Show HN: Kinda like posterous? | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Kinda like posterous?

53 pointsdotmatrix2238 comments

Always loved posterous, but I thought it would be really cool if somehow you could treat email addresses like twitter hashtags and usernames.

So after 2 days of coding, it's here and works. It's not pretty, but it's really neat & kinda addicting.

Anyone can email or text anything to _ _ _ _ _ _@inboxi.us and it immediately creates a public page and an email address. For example, say you wanted to create a page for coding errors called fmlcodesucks, you could just text or email it to fmlcodesucks@inboxi.us and it instantly posts your picture to that page and lets anyone contribute by sending pictures to fmlcodesuskcs@inboxi.us.

This is just an example and you can come up with any name you want, no account registration or any of that BS. Right now we only support pictures, but plan to support other stuff.Would love your feedback and see if you think there are any legs here to keep working on it.

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I like the idea because of the extremely low barrier to entry. What concerns me is how immediately exploitable it seems to be. What happens when I email a URL? Does it get linkified on the resulting page? What if my computer gets some malware that sends spam to everyone in my contact list. Does that page on inboxi.us become an outlet store for Viagra?

Hey coderdude, these are awesome points. A few things, since we pull everything into our email reactor we can run spam filters on the content sent to us, so while this wont be 100% effective we think we can scale this technology with some practice. Second, we already run malware and anti virus scans on everything sent to us, again this is not 100% bullet proof but since we're using gmail as a back end email appliance its not bad so far.

That's quite a burden to take on (and quite a technical challenge to get right). I wish you luck.

One more thing I wanted to find out about. How do you handle email signatures? When someone comments on a task in BaseCamp (via email) the entire email is posted to the thread, including their signature and whatever little images they included (photograph, or Facebook/Twitter icons). Is there anything you can do about that? Gmail seems to be pretty good at detecting the boilerplate part of a message -- possibly only after having seen one message from the user. This would be an important thing to nail.

Edit: What if you want to lock a page down so that only you or a select few may email updates? I would probably want that for at least one of the pages. Now that I'm thinking about it, the lack of registration is possibly due to how hard it would be to authenticate a user via easily-spoofed email. You might be able to come up with a sort of "secret key" that you add anywhere in the email but I could see that not working out for your average user.

Your personal email is never disclosed to anyone so there is no way for a spambot to ping back our users.

As for handling spam, yes it is a challenge but something we plan on doing to prevent spam is sending automatic authentication links to accounts we believe are posting a high volume in a short period of time. The authentication link will lead them back to a page that requires them to fill out a different captcha for each link.

Finally with regards to signatures, there is definitely OER software that exists that we can test out handling signatures and images inside the email itself.

I wasn't so much worried about the spammers finding their way back to me, but my spam finding its way to you. :) (via infection of course)

The authentication link is a good idea. They can still post non-automated messages (and automated messages if they find the right lib for breaking captchas) but at the very least it will give you a way to keep a close eye on suspicious activity. Someone starts triggering the captcha? Take a look at what they do.

This is all great feedback! BTW, if you have any ideas or ways to combat future issues like these would love to learn from you.

Glad I could help. I'll ping you if any other ideas come to mind.

dotmatrix22, I'd like to chat with you about how you're handling things - I'm working on a startup that is leveraging this in a similar way and I'd like to see if you can help us out as a consultant. Shoot me an email (under my profile).

Nice idea. I bought the domain name publesh.com to do exactly this, wrote the code, but never pushed it live because I could see no way it could become a sustainable business. Very nice implementation you have there; a bit slow, but that could be due to traffic, hence a good problem to have.

Hey Rokhayakebe, thanks for the great feedback! Would love to connect with you and see if you are interested in helping out (ohaffaratgmail). We are working on making the site faster.

It brings up the question: why did posterous stop doing this? Even before they pivoted to the spaces idea, they slowly deemphasized the email-to-blog feature and then removed it from their home page completely. What kind of problems did they get into with this approach?

Hey Waleedka. I dont recall exactly whether posterous ever enabled the creation of emails like hashtags and public pages. I think the approaches are quiet different. But nevertheless, great questions.

One could guess it was spam pages or SEO pages.

Just created a page for HN: http://beta.inboxi.us/hackernews . Right now we only accept pictures, just email them to hackernews@inboxi.us

This is actually a pretty cool idea! I'm sure content is slow right now being fresh... but it would be nice if you added some more features for exploring content.

Hey Swalsh, thanks for the feedback. We're working on a home page that helps you discover what's being posted. Stay tuned.

Apparently I created a page at "http://inboxi.us// by emailing "/@inboxi.us". Although it doesn't seem to work.

Hey mike right now you can only post a pic. Try sending one to hello@inboxi.us

I don't think you could ever go wrong with "____ for lazy people". This looks great.

Ha, thanks rdl for the great feedback!

Any way to have a private account or log in and edit the post page?

I assume these are coming.

Hey zdgman, currently its only public. We are considering adding private pages and do plan to add edit features for only what you submitted.

Perhaps introducing a pay for private page feature would be a nice thing to have to bring in some revenue.

What javascript plugin did you use for the Pinterest layout?

Hey Felixchan, its an opensource JQUERY plugin called isotope: http://isotope.metafizzy.co/

This idea rocks.

Front page trending/newest links don't all work.

Thanks Sejje, yeah I haven't spent much time on the home page yet, but hope to have something this weekend that shows you what's trending.

Not bad. I like it. Very easy to use. It needs more than pictures though.

Thanks fumar. Based on today's feedback we plan on supporting more media and content type.

Whatever I try, I get: Relay access denied

what did you try, sending can email or visiting the site? can you be more specific?

Hey aw3c2, can you try to send a picture to hello@inboxi.us, we will see if it comes in, then go to www.inboxi.us/hello to see if it showed up.

No luck. I am not even sure it is a problem at your end and not mine. For more information please provide a contact address on your profile or so, so we don't have to spam HN for this. ;)

[20:39:25] ESMTP> MAIL FROM:<my@address.com> SIZE=18028

[20:39:25] SMTP< 250 2.1.0 Ok

[20:39:25] SMTP> RCPT TO:<hello@inboxi.us>

[20:39:25] SMTP< 554 5.7.1 <hello@inboxi.us>: Relay access denied

error occurred on SMTP session

* Error occurred while sending the message:

554 5.7.1 <hello@inboxi.us>: Relay access denied

thats a bummer, what mail program are you using so we can try and replicate the bug and fix it, thanks!

Nice work!

1) I would pay for private pages.

2) Of the 8 trending/new items, only 2 are linked.

3) On @knobreak, there are 20 photos, but the top says 166.

4) What will you do when @childporn begins to trend?

5) You don't have a TOS, which is awesome, because I hate censorship. Can I assume that you will eventually install the standard one, which forbids pretty much everything, depending on interpretation at your sole discretion?

Hey Thadeus,

1. Interesting idea

2. We are rebuilding the home page, should have something far better soon.

3. What browser are you using? It's possible there is a bug, however on Firefox and Chrome latest editions there are 166 photos and 91 people.

4. To prevent porn from trending we will have community reporting features. I also believe we would handle this quite similar to how twitter, facebook, or flickr handle this.

5. We don't have a TOS because we threw the project up very quickly but plan on having one soon. Our TOS will aim to protect the greater good of the community.

3) I'm using Chrome v18.0.1025.151m.

4) That almost guarantees that I won't be using your service. Effectively having "Report this image for abuse." everywhere, is one of the most egregious enablers of today's online censorship. I don't expect you to solve this problem, but you should at least attempt something different.

5) What do my private pages have to do with the community? If you provide private pages, then only a subset of the TOS should apply to them.

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