Page 1 of 4

spamgourmet will be shutting down soon

PostPosted: Sun Aug 18, 2019 8:42 pm
by josh
Hey everyone

I'm working toward the least yucky way to shut down the spamgourmet service. Shutting down with as much warning as I can has become the best alternative.

It's critical that you change your spamgourmet email addresses to another service as soon as you can!

A few months ago, we stopped accepting new users. The next step will likely be to stop allowing new spamgourmet addresses to be created - I hope to do that soon.

I want to give everyone as much time to switch to a new service as I can - that's my primary concern. If you haven't been working on an alternative for your own use, now is a great time to start :)

As we get closer to shutting down, I plan to send a notice message to the spamgourmet user base (this will be the only email ever sent to the group of spamgourmet users). The user base is a much larger number than the bbs users or twitter followers, but I'm hoping that most spamgourmet users are inactive these days.

I don't have dates, but will post them as I can. Again - my goal is to make this as easy as I can. I will also keep things running as long as I can.

Given my health situation (https://bbs.spamgourmet.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1766), I don't have the resources to communicate on the topic, unfortunately, so please accept my apology in advance for probably not responding to inquiries. I'm not happy about this move, but given my deteriorating state, and the privacy ultimatum that I've sworn to, it's what I've got to do

Josh

Re: spamgourmet will be shutting down soon

PostPosted: Sun Aug 18, 2019 10:35 pm
by ioconix
While I understand your decision, I will still miss the service, as there are only a few services online today that don't want anything from you (money or data).

I wish you the very best health-wise.

Farewell.

Re: spamgourmet will be shutting down soon

PostPosted: Mon Aug 19, 2019 11:10 am
by MrData
Hello Josh,

any (rough) ETA on the intended shutdown ? My reason for asking is that I'm possibly a very weird edge-case of your spamgourmet service, which I have been using for at least 10+ years now :D
I was using Spamgourmet / Xoxy redirections as a means of "Email Proxy" rather than the more likely use case of "throwaway mails" that most users probably used.
Giving out unique eMail endpoints to 3rd parties allowed me to hide my real mail address and to be in full control of cutting the ties to parties that either started spamming or selling those addresses to others.
This also allowed for very interesting and sometimes surprising insights as to which party might've sold your address without consent (Hello, Bioware, for example)

To cut to the chase, most of the mail redirections i use at spamgourmet (which I have hundreds of :shock: ) are regular, valid endpoints that I will need to "route through something else".

Re: spamgourmet will be shutting down soon

PostPosted: Mon Aug 19, 2019 12:36 pm
by jgonggrijp
Dear Josh,

Thank you so much for developing and hosting this truly-free service. It has been my email service of choice for seven years.

spamgourmet has a unique set of features and a unique "feel". I'd call it software with a soul. I'll sorely miss it.

I wish you and your family all the best in your remaining time and afterwards.

-Julian


P.S. to other users: I created a thread for sharing possible alternatives over here: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1786

Re: spamgourmet will be shutting down soon

PostPosted: Mon Aug 19, 2019 3:42 pm
by xxxxme
This is sad, but I see the necessity.
MrData, I've been using SpamGourmet as you have: I almost exclusively give out SG addresses, one per business/site. It appears my first SG address was created over 12 years ago, and it's interesting to see who's spammed me the most (emusic, which gave a code for 10 free mp3s with a flash drive I bought, then tried to sell me more, has sent an average of 1.75 emails per day for the last 10 years, according to the "deleted" count. Also, it seems someone leaked the user list from a forum I no longer use a while ago.)
Thus, I'm very interested in possible alternatives.

Re: spamgourmet will be shutting down soon

PostPosted: Mon Aug 19, 2019 3:57 pm
by gnollet2003
Please keep the service open for a while , I will have a lot of work to replace all those addresses!
"Your message stats: 66,089 forwarded, 13,783 eaten. You have 415 spamgourmet address(es)."
Many thanks for the many years of service, I already used it before 2004!
Is it not possible to find a successor?
I wish you many good years!
gnollet2003

Re: spamgourmet will be shutting down soon

PostPosted: Mon Aug 19, 2019 7:25 pm
by lwc
MrData wrote:I'm possibly a very weird edge-case of your spamgourmet service

Thanks for using the word "possibly" because Spamgourmet was always meant for your case.
Otherwise it's much easier to use one of the various no-registration-or-real-address-needed throwaway services out there.
That's why I tried all these years to convince Josh to disable (at least by default) the anonymizer feature.
I myself have 15 years with hundreds of addresses, so I don't even know how to begin moving away!
Plus I've made sure everyone I know use Spamgourmet too...

With that said, I do feel so sorry for you, Josh, you don't deserve this from life.
I know it's "just a technical service", but it helped so many people for so many years, and you did it all for free.

Re: spamgourmet will be shutting down soon

PostPosted: Mon Aug 19, 2019 7:31 pm
by gljo
Wow. My first spamgourmet address was created on 11-23-2003 and this is my first post on the board.

I always knew that this day would come, I just wish it didn't have to be under these circumstances. Thank you so much for all you've done for so long. Your service has become such an integral, reliable way for me to communicate with almost every site I've ever done business with on the Internet since I found Spamgourmet.

The one thing I'll never understand is how Spamgourmet never gained mainstream traction. As much as I told my friends how useful it was, and as much as they hated spam, I could never convince anyone to use it with any consistency. I guess the concept was just too much for the average person to wrap their head around.

In any case, thanks again for everything and best wishes to you and your family. I'll always consider you and your site a hero of Internet :D

Glenn

"Your message stats: 24,783 forwarded, 188,537 eaten. You have 944 spamgourmet address(es)."
"You have 22 trusted sender(s)"

Re: spamgourmet will be shutting down soon

PostPosted: Tue Aug 20, 2019 5:53 am
by drive
Sorry to hear that, I wish you all the best in these difficult times.

SG is an amazing service and it will be sorely missed, thank you for providing it all this time!
You have saved me so much grief over two SG accounts:
Your message stats: 5,607 forwarded, 84,983 eaten. You have 1286 spamgourmet address(es).
Your message stats: 1,334 forwarded, 68,086 eaten. You have 384 spamgourmet address(es).

Re: spamgourmet will be shutting down soon

PostPosted: Tue Aug 20, 2019 1:53 pm
by Gilla
Josh,
That sucks, and even if spamgourmet shut down regardless, I wish that this wasn't happening to you.
Thoughts and prayers go out to you.
Yes, please send out a headsup email to everyone ASAP. It's not spam, and will help people to plan. I only accidentally noticed this linked from homepage because a friend told me.

I've been here since 2004 or before (not sure exactly)
Your message stats: 62,770 forwarded, 142,870 eaten. You have 1547 spamgourmet address(es).

For everyone else:
spamex.com looks like it's the closest similar thing to fit my needs, although paid and with some limitations. There's one or two other free ones for smaller amounts of mail and aliases.
I'm going to be getting a personal domain name (look's like a .com is on sale from godaddy for about $10 a year), so that I won't have to do this again if spamex shuts down. Potentially that allows me the option of even running my own mail server at some point in the future.
I'll be doing this asap because that's a lot of emails to change! I'll also be taking this chance to change over to a different gmail account as the primary destination, the one I use now was too simple and people type it in all the time signing up for things (by mistake or on purpose I don't know).

Anyone know if Josh has ever released info on how this spamgourmet setup or the source code? In case I ever want to run a personal version for myself?

Re: spamgourmet will be shutting down soon

PostPosted: Wed Aug 21, 2019 5:37 am
by drive
Gilla wrote:Josh,
I'm going to be getting a personal domain name (look's like a .com is on sale from godaddy for about $10 a year), so that I won't have to do this again if spamex shuts down. Potentially that allows me the option of even running my own mail server at some point in the future.

Anyone know if Josh has ever released info on how this spamgourmet setup or the source code? In case I ever want to run a personal version for myself?


Please don't buy from godaddy, the owner is a mysoginist, endengered species hunting asshole. There are tons of more ethical registrars, including gandi.net for instance. See domcomp.com for alternatives and options.

Good luck running your own mailserver, it's a lot of hassle and it's hard to have a clean IP that won't get you blacklisted with gmail and Microsoft. I gave up on running mine and went back to paying someone to do it for me (mailfence, not amazing, but okay for the price)

Re: spamgourmet will be shutting down soon

PostPosted: Wed Aug 21, 2019 10:02 pm
by TuTa
Thank you Josh for reliable, easy to use and free service. Thank you for staying true to your values and your users.
I wish you the strength to deal with the health issues.

Re: spamgourmet will be shutting down soon

PostPosted: Thu Aug 22, 2019 2:34 pm
by no_spam
Hi Josh, All,

Loved the service you provided. Thanks for all the years

Your message stats: 16,921 forwarded, 53,258 eaten. You have 717 spamgourmet address(es).

First address 2003-02-24 11:01

Sorry to hear about your health.

Do you host yourself? Is it possible to move the service to another host and transfer the domains?

EDIT: Just been reading the earlier posts, really saddened by your news. On top of everything you are going through, you are still able to give notice to SpamGourmet users to sort their stuff out too. Amazing Guy!

Re: spamgourmet will be shutting down soon

PostPosted: Thu Aug 22, 2019 7:32 pm
by skopeia
Thank you for the great service I used over more than one dekade.
If you publish the sourcecode perhaps we can try to run an similar service. You offered the source sometimes ago, and perhaps privacy NGO could be interesseted to continue your work.

Sincerely

Skopeia

Re: spamgourmet will be shutting down soon

PostPosted: Thu Aug 22, 2019 11:40 pm
by josh
the source code is still on source forge. I did a bug fix after the last source forge version and added a spoof defense, but I can't seem to log into source forge anymore to update the code. Not really a big deal - the source forge code is pretty much the latest, anyway.

If someone wants to create a new source project somewhere, I think all that needs to happen are these changes to the mail program:

123c125
< $line =~ /^.*for <*(.+)>*/;
---
> $line =~ /^ for <*(.+)>*/;

241a244,251
>
> if ($from && lc($for) eq lc($from)) {
> # assume spoof attempt
> $config->debug("assumed spoof $ENV{'SENDERIP'}: $from to $for exiting");
> $config->die() if $config;
> exit;
> }
>