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I Have A Dumb Idea
Subprime6562
Member
Hey LET,
I have a dumb idea, and I'm hoping this community of experts can tell me if its so dumb that it might just work, or if I should just abandon it right now.
First, some context. My main motivation here is learning. This isn't a get-rich-quick scheme; I'm not even sure it would break even. To be clear about my skill level, I'm not a coder or a sysadmin – I work in finance full time in a non-tech role. By some miracle, I've managed to set up a few VPSs and a bare-metal server to run a handful of Python programs and Telegram bots, but that was with ChatGPT and Gemini walking me through every step. I learned a lot doing that, and this just feels like the next step in that learning experience. Having a small service that offers something quirky and light-hearted seems like a fun thing to do.
The Concept The idea is simple. I own a few domain names that don't really work for websites, but they have potential for funny/novelty email addresses. For example, one of the domains is PleaseDontEmailMe.com.
I want to "rent" out addresses like [email protected] for a small monthly fee. I think it would give people a funny little novelty they can whip out from time to time. I believe someone on here is using [email protected] – I want to offer something in the same vein: a funny email address which actually works.
The Core Problem: Finding a Willing Provider Putting the business side aside, my main question is about technical feasibility for a non-expert. I clearly don’t have the skills to manage the email infrastructure myself. At first glance, I don’t see any services explicitly designed for my situation.
I see two possible paths, but I'm skeptical about both:
1. The Forwarding Route: Use a service like SimpleLogin/addy.io. This seems ideal as I'd never handle user inboxes. But their plans seem designed for personal use, not public reselling.
2. The Full Inbox Route: Use an email reseller service (cPanel/WHM or specialized). But these seem designed for reselling to businesses for use by their employees, not handing out individual mailboxes to random strangers on the internet.
This leads to my main question: Is this idea dead on arrival because no provider will touch it?
• Are there any forwarding services that offer a multi-domain/reseller plan with an API and formally permit this kind of public reselling?
• Are there any email reseller hosts (cPanel or otherwise) that are known to be friendly to this specific business model? Or will most ToS forbid it?
The Follow-Up Problem: Abuse Assuming a willing provider does exist, my next biggest concern is abuse. I've read enough posts here to know that bad faith users, spammers, and criminals will be attracted to this.
• Monitoring: As a non-sysadmin, what are realistic ways to monitor outbound email? How can I get alerted if one user suddenly starts blasting out thousands of emails?
• Isolation: If one user misbehaves, how do I protect the reputation of the shared server IP and the root domain itself?
• Process: What's a sustainable process for handling abuse? Do I just wait for spam reports and then play whack-a-mole, or are there better, more proactive methods?
Other Questions:
• Automation: For either route, my goal is to eventually automate user creation/deletion via an API. How important is it to choose a provider with a good API from day one?
• Gotchas: What other major hurdles am I, a self-described novice, completely overlooking?
Thanks for taking the time to read. I'm here to learn, so any brutal honesty is welcome and appreciated.
Comments
For gen-z:
I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea.
For the first approach: I think Aliasvault is an alternative to Simplelogin which can be self-hosted with your own domains.
However, since you said it's more for learning i would encourage to build something yourself, not just take a ready solution however that obviously comes with drawbacks.
I think having an API access is necessary from the beginning when building your own solution like that.
As for abuse, you could also consider giving user cheaper/free receive only mailboxes. If user wanted to have an email alias to register for a service privately, it could be handy.
That's all could help you with, sorry. I'm bad with mail stuff.
It's simple to create, but it will require a custom plugin for WHMCS (or similar) or a custom website. The technical part (the backend) can be handled using DirectAdmin and API calls. Are you willing to pay someone to program the custom parts?
Maintaining the system isn't simple. Fighting spam and maintaining a good reputation, so emails end up in the inbox and not the spam folder or get rejected, is technical work that can take many man-hours.
Where do you plan to find paying customers? Others, e.g., cock.li, are offering something similar for free.
I m chat gippity respons !
Is the dead on arrival?
Yes, because your post was AI generated and a clear indicator you are incapable of operating without an AI. Also you'll be spending a lot of money on buying some novelty domains.
Is it a good idea if I sell this as a commercial good?
Just as good of an idea as me to be your neurosurgeon (Don't worry I'm still learning!).
No provider will work with this
I certainly wouldn't work with it if you had no idea how to admin a mailserver. There is other forwarding services you could use and im sure they'll take your money.
The core problem
I wouldn't purchase a service from someone who relies off the basic tiers of Gemini/ChatGPT to provide a commercial service.
regurts
I think this is a pretty cool idea! You could mitigate abuse by setting a reasonable rate limit. Or simply charge by usage: $1 for 10 emails etc.
OTOH, for this audience, it's much cheaper, flexible, and probably easier to just register a domain for themselves for <$10/y. I just nabbed JustDontEmail.Me
BTW, since it's just a novelty forwarding service, you can just use Cloudflare API with Email Workers to do the automation. Could be a cool vibe coding project.
VPS + Hosting Panel + Billing Software. If you do it right you would just need to pay for the VPS and do a little bridging coding yourself.
Ha yeah this community is not the target market. I figure everyone here has the ability to spin up a funny email for themselves in a matter of minutes. I was thinking this was more for people like my dad - a guy with no tech skills who would be willing to spend $5 a month to have a dumb email to hand out to his friends as a joke.
It could work, but i feel like it would need a shit ton of marketing.
Reminds me of cock.li (free but a little unhinged)
I've only just discovered cock.li because of the responses here. Its definitely got the same vibes... but I plan to be wayyyy less extreme with the names.
What OP hears, "you should get AI to create and run the service yourself".