this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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I created an email provider called Port87 that specializes in spam prevention, phishing prevention, and organization.
You use it by giving a labeled address to all your accounts, so to Netflix, you would give something like yourname-netflix@port87.com. Then that becomes a label in your account that you can set quick settings for like mark as read or even just block that address if you’re done with it. And if you get something claiming to be from your bank there, you know it’s phishing.
Then you can have labels that are meant for real people like yourname-friends@port87.com, and when someone emails them for the first time it will email them back and ask them to verify they’re human.
And your bare address (yourname@port87.com) doesn’t go through, but rather responds with a list of your “public label” addresses. So that one you can share all over the internet and you won’t get spammed.
Sounds like you have qmail at the root. I ran that with spamassassin, barracuda and some other custom rules for years. Didn't add on the auto response you have described, but really liked it back in the day.
Did I guess kinda close to what you have running?
I'd think the annoying part would be that you've forced the work to prove they are human back on the sender. Might be a good way to go though given how much spam there is.
It’s actually built on Haraka. All of the queueing is custom written so I can do things like make it a flip of a toggle whether you want push notifications, sender screening, mark as read, etc. for a label. And there’s no inbox, since the bare address is not a usable address. Every email you receive already has at least one label.
Ok but you can do this with aliases with any decent email service.
I guess an aliasing service like yours can be useful if you're stuck with a bad email provider, but since OP is looking to set things up they can just pick a decent one to begin with.
As far as I know, there’s no email provider that lets you choose to enable sender screening on individual aliases. I also don’t know of any that explicitly do not use the bare address.
You can kind of achieve the same thing with Sieve scripts and a catch-all address (which is how I developed the prototype), but there is a lot that Port87 does automatically that you’d have to do manually in that system.
For example, you don’t need to set up a label before you use it with Port87. You can just give out a yourname-whatever@port87.com address and it will create the whatever label for you. These labels show up in your “Pending Labels” section. You can then approve them to move them into your regular labels, block them, or just let them expire.
I wrote this service around this concept, so it’s not like you’re using a regular email system a special way. The system is designed and built to be used this way.