alt Hacker NewsIt doesn't right now. I'm thinking about options and so far all seem either "too much work" for the user. A few options:
1) a button to release the lock and allow the next sender to lock it again (only works for renames like you mention, facebook.com -> meta.com but not for apple.com and icloud.com sending together).
2) A button to manually add related domains. This is too much work because users can't guess new domains easily. I had betterstack.com email me as that and also as betterstackhq.com.
3) Allow up to 3-5 domains and let users block them manually. I feel this option is what permanent inboxes are for -- Clova already has an option to block entire senders (the whole domain or just a user).
4) Plugin some logic or AI in the backend to help categorize things together and understand that betterstack.com and betterstackhq.com are the same thing, apple.com, icloud.com etc are related, etc.
Anything else?
Replies
The convenience of having the first email in "claim" the inbox sounds nice, but how do you stop bad actors from claiming other genuine businesses before you've done business with them? ex., one fast food company spamming all of their competitors' names for your accounts?
What's the difficulty in letting someone manually add more domains, or replace the existing domain explicitly without going through a "release inbox, and the next email can claim it again" dance?
I really like this idea, but only in theory right now.
You could gather enough data to be able to handle big known players. Randoms get the single claim treatment, and for big services used by a lot of people you could learn the domains and allow adjacent domains.
Put the auto rejects into its own list and let the user add it to an existing inbox.
So if I have have the inbox for Facebook.com email, then I notice unsorted messages coming from meta.com, I can merge this into the Facebook inbox. You can probably guess and recommend the correct merge because they’ll inbox in the To: line is already known.
I think if you’re centralizing the data for merging across all users, you can really get smart about recognizing or train an agent on that info.
I don’t think you should ever totally trash an email though. This will lose you users over time. Put them in a list/folder. Similar to how there are Junk and Spam folders where flagged emails get put. The user still gets to have those emails in case they need them or a false flag occurs.