AKA³ Help

Help topics

• Setting your username

  When you register for this service, you are asked to define a username. The username must be at least 4 characters and not be in use by anyone else. Generally a shorter username is better, as it becomes part of your email address. Once it is defined, it cannot be changed.

  For additional privacy, choose a username that is not associated with your real name or identity.

  Shorter usernames (1, 2 or 3 characters) are available as a premium add-on. More info.

• Connecting with a wallet to register or login

  One of the things that makes this service unique is your ability to sign-up without needing a password. As the "3" in the servie name implies, we are focused on web3, which uses decentralized identity on the internet. To use this service you need a digital identity or web3 wallet app. If you don't have a wallet app, you can use your email address, which sends you a one-time code to prove your ownership of the email. You can then upgrade to a wallet app at a later date, if desired.

  When you register via your wallet, you prove that you control a specific Ethereum address. Then when you login in the future, you prove that you still control that Ethereum address. For privacy and security, we don't store your Ethereum address, but a one-way encrypted version of it.

  You can use any digital identiy or web3 wallet app that supports the WalletConnect version 2 protocol. We recommend ID Pocket, a free digital identity wallet app, and a product we have developed.

• Setting your real email address

  Once you register, you'll be prompted for your email address. This is the only piece of personal information that the service collects and stores. Your email address is needed so the service can forward emails to you. It is never used for marketing purposes nor sold to anyone else.

  When you add (or change) your real email address, you'll receive an email asking you to verify your email address to prove that you have control of that email address. You must verify the email address in order to use the service.

• Normal usage

  The normal flow begins when you are asked for your email address, either in-person or online. You invent the first part of your alias and then provide the full alias address to the requester. You do not register these addresses with this service, you only specify any that you want blocked in the future.

  For example, if your username is "alice", the static part of your email alias is ".alice@aka3.net". You control what is placed in front of that. So, if Southwest Industries is asking for your email address, you could use something like "swi.alice@aka3.net". Generally, a 2-4 character abbreviation works well to keep the email address at a manageable length.

• Blocks

  You can block any email alias address that you have defined. Hopefully, this is a rare event, but unfortunately some people behave badly. To setup a block, go to the "Blocks" section of your account and enter the left part of the email alias address that you used. The service now blocks all emails from that address from reaching your real email account.

  To continue the previous example, if you used "swi.alice@aka3.net" to sign-up for a raffle, then later, after you didn't win anything, the company starts sending you unwanted marketing emails. They don't honor your unsubscribe attempts, or even worse, the company has sold your email address and now you are receiving spam emails from others. No worries, just setup a block and you'll never see another email to that email alias address.

• Blocked Senders

  The Blocked Sender feature allows you to block emails from a specific address, regardless of which email alias address is being used. You can block a single email address, or all addresses from a specific domain name.

  To further continue the example, suppose Southwest Industries got hacked, and you are now receiving emails from multiple email addresses at scaminvestments.com. You may still want to receive emails from Southwest Industries, so you don't want to block the alias address. You can setup a blocked sender of "*@scaminvestments.com" to block all emails originating from that domain.

• Replying to emails

  You can reply to any email you receive through an alias account. You'll notice that the to address is coded with both the actual sender and the alias address used. To reply to an alias message, just press the reply button as normal. The reply is sent to aka3.net, which then removes your real email address from the message and formats the from and to fields before sending it on to the intended recipient.

  Note that you can't use an alias account to send someone an email directly, you can only reply to messages you've received through an alias account. This is a security control to prohibit spammers from using the service to send unsolicitated emails.

• Activity usage

  Your account contains a dashboard page where you can view the number of emails that have successfully used the service and those that have been blocked. You can select various timeframes to view this data. Note that no details are kept as to which alias account was used, only a daily roll-up by type of activity.

• Inappropriate words

  Incoming and outgoing email messages are scanned against a "bad words" list. If the service finds more than 3 bad words in an email message, then the message is not delivered, and instead you'll receive an email stating that. For incoming emails, the first 3 bad words will be blotted out with asterisks.

  Please don't send or receive vulgar or sexually-oriented emails. If you consider this censorship, and you routinely use language that your grandma would disapprove of, you can disable this feature in the profile settings.

• Tracking images

  By default, the service attempts to remove all tracking images from incoming emails. Tracking images are tiny, invisible images that when displayed, send information to a service that you opened the email. This can also include the time, your location, and device information. We believe that this is an invasion of your privacy, but if you disagree, you can disable this feature in the profile settings.

• Privacy

  Privacy is a very important aspect of this service. We collect and store the absolute minimum amount of data from you. Your email address is collected and stored so we can forward email messages to you. When you register, we collect your Ethereum address and one-way encrypt it so that we can verify that you are the same person when you login again. We also store the first 6 charachers of the Ethereum address to use as verification if you email/phone us for support.

  After the service processes (forwards or blocks) an email message, it is immediately deleted.

  We do not log the actual email alias addresses used nor the exact time they were forwarded or blocked, but rather only log a daily account of activity types for each username. Also, the email server logs are purged as soon as practical.

  Further, if you ever decide to cancel this service, you can permantly delete all blocks and blocked senders that you have setup. In addition, your real email address is deleted from your account, so no personally identifiable information (PII) exists after termination of your account.

• Email delivery speed

  The server checks for emails every 3 minutes, so the average wait time to receive an email message or to have a sent email message delivered is a minute and a half.

If you have a suggestion to improve this service, or discover an issue, please contact us at support [at] rktechworks.com.