No sending temporary emails

When EmailOnDeck first launched, we only allowed people to receive emails to their temporary email inbox. Today, we're still sticking with it and not allowing any sending of email from your temporary email address.

There has been discussion on how to go about allowing the sending of temporary emails. Though it's easily implemented, it's not trivial to control abuse.

Issue #1
One issue is that people could then use the platform to start spamming emails themselves.

Clearly, EmailOnDeck was created to help protect against SPAM. So having the potential to be a part of the problem had no appeal.

The first thought was to rate limit a user. For instance, maybe you could only send 1 email every 5 minutes or every hour.

The 2 problems with this, is that (1) someone could open up multiple browser sessions to get around that and (2) if someone only has a few minutes to send a couple emails, they wouldn't want to use EmailOnDeck because they know they would have wait longer than that to be able to do so.

Issue #2
Dealing with legal issues.

This issue relates to trying to understand what most people would use a temporary email address to send from for.

Reasons would include:
(1) Replying back to a specific email sent to your temporary email.
(2) Sending some sort of information without your recipient knowing your everyday email address.

That second bullet deserves a closer look. Though it could and would be used for benign purposes, it's open to be abused.

For instance, people could send hateful or threatening email messages. This is not any part of the purpose or vision we at EmailOnDeck have for our service.

Even if we included an originating IP sent in the email itself like similar websites to us do, we'd still be (1) not adding to a more productive society and (2) have to deal with email blacklists and law enforcement requests.

Conclusion
At EmailOnDeck.com, we want to help you protect your online privacy. The internet seems to be turning into a place where you have to trade your personal information in order to be able to use it and we don't think that's necessarily right.

Sending temporary emails does not perfectly align itself with our goals and vision, so we won't be allowing it.

We know there is a demand for this feature, but we'll just have to do with that demand going to other websites.

Be safe out there.