If it wasn't for this, authenticating/blocking the source of spam would be comparatively easy.

It is perfectly acceptable practice if you have set the proper SPF records.

Is that better?

It's not really the practice itself that is the problem, it's the quantity of companies that do it poorly. Granted, it isn't as bad as it was 5 years ago.

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Now if only Apple could actually filter spam better? I've been marking tons of emails as junk for ages, but it just seems anything similar never gets filtered out.

Funny, I've had the opposite problem. I don't mind specific commercial email from coming in, but Mail has a hard time not marking a lot of them as junk. Although, I think I've managed to tame it finally, I think.

 

[oogje]

How to send email using a catchall allias

In Apple's Mail.app, in the Accounts setting, add any email alias you want for sending mail to the Email Address, separating them with commas. So if your main account email is jackboy@mydomain.org, and you want to reply to a message from your Facebook alias, your Email Address field in Mail.app Accounts setting might look like:

jackboy@mydomain.org, facebook@mydomain.org, ebay@mydomain.org, lotsmore@mydomain.org

When you send mail with Mail.app you can choose which address to use. Likewise using Mail on iOS you can add email addresses in the account setting.

You don't have to do this for every alias, just the ones you want to use for sending mail.

 

[cwt1nospam]

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.

No, you absolutely have not been doing this. "This" is making it easy for the average user who knows nothing about spoofing addresses or adding accounts to their own domain. Have you done that? NO. "This" is about automating the process so that a user can click a button to remove/block email from arriving if sent to that address. Have you done that? Again, NO.

Now, I'm not saying that a patent should be awarded for this. That's another discussion altogether, but if you've found a way to thwart spammers that appears on the surface to be similar that does not begin to constitute prior art.

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I've been using a service like this for years. Nothing new at all.

And I'll bet you were using smart phones for years before the original iPhone came out. And then it turned out they weren't smart phones at all.

You can't make claims like this based solely on a patent application. You need to see what they actually put on the market. The details matter.

 

[vpndev]

good plan

Sounds like a good plan to me.

Email aliases are something like this but, for some unexplained reason, Apple reduced the number allowed from five (under .Mac/MobileMe) to three (under iCloud).

Fixing this would be an easy place to start.

 

[spazzcat]

The Mail app in Mavericks works great. My guess is you are using that non standard terribly implemented IMAP email service known as Gmail.

....

The Mavericks mail client is a mess. It doesn't work right with gmail or exchange.

 

[whooleytoo]

Apple countering spam emails, making emails traceable - fantastic!
Apple patenting this so others can't use a similar, consistent approach - Boooooooh!

 

[kevinsmith11]

A substantial part of this patent application includes work already done by several other services, as has been noted in this thread already. I run one such small service (still in private beta, so I won't bother linking to it), so I obviously have an interest in seeing this patent rejected.

I haven't seen anyone else link to Ask Patents on here yet, so here's the link: http://patents.stackexchange.com/qu...vial-extension-of-disposable-e-mail-addresses

If you're not familiar, Ask Patents is a Stack Exchange site that basically crowdsources the search for prior art. It's already been referenced multiple times by the USPTO in patent rejections. If you're aware of prior art for any of the claims in Apple's patent filing, please chime in there.

 

[SusanK]

What's novel or patentable here? Disposable email addresses have been provided by numerous email providers for years

It only counts when Apple does it 200 years later

 

[Northgrove]

What's novel or patentable here? Disposable email addresses have been provided by numerous email providers for years

Spamgourmet is my favorite! It's so clever in its simplicity and also a pretty unique take on the problem. Perhaps the best part is that if a company sells your address so that you'll start receiving spam, you'll know which one it was that did the deed! (it'll be encoded in your disposable mail address) Spamgourmet will then automatically stop the spam flow since you usually create mail count limited addresses (for use with registration confirmations etc).

 

[SecretAsianMan]

No, similar systems have been provided by various websites for years. I think that even Craigslist does it.

Can you list some of the providers that do this? I would like to become a customer. Currently, I have a similar system set up with Tuffmail, but it involves a bit of manual setup for each new address.

Craigslist is not quite it, BTW. With Craigslist, both parties have to send to a specific fake recipient address. Plus, I have to create a listing, and communication can only start when someone responds to it. It isn't viable to use this for all of one's email.

Ideally, with a bidirectional, automatic system, you send to a real recipient address from your real sender address, and the SMTP server does the rewrite on the fly — perhaps creating a new alias for you automatically. As far as I know, there is no product today that does this.

I've been using a service like this for years. Nothing new at all.

I'd like to try the service that you use. Can you tell me which service it is?

In Apple's Mail.app, in the Accounts setting, add any email alias you want for sending mail to the Email Address, separating them with commas.

This is really difficult to manage when you have tens or hundreds of sendable aliases. The Apple service (and also the one I was developing), if done right, should make it more automatic and manageable.

 

[Tech198]

Why doesn't people just use Gmail and be done...

Seem's the only reason Apple wants their own, is because their not happy.

Persoally, I dunno what the fuss is about....

Do what I do,, you IMAP, and never log into your Gmail account, and "hide' Spam folder from view, solution solved.

I've never received something i never expected. Thank to Google's collaborative filtering...

Why I dunno why Apple never did this, i'll never know, but Google does it first, and yes. you are right... Apple follows 200 years later and probably buggy like like most new things...

Google just works...

Now, that's a twist.

 

[ps45]

I've been doing this for years using a domain I control. It's staggering the number of seemingly respectable companies who either sell their lists, or get hacked.

I've confronted some of them, but they just throw their hands up in the air and say the email address must have been guessed at random, or say perhaps their emails to me were intercepted. I know it's them at fault, but what can you do? Hopefully Apple's aggregated blacklist will help.

 

[Tech guy]

I wonders if other places will do the same thing

 

[jtara]

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.

That's exactly what SpamEx does.

 

[ChristianVirtual]

Would you please detail how'd you do that?

Extreme simple: [geek] beside a number of emails like .me/icloud, gmail, live/outlook my main email traffic goes via my own domains.
For those domains I can freely define email alias; as many as I like.

I have few real IMAP inboxes and a number of mail alias pointing into the real inbox.

When I join a new service I check on the year and month and add that to a nickname or full name of the service.
If I would join Macrumors today I would choose

mr201402@mydomain.com. Or MacRum201402@mydomain.com

And pointing those to myself@mydomain.com. On my iPad they all still come in one folder, easy to manage.

Sure not perfect as it still expose the domain itself. The bad guys could just replace the prefix with info@ o postmaster@ and reach me. But nothing I can against that as long as I own a domain.
[/geek]

 

[spamex]

So not novel

We have been doing pretty much everything described in the application at Spamex (http://www.spamex.com) since 2000. Easy creation of Disposable Email Addresses, bi-directional communication, personal domains... nothing terribly novel here Apple.

 

[Cubytus]

Extreme simple: [geek] beside a number of emails like .me/icloud, gmail, live/outlook my main email traffic goes via my own domains.
For those domains I can freely define email alias; as many as I like.

I have few real IMAP inboxes and a number of mail alias pointing into the real inbox.

When I join a new service I check on the year and month and add that to a nickname or full name of the service.
If I would join Macrumors today I would choose

mr201402@mydomain.com. Or MacRum201402@mydomain.com

And pointing those to myself@mydomain.com. On my iPad they all still come in one folder, easy to manage.

Sure not perfect as it still expose the domain itself. The bad guys could just replace the prefix with info@ o postmaster@ and reach me. But nothing I can against that as long as I own a domain.
[/geek]

Oh, I have that, too, but naïvely thought wiser to use a "common" email address rather than any associated with my domain. Besides, I never thought the cPanel managing interface as really user-friendly.