You send an email to this service to post a blog entry, and this service exposes your name and email address (as obtained from the email headers) to everyone! That’s a huge privacy disconnect in a world where exposed emails can cause a lot of problems, and more so for non-technical people, which this service intends to make things easy for.
One look at the homepage of this service shows all the email addresses used by the users to post. Since the service also claims (in another comment here) that spoofed email addresses won’t work, users must use a non-personal address and name if they don’t wish to expose their information publicly.
This site isn't an anonymous posting forum. If you want to be anonymous you can use an anonymous e-mail account, but for everyone else it's to speak with your name and your voice.
What you're looking for is a different service with different goals, and that doesn't make this one worse at what it is trying to do.
No need to get defensive. You have basically created a spam attractor for non-technical users by saying that this is suitable for “Grandpa and Grandma” and making them a lot more vulnerable to email scams.
Writing in one’s voice doesn’t need to have an email address attached with it. I can understand using the person’s name. You could do better by not displaying the email address or obfuscating it. Or you could remove that “Grandpa and Grandma” part from your description and say that it’s for those who understand how email addresses in public can get misused.
This isn't defensive. I'm simply stating that anonymous posting is different from named posting. That said, I will be adding a way to do anonymous posting and unlisted posting today. :-)
Named posting doesn’t need to expose one’s email address. You could just use the name. That was my point. There is no need to expose anyone’s email address to the world, be they technically knowledgeable people or otherwise.
I still believe your site is harmful to users unless the default is publishing with just the name and no email address, with an option of publishing with the email address if someone really wants to. The current defaults seem inverted.
I’ll stop with this comment since I’ve said enough.
Unlisted posting is complete. If you send to topic.unlisted@hackerspring.com (or anytopic.unlisted@hackerspring.com) the post will not show up in new/popular/categories. However, it will still show up in your user view.
If you want it to be visible with a link only and not even show on your user page, you can send to anytopic.linkonly@hackerpsring.com.
And while happily displaying the sender email publicly, it gives no indication that someone has embedded (potentially malicious) javascript in a post (why that is even allowed is another question), or that some expected 'blog posts' are actually unexpected redirects to external sites that can contain even more malicious/illegal content.
Leaving aside that a site like this is so wide open for abuse of all kinds it won't last five minutes, I don't even see the advantage of submitting a form at an email provider over simply submitting a form directly on the site.
We offer a public API with no access, so there is limited risk and, in addition, we do not use cookies. There are some dangers, but it's really limited in this context!
An attacker can just as easily perform the same attacks with free webhosting on any of the thousands of free webhosts!
You send an email to this service to post a blog entry, and this service exposes your name and email address (as obtained from the email headers) to everyone! That’s a huge privacy disconnect in a world where exposed emails can cause a lot of problems, and more so for non-technical people, which this service intends to make things easy for.
One look at the homepage of this service shows all the email addresses used by the users to post. Since the service also claims (in another comment here) that spoofed email addresses won’t work, users must use a non-personal address and name if they don’t wish to expose their information publicly.