Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Mailinator is a great product. My favorite part about it is how whenever I register for something, the clever form validation software always rejects the mailinator.com email address. Then I visit mailinator, see their alternate domain name du jour in image form (so bots can't harvest it, hah!), and then that works perfectly. It makes me giggle with joy every time I do it.

It's also nice not receiving ads in the mail every hour of every day just because I wanted to try some new YC-startup's product.

View on HN

I worry we're going to need disposable social ids now too like email. That's something facebook/twitter probably won't appreciate. I would LOVE to try a lot of services that require one of those logins but am not comfortable giving them access to my info.

BrowserID solves that one: a disposable email becomes a disposable identity.

Create an "alter ego" account on Facebook. http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/gen-random-us-us.php if you need fake name and address ideas, or just use whatever you wish your name was. If you get too funny with the name though, FB's filter won't believe your name.

Then, keep a separate Chrome profile that's logged into the fake facebook, and your identity is safe. Probably best to lock down all privacy settings on the fake user to absolute maximum lockdown, to avoid information leaking onto Facebook's public layer that may tie you to it.

That was the strategy I used when I worked for a company that did business with Facebook games. Those things were so spammy, I would never want my actual friends to be spammed with all the viral content. To this day I keep my fake account for any and all untrusted FB-related things.

Facebook now requires your phone number in order to register. Have a way to use fake phone too?

I'm fairly certain this is untrue. Looking at the signup form, all I can see is name, email, password, birthdate and gender. They may ask for it later, but that almost certainly is optional.

This is sort of true. If you want to use the account as a developer account you have to register your phone number. Also probably to advertise.

I recently wanted to create an "Admin" account for a client I was developing a web-app for as I didn't want to link my personal facebook account to my work. But with the phone number requirement the account got flagged and rejected from the system.

Frustrating!

If that's true, a $15 tracfone takes care of it.

Sorry, but fake facebook account isn't worth that much. YMMV.

There are SIP providers which offer phone numbers on their free tiers. But I'm sure they would appreciate registering throwaway accounts even less than Facebook and its ilk.

According to this[0] you can also use your own domain and send all the mails to mailinator. I dont think those form validation software would so clever to check your MX records (or their alternate domain name du jour would not work)

[0] http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2008/01/your-own-private-mail...

Nice. Hopefully I can just CNAME something.example.com to mail.mailinator.com, and everything will just work.

Edit: yes, this works perfectly.

It would be nice if there was a quick-and-easy open-source version of an in-memory mail server. I'd like to run my own service, but not enough to write a robust SMTP server from scratch.

I still think that mail servers could really use a disruption. It is still way too complex just to get something simple set up.

I haven't surveyed the field extensively but this has been my experience with the common recommendations. If anyone knows of a server that already exists and would make it trivial to set up basic SMTP/IMAP/POP3 with authentication let me know.

Ideally the only configuration info I would need would be something like this:

allow_imap = True

allow_pop3 = True

allow_smtp = True

accept_mail_for = ['this_domain.com', 'another_domain.com']

#users

users = ['jeff@this_domain.com', 'molly@another_domain.com']

#forwards

forwards = {'jeff@this_domain.com': 'cookiecaper@some_domain.com'}

and then, a program like mail_server_passwd would ask me for my username and let me set a password, and that would be that. It shouldn't be any difficult to bootstrap a mail server, and right now setting something that has POP3, IMAP, and SMTP up can take hours for experienced admins unless they know the mail server(s) very well ahead of time.

OpenSMTPD comes very close to your ideal simple configuration, a 5 line configuration gets you up and running. Tie this together with openbsd's extremely simple pop3 server, you have something that is both extremely simple and easy to set up.

http:///opensmtpd.org

Keep an eye on OpenSMTPD. For a taste, look at the sample configurations at https://calomel.org/opensmtpd.html.

[Warnings: OpenSMTPD apparently hasn't eaten anyone's mail yet, but it's hardly done. By design, it doesn't include as many options as other mail servers, some of which may be useful. I don't think OpenSMTPD been ported to non-OpenBSD yet. calomel.org tends to be out of date, inaccurate or dangerously incomplete.]

This is what you're looking for: http://quintanasoft.com/dumbster/

What about using a ramdisk? Of course, it wont be as optimized since the software thinks it's writing to disk, but..

Also, some SMTP servers are probably pretty easy to modify. I use qpsmtpd[1], which is probably quite easy to modify. Then, all you need is a IMPAD that can read from memory..

I would like to have my mail in something like Redis. It would give easy access from different languages etc..

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qpsmtpd

Warning! If you do this, anyone might be able to create HTTPS certificates for your domain name!

A lot of certification authorities will allow you to get a certificate for example.com if you can prove that you can reply to an email sent to an email address @example.com. If you configure an MX record pointing to the mailinator MTAs, then anybody can request a cert and ask to validate domain ownership by contacting whatever@example.com, and can subsequently browse the whatever@ mailbox on mailinator to read and reply to the confirmation email.

Are you skipping over something in that explanation about which email(s) one must be able to read? Because the way you said it makes it sound as if anyone could make fake certs for hotmail, gmail, etc. And that can't be right... I hope.

Presumably something like "root" or "webmaster," but those aren't illegal on mailinator: http://mailinator.com/maildir.jsp?email=webmaster&x=0...

This is partially right(!)

A security researcher once obtained a certificate for Microsoft's live.com domain by registering an email account sslcertificates@live.com and using it to reply to the CA's verification email.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/11/state_of_ssl_analysi...

You're right, but I was just proposing to use one of your own domain, not your real, business, holy domain. You can register a new one for less than 10$/year, or you can just use a free third level subdomain (like trashbin.example.com)

My favorite part about it is that most sites I register for do NOT reject the mailinator.com email address. I always think "I'll probably get rejected and have to hunt down an alternate", but 80-90% of the time my mailinator address is accepted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com