Address recycling / reuse

Andras S shared this idea ago

Proposed

I was too hasty with the registration and only noticed afterwards that you guys recycle e-mail addresses.

I find this bizarre and a total non-starter, but before nope-ing out of here I figured I may as well ask whether you're already planning to stop doing this and guarantee our address will never be given to someone else. If even gmail, under several orders of magnitude higher username demand can resist doing this, so should you.

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Replies (2)

Redfield ●

I agree in that recycling email addresses is a bad idea from many fronts - biggest issue of which is just your emails going to some other person that currently owns the recycled ID. Hoping there's an explanation from the mailbox team.

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mailbox.org Support ●

Hi,

thank you very much for your postings. es, we recycle addresses, but only after a certain period of time. During this period, the addresses are blocked for re-registration. this prevents the problems you mentioned. how long an address is blocked for re-registration depends on the package and the duration of the contract. the longer a contract exists, the longer the blocking period after cancellation of the contract. You can find more information here under "Plan & details" > "Protection against re-registration":

https://mailbox.org/en/private-customers#price-plans

Best regards

your mailbox.org team

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Ben ●

I must disagree here, imagine I die unexpectedly and cannot pay anymore, after some time anybody can just pretend to be me and re-register my mail address. Also when I registered an alias I got a lot of mails - now I know where it came from, I probably inherited spam from somebody else. Moreover, if somebody used the mail address for questionable activities, anybody registering this mail address again will inherit this legacy.

Please reconsider this policy.

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mocife ●

You are losing customers because of this.

When I die, I don't want anyone who happened to know my email address to be able to recycle it and then use it to receive confidential messages or even gain access to my other accounts using password resets. Your current policy of temporarily blocking re-registration is ineffective because (even on the most expensive plan) it is far shorter than most services will wait before deleting inactive accounts.

To be clear, I don't even care if you recycle your regular @mailbox.org addresses. Perhaps you are concerned that if you never recycle you will quickly exhaust all of the short and easy-to-remember address and that's completely understandable. If that's the case, simply set aside a domain like @id.mailbox.org where all the addresses are randomly-generated gibberish like yn8r9ctb6s@id.mailbox.org and are never recycled. Since they're all random strings, none of them have any inherent value and you don't have to worry about running out of 'pretty' addresses. These addresses still work fine for third party 2FA and password recovery purposes where the 'prettiness' of the address is irrelevant but immutability is important for security.

I just finished evaluating email providers and mailbox.org was my number one choice were it not for this policy. However since address recycling is a deal-breaker for me I had to go with another option. I will probably still switch to mailbox.org in the future if you do end up implementing a solution.

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