[idea feedback] eMail masker

Why not work on something where you can charge much more than $2-5/month?

Aiming for a higher price point forces you to spend more time considering whether or not you're solving a valuable problem for people. When you're charging a few bucks a month, you're basically saying, "This isn't all that valuable to anyone." If that's true, it'll hinder more than just your price point — it'll hinder your ability to attract and retain customers, because you're working on something that's barely important enough for people to take time out of their day.

Also, charging more will generally force you to target businesses, because they have more money. This is advantageous, because businesses are more decisive and less fickle than consumers, as it's easier for them to put a dollar amount on the problems they have. Consumers rarely save or make money from the things they buy, so it's hard for them to imagine a correct price, so they often refuse to pay for things things even when they find them useful.

Finally, a higher price point will also make your life easier in the long run, as you won't need to find and deal with nearly as many customers to succeed.

If you're not sure where to find high-value areas, look where lots of money is changing hands. My favorite example is hiring software engineers, where every "transaction" involves exchanging hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if you're not sure how to find a problem worth solving there, ask yourself, is everything about <high-value industry or activity> so perfect that nobody has any significant challenges, problems, or complaints? The answer is almost always no.

Take all this with a grain of salt. I'm certain there exists a path to making your current business succeed. However, it's worth knowing that there are different approaches you can take that will greatly increase your chances of succeeding, and of building a business that you actually enjoy running.

I get very few spam mails anymore and it seems pretty easy to unsubscribe from reputable companies because of CAN-SPAM.

Maybe I'm more judicious than most in giving out my email address, but I don't think this bothers most regular people. My wife has a bazillion unread emails. Probably most of those are spam or marketing emails. She just ignores them. It doesn't bother her at all. I doubt she'd go to the trouble of creating alias addresses and all that.

My point is that I think the number of people that are truly bothered by these emails is small. And the number of people that would go out of their way to create an alias to deal with it is smaller still.

Whats the difference from your service to anyalias.com?

Thanks all for the feedback! I spent some time doing a bit of research. Seems like the problem is nearly non-existent and there are cheaper / free solutions out there.

Thought I'd document the solutions here for future users with the same idea,

• Use a '+' in your email address. Most popular email providers support this. Pro: Easy / Free. Con: Email is not masked, spammers could figure out the original email if needed.

• Use a service like anymail.com / blur. Pro: Easy / free. Con: Don't see a huge problem, emails might get lost if the services go down, but we will not be using them for important emails.

• Use an email forwarder provided by domain hosting company. Pro: Cheap (most come free with a domain purchase / renewal?). Con: Harder to setup, not for non-tech people.

Any other service i'm missing out?

There was a thread from someone else about this exact same thing maybe even just a couple of days ago. There is feedback in that thread if you can find it. I think he's mostly finished building it.

I had the same idea December last year and a friend of mine suggested I just use an email service that allowed a catch-all address to mimic the functionality, so I did. I used that system for about 3 months before I ran into problems that make me stop using it. For example when you need to reply to someone it gets awkward. Also emotionally it felt very uncomfortable sometimes if it was a serious thing like applying for a credit card. Then eventually I had too many addresses I was logging into different services with it got too much to remember. The benefits were marginal, so I stopped using that system.

There's a lot of 'fake email generators' out there that people use for newsletters. Not sure if people would pay for a service like this, but if you can test the idea cheaply and quickly then go for it.