Unique Email Channels

If you are anything like me, you probably have more than one email account. One account is only for trusted friends and colleagues. The other is for everyone else. I am always paranoid that I will get spammed from some service, like Facebook. Other times I want to get the newsletters or notifications from some site, but I may lose interest in them over time and want to quickly stop the emails.

The Problem

Every service I give my email address to needs to be handled differently. Gmail is really good about creating rules for handling emails. However, I don't know what email addresses I can possibly receive from. I also cannot feasibly create a rule for every email address a service has. For example, one web service alone may have a customer service email, a bug report email, a no reply email, and many others. This just won't work.

Another option is to create a new email account for every web service I use. I could have one email account each for Twitter, Stack Overflow, GitHub, etc. Creating an entirely separate email account is overkill though.

The Solution

Fortunately, there is a way. Many email providers allow for arbitrary tags to be added to an email address. For example, with Gmail, I can create an email account with the address my.email@gmail.com. Then, I can use my.email+twitter@gmail.com, my.email+stackoverflow@gmail.com, and my.email+github@gmail.com. All these email addresses will go to the same account. Most email providers have similar systems.

How it Works

You can think of the tags on an email address like a subdomain of a URL. The base email guarantees uniqueness and the tag allows for routing. These email addresses are known as disposable email addresses. I like to call them unique email channels. By giving every service a different email address, I can control the communication channel. If that email address is ever compromised by a spammer or I get tired of the emails, I just need to sever the channel.

Since all the unique email channels are delivered to the same email account, they are not immediately useful. We need to bring in the rule system. Gmail allows for rules to be based on the To: field. For example, I can have a rule that says, when I get an email sent to my.email+twitter@gmail.com, mark it as read, label it as Twitter, and archive it. I can have all sorts of complex rules that are specific to my needs for each service. I can even have Gmail forward an email to another email account.

Personally, I have one email account that just handles mail sorting. It takes in email from all my services, marks them as read, labels them appropriately, and archives them. If I get an email from a service I am interested in, I forward it on to my real email account. This allows me to build up an archive of newsletters and notifications, but I never see them if I don't want to. When I get tired of seeing a notification, I don't cancel it. Instead, I just change the rule. The rule system keeps the interface to all my notifications consistent. This way I don't need to dig through some website trying to figure out how to cancel my subscription.

Potential Problems

What if some spammer gets smart and decides to remove the tag? This problem is easy to solve. Just create a rule that deletes all emails sent directly to my.email@gmail.com.

What if some spammer gets smart and tries to guess which tags I use? This is much harder to protect against, especially since +twitter or +github would be easy to guess. Using unique email channels has been around for years and is still not in widespread use. I don't foresee this becoming largely popular to the general user anytime soon. So, there is little chance that someone will attempt this.

If that is not comforting enough, you can use tags that are not easily guessable. For example, you could use +apple20934 or +i.love.steve.jobs for your unique Apple email channel. This is admittedly security through obscurity, but it makes guessing channels even less likely. It's a similar security problem as passwords. Again, it is highly unlikely that spammers will be guessing email channels anytime soon.

If you know what exactly email address(es) you will receive from, you can have rules that only filter if both the To: and From: fields match your expectations. This almost guarantees safety from spammers, but may not be feasible for all situations. This approach could be foiled by worms or email spoofing, but again it would be hard to guess your rules. The key to security is to make spamming you more effort than it's worth. Spammers have plenty of low hanging fruit to spend their time on.

Advantages

1. Better spam protection than Gmail or any one service alone can provide.
2. Specific email handling rules for each service.
3. Don't need to tell your friends that you made a new email address if your email address is compromised by spammers.
4. Don't need to hunt down the subscription options to cancel email subscriptions.

Disadvantages

1. If you want to change the types of email notifications you receive from a service, you still need to go to the website.
2. It takes a little bit of time to set up a rule when creating a channel for a new service.
3. It takes a lot of time to change all your existing services to use your new, unique email channel.

Conclusion

Though it does take some time up front to set up, unique email channels are worth it for anyone who is paranoid about spammers or wants to automate how their email is handled. I expect to see similar patterns emerge in other communication systems as the event-driven web and personal cloud networks continue to develop.

PaintCode App Review

With the new iPad and its Retina Display, iOS apps are getting even larger due to the various sizes of assets. When a user downloads your app from the store, you want them to get it quickly. You especially don't want them to be forced to download from wifi if you can help it. Fortunately, a new app called PaintCode has been released just in time by PixelCut to help remedy this problem.

Summary

PaintCode is a vector image editor. What makes it special is that PaintCode generates Core Graphics code for both Mac OS X and iOS. The idea is that we can draw many of our graphics rather than include a series of rasters in the app's main bundle. PaintCode also serves as a bridge between graphics artists and developers. The graphics artist can generate the assets using PaintCode, then the developer can take the generated code and tweak it as needed.

Test Run

To really see if PaintCode could fill my needs, I stress tested it with a fairly complicated image: the Siri button. The Siri button touches nearly every feature of PaintCode, including arbitrary shapes, linear/radial gradients, and inside/outside shadows.

Within a few hours, I had all the intricate details worked out. I consider myself an amateur graphics artist, but PaintCode made the process very easy. Most of the controls are intuitive and easy to learn. The provided examples and videos also helped.

I then put the code to the test. I simply dropped the code into a custom UIView. To make things more interesting, I applied some affine transformations.

I found that the transformations worked perfectly with everything except, inside shadows. The inside shadows will translate properly, but won't rotate or scale properly. I am not entirely sure why they don't work. I expect this bug will be fixed in a future release.

Pros

Again, PaintCode made generating vector assets very easy. I tried out the trial of a competing app, Opacity, but I found PaintCode to be much more intuitive. I also appreciate the great attention to aesthetic detail, yet minimalistic style.

Everything in PaintCode is drawn using Core Graphics. So, whatever you see on the canvas is exactly what will appear in your own app.

The generated code may not be perfect, but it's pretty good. The advantage of PaintCode is it does the hard, tedious work. Once the image is finished, a developer can easily tweak details as needed to make the drawing more dynamic.

Cons

Though PaintCode generates some good Core Graphics code, it is not truly resolution independent. You will notice this particularly with the radial gradient on the button. I wanted to alternate colors about once every pixel or two. PaintCode only allowed 21 discrete steps for a gradient. Furthermore, since the number of steps is fixed, changing the scale changes the appearance. Fortunately, this can be remedied by tweaking the generated code. A simple for loop can dynamically change the number of steps as the scale changes.

As any graphics artist knows, vector images are not a silver bullet. There are some relationships that are not 1:1 linear transformations. For example, one object may scale twice as fast as another. The scale could even be x2. This scaling problem can be fixed in code though. Also, when the size changes, details often need to be added or removed. The code could be modified to do this automatically as the scale changes, but this is probably outside the scope of PaintCode and may be more trouble than it is worth.

My Wishlist

If there is anything I could have added to this app, it would be import SVG. Every graphics artist has his or her favorite vector editor. It would be amazing if PaintCode could import an SVG file (or AI file) and convert it to Core Graphics code. I have no doubt such a feature would be a large undertaking, but if PaintCode could do this, it would be worth so much more than $80.

Recommendation

If you have an app that is getting large, you should really look into getting PaintCode and converting some of your assets to Core Graphics. Or if you are trying to draw something in Core Graphics and find debugging too hard, PaintCode will make save you many hours.

Code

If you want a copy of my PaintCode file or Xcode project, you can find them on my GitHub account.

Disclaimer

I received a copy of PaintCode free for the purposes of reviewing. However, I do not receive any compensation if you purchase PaintCode.