frits1993 (u/frits1993)

frits1993 commented on Show HN: Personal messaging with a 2-7 day delay tardamail.com/... · Posted by u/frits1993

kirktrue · 5 years ago

Interesting concept.

I tried it out and got the 'We've sent an email to foo@example.com with a confirmation link.' message. It's been about 5 minutes and I still haven't received the confirmation message. You might want to turn some knobs so that the confirmation emails go through sooner.

Or are the confirmation emails similarly intentionally delayed? :)

frits1993 · 5 years ago

Haha no the confirmation mails are sent straight away ;)

"tardamail.com is too new, temporarily blacklisted" is what I see in the mail-logs.

Seems like something I can't do much about at the moment, and should correct itself in a while. It seems to get past most spam-filters though.

I'll consider implementing an email-confirmation backup, thanks!

frits1993 commented on Show HN: Personal messaging with a 2-7 day delay tardamail.com/... · Posted by u/frits1993

gus_massa · 5 years ago

You are sending a confirmation link to the receiver, but I expected that the sender must confirm the address.

frits1993 · 5 years ago

I double checked, and the confirmation links are sent to the sender as you would expect. Please check again and make sure you use the correct fields. If it happens more often, I'll consider swapping the fields, even though this order seems to make most sense looking at several email clients.

frits1993 commented on Show HN: Personal messaging with a 2-7 day delay tardamail.com/... · Posted by u/frits1993

LinuxBender · 5 years ago

Sortof related: I just wanted to add that many MTA's email servers also support this concept. Using milters or scripts, you can default emails to be stored in the hold queue, then release them based on ingestion time.

frits1993 · 5 years ago

Cool, I did not know that. Are there any other thinkable use cases of keeping messages in a hold queue for a longer period of time, for this option to exist?

frits1993 commented on Show HN: Personal messaging with a 2-7 day delay tardamail.com/... · Posted by u/frits1993

frits1993 · 5 years ago

Good point, I will push an update with email verification and a favicon in the next hour.

frits1993 · 5 years ago

Done!

frits1993 commented on Show HN: Personal messaging with a 2-7 day delay tardamail.com/... · Posted by u/frits1993

gus_massa · 5 years ago

How do you prevent spam? You should at least verify the address of the sender.

A favicon would be nice. (I'm using Chrome.)

frits1993 · 5 years ago

Good point, I will push an update with email verification and a favicon in the next hour.

frits1993 commented on Show HN: Personal messaging with a 2-7 day delay tardamail.com/... · Posted by u/frits1993

frits1993 · 5 years ago

Instant messaging has become the standard. The messages I send my good friends have become shorter, and are often based on my expectations of their reply. With TardaMail, I wanted to recreate the letter-writing experience, digitally. Taking more time to write someone without expecting an instant reply can be very valuable, especially in these times of isolation.

frits1993 commented on Show HN: I created an API for active email validation confirm-email.progresso-i... · Posted by u/frits1993

songzme · 5 years ago

very cool, awhile back I made a server router that helps me setup email address quickly: https://m8l.me/

This way I have a server to ignore all the confirmation emails.

If I understand the use case correctly, I give out your system generated emails instead of giving my emails correct? And then your service forwards all emails you receive to my email?

frits1993 · 5 years ago

Looks cool, probably uses similar techniques indeed!

The use case of my API is not quite as you describe, but I get the confusion. Instead, my case needs the platforms at which you register to implement the new method of confirmation. That means you can't just use this for every existing software.

It goes like this:

- You register at platform A with your own real email address

- Platform A asks you to confirm your email address, but instead of sending you an email, it shows you an email address to which you can send an email.

- You send an email using your own real email address.

- Platform A receives an event from my API that they received an email at the given email address from the email address they expected, so email address confirmed.

What you see at the provided URL is simply a demo of what could be part of any registration form.

frits1993 commented on Show HN: I created an API for active email validation confirm-email.progresso-i... · Posted by u/frits1993

frits1993 · 5 years ago

Manual account activation because the "please click this link to confirm your email address" email somehow does not end up in my user's inbox, is one of the most frequent support requests I get.

I built an API (private for now) which offers a solution to these scenarios, and may work as an alternative to passive email validation.

Instead of receiving an email, users are asked to send an email to a unique email address to confirm their email address (this - by the way - also filters out temporary receive-only email addresses)

A proof of concept can be found here: https://confirm-email.progresso-ict.nl. I can imagine the API to be used for account creation, password recovery, signing up for newsletters, etc.

Even though, with a clickable mailto address, the amount of steps are equal or similar to receiving a confirmation email, my girlfriend tells me the method is cumbersome.

So, what does the HN community think? Other questions I still have to investigate are mainly security-related. Emails are spam-filtered by Amazon SES, yet have to test for spoofing.