Show HN: Asdfasdf.co – emails from the internet's gibberish form fills | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Asdfasdf.co – emails from the internet's gibberish form fills

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78 pointsmikeortman31 comments

Services like this have existed for a long time. There's ThrowAwayMail.com, temp-mail.org, and a few others that I used years ago which I can't even remember. Those services also have the added benefit of rotating domain names and private email access.

All that aside it's a cool project!

I think you misunderstood the intent of the project. The author specifically bought domain names that are likely to be filled in to forms by random people. I really like the idea as a privacy awareness stance.

The wildcard bit is just extra. I'm partial to 10minutemail.com.

Author here. Yup! This is project/experiment and not a product

Does sending to admin@asdfasdf.co work on the website? You'll want to be extra-careful about social engineering with stuff like that...

uhhh.... it doesn't anymore... thanks for pointing that out. Sometimes the obvious is the easiest, and most dangerous, thing to forget.

There's a short list of names you should probably blacklist, i don't have it on hand but look around for it

thanks! found a list :) EDIT: See dogecoinbase's neighboring comment for the list. I was that guy for not posting a link to what I found :(

If anyone else is looking for one, I've used this in the past: https://github.com/marteinn/The-Big-Username-Blacklist

What about hostmaster@asedasdf.co and the remaining RFC system addresses?

I got those covered as well, dogecoinbase posted an extensive list below

I find it quite funny to see so many Quora breach emails when I first go to the site.

I recommend the Firefox addon "Bloody Vikings!". You can just right-click on a form field and select from a bunch of trashmail providers. The inbox gets opened and the address is inserted automatically.

Hum, I do something like that with my personal mail services: an alias (created by hand or random depending on where I use it) that I can keep as long as I want, dispose when I want, I can easy discover spam sources and easily filter messages simply using To: field etc...

It do more things, at the price of costing money (not much really), I mean I have free unlimited alias but I pay a fee for mail service as a whole.

Your project may help students and in general people who can't easy pay for personal mail so kudos for that :-)

How long until it gets blocked ?

I have my own setup but I don't share the domains for fear that a abuse case will get the enite domain blocked.

yeah, who knows. While I'm not an expert in 100% of domain registration policies, the ICANN abuse protocols doesn't have prohibitions on this sort of system. If anyone knows of a policy better and think I might be violating a policy, please send me an email at mikeortman@gmail.com and I can work with any organization to make sure I'm compliant.

I don't think he means banned by ICANN, but my the people sending the email themselves. I know plenty of registration forms that have disallowed temporary mailbox services. I think MailChimp etc. also ban them?

I really like the html2pix conversion. Pixel tracking be gone! but then i remember its the spam mail service.

> It’s absolutely overkill, and I love it. Its fast, stable, and pretty cheap to host.

I think this is going to get way more expensive than you're imagining based on experience running those services especially PhantomJS.

Lambda runs for about 1 second at 256MB. I can run about 1.6 million calls of this lambda for free each month. The real cost is going to be the S3 bucket.

I usually simply use a fake temporary email from mailinator.

I've increasingly found that services are catching on to this and blocking the mailinator domains. Luckily there are a bunch more temporary email services; if mailinator is blocked I generally search google for "temporary email" and select the second or third one. Hasn't let me down yet.

Pretty cool idea. How does it determine what information to extract to give to the user?

The raw MIME file contains headers, to, from, body, attachments, etc. I use a MIME file parser to grab all that information. The body is processed a little more to get rid of potentially dangerous content before it is stored

There are email parsing libraries which reads the raw headers and extracts relevant information(to, from, subject, body, attachments etc).

I predict that running this service will get expensive fast...

When you have a thousand emails per second arriving, you're going to be paying a lot for that html2png conversion lambda function...

Which is probably why Mailinator has paid versions for teams and enterprise.

https://www.mailinator.com/v3/#/#pricing_table_pane

Well, of course, but I'll put in some more though if it gets anywhere near that (like ads or some sort). Running lambdas are really cheap. Realistically, the image conversion costs will not surpass monthly free tier unless I'm trigger 1.6 million emails a month. The expensive bit by far would come to the file storage which is something I'll figure out later

The idea is fun, but in reality the contents is not that interesting.

What would make someone come back to the site, since you mentioned ads.

oh dont get me wrong, there is almost 0 value to this site outside of a little chuckle from myself that it worked. I'll only add ads in that very slim case where it starts costing me money

My point is more that I don't think ads will generate any $ at at due to the nature of the website.

Would be better the asdfasdf.asdf domain.

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