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1)) By "signup over email" you mean the passwordless login over email? I thought about this one before and am not 100% convinced about it yet ...
4)) Yes I know that it's hard to trust the system :), that's why I planned for SimpleLogin to be open source from the beginning. For now, users still need to take my word for it ...
Hi Russel, thank you a lot for the feedbacks 🙏!
Could you give more details please? I'm taking any suggestion to make the website more accessible (even to non-geek people)!
I use AWS mostly for their S3 and RDS. Do you know which cloud provider who might have "cleaner" IPs? The current IP is clean for almost a year now but some users still report SimpleLogin emails falling into their Spam folder so I suspect the IPs might be the culprit here 🤔.
Adding a fallback server has a high position in my todo list! Once the second server is ready, I'll add a second MX record :).Fixed :)
The "trick" is when an email is forwarded through SimpleLogin, I remove its incoming DKIM signature (after verifying it) and replace by the SimpleLogin one. So outgoing emails are DKIM-valid.
- Just shorter and simpler would get me to try it. If you're giving away accounts, maybe you could do the whole signup over email?
- Ya; it's hard - just check your ip / block in blacklists. You can build reputation by getting folks to take the messages out of spam.
- cool
- ya, so still the problem is that I have to trust the message is un-tampered with inside your infra.
1)) By "signup over email" you mean the passwordless login over email? I thought about this one before and am not 100% convinced about it yet ...
4)) Yes I know that it's hard to trust the system :), that's why I planned for SimpleLogin to be open source from the beginning. For now, users still need to take my word for it ...
Thanks for the thorough review Marc 🙏! Your concerns are absolutely right 👍.
With SimpleLogin being open-source in the future, one can deploy the program somewhere else if somehow the service is shut down and migrate all aliases there. However as the service cost is quite low, it can be maintained easily in the long run.
Technically the emails DO go through SimpleLogin servers. It's the same for other services as far as I know though and none of them is (or intend to be) open-sourced.
At the moment the alias needs to be generated online. I also have other users asking on how to "remember" easily their alias or at least being able to generate one quickly. To be honest I don't have any solution for now that's easy to remember without affecting user privacy: concretely if the rule is too simple, it's easy to know 2 aliases coming from the same person -> easy to cross reference -> no privacy.
There are a bunch of services like this out there already. What sets yours apart?
In my research, some similar services are indeed more advanced in terms of browser extension or mobile app. However they have some issues:
- their emails are usually in spam. It's not their fault and a lot of spam will go through such email alias service. I don't think they have found the solution or at least a compromise. Avoid emails going to spam is really hard though, I experienced it first hand in a lot of projects.
- Their goal stops at the email alias. For me, the alias is only the first (and easy) step. Look at the SimpleLogin developer page and you'll understand 😉.
- They have no intention to open-source the code. Email alias is not rocket science and open-sourcing it is part of my plan since the beginning.
I don't want to cite their names here as this is not fair. I can give more info over private chat for a specific concurrent if you're interested 🙂.
I'm working an alternative solution myself
The product doesn't really target people who are have their own email servers as making alias is much easier in this case. I would even recommend not using SimpleLogin if this is your case 😉.
Thanks again for the review, I really appreciate!
Thanks a lot for the review Cody 🙏! Yes a browser extension is a must-have, I've been thinking about it for a while!
The custom domain is requested by some users who want to have a bit of "independence" and I understand their points. However I'm hesitating between the priority of this feature vs the browser extension.
The login feature is indeed confusing to users. I'll maybe hide this section for now to avoid users getting lost.
Have you tried the product? It's 100% functional (I use it almost everyday since 2 months 🙂).
I try to implement Paddle for my product and found the documentation quality pretty bad compared to Stripe ... They also seem to focus more on software licence and not really on SaaS but I might be wrong.
Btw does anyone know how wip.chat handles VAT? I don't see any VAT mentioned in the bill.
A quick update on the product: it's now fully open source and self-hostable. The code is on github.com/simple-login/app.
The browser extension is also now available for Chrome & Firefox (Safari's one is coming soon) and support for custom domain is fully functional :).