FakeFilter blocklist project considering blocking private aliasing services (incl. Skiff, SimpleLogin, Addy)

Privacy
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Hi all. I’m the CEO of Skiff and have posted here before, but this is an issue that affects every privacy-focused mail provider:

At stake is being able to sign up for hundreds/thousands (possibly more) sites around the internet. Due to this thread, tons of popular email suffixes are being blocked, despite open and constant communication from multiple anti-abuse teams.

We at Skiff have absolutely no idea why this was initiated, and no recourse to even help mitigate potential issues. If you believe in a freer internet or use these services… please comment. I’m open to any ideas on how to revert this!

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Well, have any of these changes actually been made? I’m not seeing an indication that they have been. While the GitHub Issue’s OP is an obvious troll, the repo maintainer seems to be going through at the moment and doing a one by one evaluation, and doesn’t seem to be considering adding the legitimate services. He’s clearly rejecting legitimate email providers like Proton, and I’d assume Skiff Mail. No official word on aliasing services like SimpleLogin, but I don’t see it included on their list yet, and I suspect it won’t meet their criteria for inclusion.

I like @dngray’s comments from yesterday in that GitHub thread :heart:

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Jesus I don’t know whether the person that opened that issue is just extremely technically uninformed or has ulterior motives, maybe both, (seems plausible considering how they keep trying to transition the conversation to private / non-transparent channels).

I thought that now that iCloud, Firefox, and Duckduckgo offer email aliasing, some of this anti-email-privacy crap from people would subside but I guess not.

I see the ticket is now closed, but it doesn’t say whether it was rejected, or not. I’m not super familiar with Github, do you know what this means for this proposal?

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haha, yeah @dngray was not pulling any punches in that thread.

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I doubt anything will come of that issue. fakefilter is a fairly small project and not very widely used to my knowledge.

The issue was opened by someone who doesn’t even run any services (they pretended they did until I questioned them on that exact issue), ie where were they getting their data.

Then the story changed to “I read some reports on the internet” and did some “tests”. This person didn’t even do the basic research of even reading service policies of the various providers they wanted added to the list.

If you look at their GitHub activity it’s mostly to do with roblox so I doubt they have any real expertise.

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Perhaps not for that project specifically, but there are other lists adding these domains.

Email Hippo

Both Skiff, Tuta, etc:

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Yes, and also this one - https://github.com/disposable/disposable/blob/05c21aa5b98cef142273623a93b0665404850729/greylist.txt @jonah
@dngray I hope the impact is low

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@amilich I don’t think a lot of people use these lists because they’re a pretty crappy way of doing it and doesn’t really prevent spam or nuisance users.

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After reading the entire Github conversation, I’m most surprised that the repo maintainer waited two days to settle this, then only made a statement about keeping Protonmail and Gmail. He failed to comment on email services such as Skiff, Tuta and Seznam aswell as email aliasing services such as SimpleLogin, Addy.io and Skiff’s service. After seeing this failure to calm the situation, I feel that the maintainer has started a project focused on blocking email addresses while not understanding the full extent of how email is used online.

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To be fair, the OP asked the maintainer to look at like a million different services at once for no reason. But yes I still agree :slight_smile:

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