[zzo38computer]

> [CAPTCHAs] are a lot more reliable than an email which is basically just a domain that anyone can buy and setup within mere minutes giving them access to endless email addresses.

CAPTCHAs also can be unreliable with false positives and false negatives and other problems (although some CAPTCHAs are worse than others). "CAPTCHAs are trivially defeated today, regardless of the provider" is just one more thing, that makes even more worthless.

> Why not use phone numbers instead if the issue is truly important to them?

Even telephone numbers you might not have, or might be shared with someone else (more likely to have shared telephone numbers than with email).

[ocdtrekkie]

Another fun fact, of course, is that CAPTCHAs not only suck for most people in general, they're especially frustrating for blind users, people who have privacy settings in their browser (hi Cloudflare!), etc.

It's one somewhat irritating tool in the toolbox, but honestly abuse-enabling services like disposable mail providers really just need to be taken down. We need to stop giving free help to criminals. Privacy is vitally important, but that should look more like a web of trust, not a fog of anonymity. No, every site shouldn't know your phone number, but they should be able to assume that your email provider does or knows enough about you to be confident you are a real person they can transact with.

[TemporaryMail]

In your ideal world we would be all be:

- Be hooked to a bunch of paid plans for stuff that's currently free.

- At the mercy of all the big providers that could one day just decide to turn our account off without a reason.

- Receive more spam than we currently do as all service providers would have our email addresses. Although these would all be aliases, we would have to spend a decent amount of time organizing folders, identifying which aliases that are receiving the spam and turning these off without losing access to the account.

I referred to your other points in detail here also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40968143

I really enjoy that you challenge my views on this though as we both have the same goal of stopping abuse on online services, while at the same time preserving user privacy. Your plan would work if all service providers were honest and didn't abuse your trust, my plan currently works and I'm no longer getting emails from politicians asking for donations.

[tracker1]

> At the mercy of all the big providers that could one day just decide to turn our account off without a reason.

This had me genuinely concerned when a lot of the superfuous account bans were happening on Twitter and Facebook around the 2020 election cycle. Retweeting a joke could knock you off, and I'd been using Twitter as a 2FA for many/most sites where it was offered at the time.

Now, I'm much more inclined to choose email/password options. I've also been using a wildcard domain for most new things. Ex: site@mydomain, etc for every site, store, etc I use.

[TemporaryMail]

That's funny in a bizarre way.

Imagine having to tell someone that you can't access your accounts because you retweeted something that wasn't deemed acceptable.

Perhaps if we're lucky we will advance to having the big corps create a social credit system for us as well, ha!