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by max_ 700 days ago
There is always room for a new product if you provide value that established entities don't offer.

Proton Mail for example built it's business around privacy.

There is alot email is capable of that has been forgotten.

1. For example I am part of this mailing list that is like 30 years old. And it feels sort of like a small niche social network. There is alot of improvement that needs to be done in this space.

2. Alias generation. I really would like to subscribe to some news letters or place my email out in public but I don't want to do it with my real email for fear of being spammed.

3. Cataloguing & curating emails. It would be really nice if I could book mark different messages into different folders.

4. Read receipts. All email hosts claim to have this feature but I have actually failed to use them for every single service I am signed up to.

5. Make it easy to configure custom domain names.

6. Tagging doesn't work on Gmail's mobile app. It's so badly implemented on other services.

7. Have a good API why do I have to go to sendgrid?

5 comments

Fastmail has Masked Email, it even integrates with 1Password so you can generate a new email as you're registering for a new site.

It's easy to unsubscribe from a shitty service or a newsletter, just delete the email and that's it.

They also have custom domain names, you do need to do the requisite DNS magic, but they give you step by step instructions where you just copy-paste stuff. And I think you can have them host the domain so they'll handle everything.

Fastmail labels ("tagging") works pretty well too, you just need to write the rules yourself, there is no fancy magic doing it automatically like Gmail.

Check out Port87. It's got a lot of the features you're looking for. I'm working on the custom domain feature too, so it will support that soon.
> Alias generation. I really would like to subscribe to some news letters or place my email out in public but I don't want to do it with my real email for fear of being spammed.

+1 for this.. I'd like to give out specific emails while filling forms and be able to deactivate/delete it as soon as i don't need it.

Fastmail can do this. You can also have wildcard handling, so that there's no extra step to create the masked alias.
> Alias generation. I really would like to subscribe to some news letters or place my email out in public but I don't want to do it with my real email for fear of being spammed.

If only one could give out an e-mail address, which would be a valid destination from a single, intended source ...

> Proton Mail for example built it's business around privacy

Around the claim regarding privacy. But have you tried to sign up without providing some other email address or a phone number? https://www.wired.com/story/protonmail-amends-policy-after-g...

https://cointelegraph.com/news/proton-mail-exposing-activist...

https://restoreprivacy.com/protonmail-data-requests-user-log...

Yes I just did, in a private window, and all I needed to do was complete a captcha.

But even if your IP is on their naughty list, you can delete that data once you have registered, and I would be very surprised if Proton secretly kept it after you delete it.

> But have you tried to sign up without providing some other email address or a phone number?

Yep.

Here's a video of me doing it: https://streamable.com/8anw1v

If you sign up without another email or phone number you get a warning:

"You did not set a recovery method so account recovery is impossible if you forget your password. Proceed without recovery method?"

...which you can just click through.