An open source project, where there is also a cloud-hosted version by the author, is not necessarily a spam post. Goat Counter does exactly the same thing and got a lot of upvotes on Lobste.rs. Whether the link goes to the Github README or a separate blog shouldn’t make much of a difference methinks?
The only sketchy thing here is that the Lobste.rs username matches the project name. But that doesn’t make the project itself bad. Maybe they’ll change their username to something more personal.
I’m really careful in not promoting/spamming GoatCounter too much here. For example, I wrote some things on my website about it that I didn’t post here, and I tend to refer to it as “the project I’m working on” in comments when I don’t really need to reference it by name. Additionally, I’ve been posting here for a while with quite a number of comments/submissions. I also just happen to be developing this product, but that’s not why I’m here.
I’m sure Son has the best of intentions (SimpleLogin uses GoatCounter, and provided some pretty useful feedback), but I’ve seen several SimpleLogin stories in the last few weeks, and IMHO it’s a little bit too much. Self-promotion is fine IMHO, but it’s all about the balance.
Hey what’s funny is some trending posts about SimpleLogin aren’t even posted by us, I learnt about them when they are trending on Reddit.
We are preparing an official launch so are posting about “the project we’ve been working on” ;) a bit everywhere. Lot of constructive feedbacks, some haters (obviously) but so far so good.
Yeah, it’s just some things I noticed here. Maybe my impressions are wrong 😅 Also, as someone else pointed out having the username “simplelogin” probably isn’t helping. You can change it in Lobsters on your profile at any time.
Self-advertising is not bad per se, I discovered some cool projects by their authors and I have met a lot of amazing people who support SimpleLogin via my “self-promotion” posts. For me, what’s more important is the content itself.
It’s sad that people don’t even look at the post before classifying it as “spam”.
I think maybe the match between your username here and the name of the product causes a knee-jerk reaction. Have you considered using the same username here that you use on Github?
I use the product name as username on reddit and HN so anyone could know immediately that I’m self-promoting and not trying to fake a positive review. Anw just changed my username :).
Looks like a cool project. I like that you can host it yourself, which may be important for such sensitive traffic.
I’m currently using ‘tags’ with a + and the platform name suffixed to the mail alias like me+lobsters@example.org, not for privacy, just to separate mail by platform. Quite a few mail providers seem to support this in various forms. Using a catch-all address and randomized email aliases is an option as well.
Hosting this yourself with your own domain doesn’t really make it ‘private’ though, as every address can probably be linked easily to you as a person. The same goes for using alias tags of course.
Hi guys, author here. I made this tool to hide my personal email by using “email alias”. The project is fully open source and can be self-hosted. The self-hosting instruction is relatively simple and the most complex part is maybe DNS setup on your DNS registrar.
The code has been deployed in production since several months now and is stable. It also comes with some niceties like a Chrome/Firefox/Safari extension and (soon) mobile apps.
This seems like a really useful project! I’m wondering what kind of mail backends this would support? I think using this with GMail might be out of the question, the forwarded mail might be stopped due to SPF. The document gives information about setting up DKIM/SPF, but the way I read this it’s only for outgoing mail (from me to the party I’m hiding my real address from). Or is there some rewriting in place?
Maybe I’ll try setting this up, but I’m not a big fan of Docker, especially when the application has specific network requirements. I didn’t check the Dockerfile yet, but I hope this will be easy enough to run in a FreeBSD jail.
Anyway, great work! We need more projects like these.
wondering what kind of mail backends this would support?
What do you mean by “mail backend”? SimpleLogin uses Postfix to send and receive emails. You could also config Postfix for it to send emails from other mail servers (e.g. Gmail) but then SPF check would fail.
forward received emails to your personal email inbox
Ah, from the diagram I see you use SRS rewriting. I’m not sure about this, but I was kinda hoping ARC (Authenticated Receive Chain) would solve this without rewriting?
ARC is indeed a good idea to handle email forwarder case. Its status is still experimental though.
ARC wouldn’t be useful for SimpleLogin though as it rewrites both the “from” and “to” header to implement the “reply flow” so when user replies, the email is routed through SimpleLogin.
Add a “show” tag, and perhaps consider not having your username be your project name (looks like advertisement).
Yeah. I PMd to tell him to knock off the self-promotion.
An open source project, where there is also a cloud-hosted version by the author, is not necessarily a spam post. Goat Counter does exactly the same thing and got a lot of upvotes on Lobste.rs. Whether the link goes to the Github README or a separate blog shouldn’t make much of a difference methinks?
The only sketchy thing here is that the Lobste.rs username matches the project name. But that doesn’t make the project itself bad. Maybe they’ll change their username to something more personal.
I’m really careful in not promoting/spamming GoatCounter too much here. For example, I wrote some things on my website about it that I didn’t post here, and I tend to refer to it as “the project I’m working on” in comments when I don’t really need to reference it by name. Additionally, I’ve been posting here for a while with quite a number of comments/submissions. I also just happen to be developing this product, but that’s not why I’m here.
I’m sure Son has the best of intentions (SimpleLogin uses GoatCounter, and provided some pretty useful feedback), but I’ve seen several SimpleLogin stories in the last few weeks, and IMHO it’s a little bit too much. Self-promotion is fine IMHO, but it’s all about the balance.
Hey what’s funny is some trending posts about SimpleLogin aren’t even posted by us, I learnt about them when they are trending on Reddit.
We are preparing an official launch so are posting about “the project we’ve been working on” ;) a bit everywhere. Lot of constructive feedbacks, some haters (obviously) but so far so good.
Yeah, it’s just some things I noticed here. Maybe my impressions are wrong 😅 Also, as someone else pointed out having the username “simplelogin” probably isn’t helping. You can change it in Lobsters on your profile at any time.
Yeah I just changed my username.
He’s pushing it too much (see his previous submission and the discussion underneath).
Self-advertising is not bad per se, I discovered some cool projects by their authors and I have met a lot of amazing people who support SimpleLogin via my “self-promotion” posts. For me, what’s more important is the content itself.
It’s sad that people don’t even look at the post before classifying it as “spam”.
I think maybe the match between your username here and the name of the product causes a knee-jerk reaction. Have you considered using the same username here that you use on Github?
I use the product name as username on reddit and HN so anyone could know immediately that I’m self-promoting and not trying to fake a positive review. Anw just changed my username :).
[Comment removed by moderator alynpost: Rather than blending irony, solipsism, and swearing in to comment shaming another user--go for a walk.]
Not sure to understand why you thought this is “arrogant”. Anw I guess it’s not helpful to discuss further.
Because you presume people didn’t look at the post before flagging it as a spam.
Looks like a cool project. I like that you can host it yourself, which may be important for such sensitive traffic.
I’m currently using ‘tags’ with a
+and the platform name suffixed to the mail alias likeme+lobsters@example.org, not for privacy, just to separate mail by platform. Quite a few mail providers seem to support this in various forms. Using a catch-all address and randomized email aliases is an option as well.Hosting this yourself with your own domain doesn’t really make it ‘private’ though, as every address can probably be linked easily to you as a person. The same goes for using alias tags of course.
Hi guys, author here. I made this tool to hide my personal email by using “email alias”. The project is fully open source and can be self-hosted. The self-hosting instruction is relatively simple and the most complex part is maybe DNS setup on your DNS registrar.
The code has been deployed in production since several months now and is stable. It also comes with some niceties like a Chrome/Firefox/Safari extension and (soon) mobile apps.
The github repo is on https://github.com/simple-login/app Let me know if you have any feedbacks/questions!
This seems like a really useful project! I’m wondering what kind of mail backends this would support? I think using this with GMail might be out of the question, the forwarded mail might be stopped due to SPF. The document gives information about setting up DKIM/SPF, but the way I read this it’s only for outgoing mail (from me to the party I’m hiding my real address from). Or is there some rewriting in place?
Maybe I’ll try setting this up, but I’m not a big fan of Docker, especially when the application has specific network requirements. I didn’t check the Dockerfile yet, but I hope this will be easy enough to run in a FreeBSD jail.
Anyway, great work! We need more projects like these.
What do you mean by “mail backend”? SimpleLogin uses Postfix to send and receive emails. You could also config Postfix for it to send emails from other mail servers (e.g. Gmail) but then SPF check would fail.
I created a small diagram to show how SimpleLogin works here https://whimsical.com/2BfXodQqkWi2p12QXJyfAH Basically what it does is to rewrite the email headers to:
I think you could deploy SimpleLogin without Docker as it mostly used Python and its dependencies are relatively simple.
Ah, from the diagram I see you use SRS rewriting. I’m not sure about this, but I was kinda hoping ARC (Authenticated Receive Chain) would solve this without rewriting?
ARC is indeed a good idea to handle email forwarder case. Its status is still experimental though.
ARC wouldn’t be useful for SimpleLogin though as it rewrites both the “from” and “to” header to implement the “reply flow” so when user replies, the email is routed through SimpleLogin.