[DanBC]

> If any of you can figure out how to make this work, I'd definitely pay for it.

You have two versions of your business card. One goes to anyone and has a junk email. The other goes to wanted contacts, and has an email that you pay attention to.

[verisimilidude]

Exactly. For most people, that's probably enough. I couldn't see the business case for creating a whole social network out of the concept.

For myself though, I could easily see creating 9 or 10 cards for different situations. It'd be nice to have an easy way to manage all that.

[joering2]

What you need is an "premium" email at a "premium e-mail provider". :)

You signed up as Joe Doe and plug your basic info: website url, physical address, your real email address, phone number cell phone, etc. All this can be in multitude quantity, like your email: office job 1, office job 2, personal. All this info is confidential and only seen to you.

Then your conference comes in. You click "create addresses" and system is randomly generating your email addresses, like this:

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

Then for each email you can setup few options, like:

- forward this email to office job 1

- forward this email to office job 2

- forward this email to my personal email

- if someone emails me at this email, send them autoreply with short profile: my homepage url, my pshysical address, my office phone, but no cell phone.

- if someone emails me at this email, send them autoreply with my personal cellphone.

When forwarding your email you can have optional header, such as extra info you added initially: "this is my Word Expo 2014". Then when 2016 comes in and you receive an email, header tells you the origin of it.

You can setup any email to hold on mail and not forward it at all and just notify you once a week/month/once there is X emails awaiting.

At any point you can dispose an email or simply set it to auto-expire. Or change its settings for that matter.

You have two options when it comes to your presentatione. You can go high tech and print (or request print) of business cards with QR code where each code is your CRF card with different email of course. In this scenario you could have different color of qr code representing different email setup and just memorize: green qr code - potential investors, yellow qr code - potential employees, blue qr code - cute blonde that i think likes me!

Or even simplier solution: order yourself a few thousand business cards with your email address like this: "[e-mail]" and then just write down the email number after the pre-printed part of your email address that will match particular premium email #. And if someone asks about it, just tell them a perfect excuse: "oh yeah i get so much spam that once a year i have to create a new email for myself".

Someone building such a system could call it similar to gmail so your emails look normal, like maybe pmail.com (for "premium" mail) or something like it.

I think the problem is that this is very niche market. I am sure for a right solution you would pay even $99 per year, but again it would be hard to market and even harder to make some money long-term off of it :)

[davmre]

You can actually do this with gmail itself: [e-mail] is a valid alias for [e-mail], for any value of x. So you can make up whatever set of custom addresses you want; they all go to the same account, and filtering/forwarding/etc. can be done with standard gmail filters (not sure about autoresponses; you'd probably need a third-party client for that).

Of course this plus-sign behavior is a pretty well-known fact about Gmail, so it'll be obvious that you're bucketing your email in this way. Anyone can easily read off the 'base' address [e-mail], so you'd need to set it up so that mail to this address is heavily restricted and anyone wanting to actually reach you would have to use [e-mail] or whatever. But I think this would basically also be true of any custom service you could invent having similar functionality.

[PeterWhittaker]

But gmail basically does this now with the +: [e-mail], [e-mail], etc.

[joering2]

Exactly. Anyone know this "trick" so I can envision people that didnt have the response back in a day or two, just remove the + part thinking exactly what you said -- my email went to some less-important folder.

I, for example, always remove the + part. Not sure why, just a behavior. Even if wrong, still it is what it is.

Besides, I don't think you can discard your email. So if you had [e-mail] and month later you decided you don't want anymore email from this account, you would have to setup rule for this email to go to spam, which is not a perfect scenario. Better would be an auto-response that e-mail expired. Something like PlutoMail is doing.