Show HN: MailDrop, throwaway e-mail addresses, built with Scala and Akka

Here's a few responses. The design at a wider width is, okay, let's call it suboptimal. Send me a pull request with a fix for 1600px screens and I'll gladly put it in. Testing was originally done on a non-maximized desktop, along with an iPad and iPhone. (If something looks strange on Android, send me a pull request for that fix, too.)

MailDrop was designed to be a friendly clone of Mailinator, with a little different architecture. It isn't going to approach the speed of Mailinator, but I'd like to think the extra functionality makes up for it. You can point any CNAME or MX toward MailDrop and it will accept messages; the system doesn't care about the recipient domain at all.

If you don't want to browse through the (poorly-formatted; what's up with that?) source, here's a quick roundup of the architecture. MailDrop runs in two JVMs and uses Redis as its datastore. One JVM runs the SMTP server (written in Scala, using the SubEthaSMTP Java library and a collection of custom Akka actors) and one JVM runs the webserver (written in Scala/Play).

Performance should always be IO bound; the Akka actors use very little CPU overhead. If you're finding that you're running into bottlenecks, spinning up another JVM is pretty easy. Right now, maildrop.cc is running on one small EC2 instance for everything; if it explodes, I'd probably just add another instance for another SMTP server.

You'll notice that there's no way to actually send mail from MailDrop. That's by design-- the moment you can send e-mail from a service without authentication, spammers are all over it. Hence, no forwarding messages, no forwarding inboxes, etc. MailDrop is designed to help fight spam.

Thanks again for the responses!

If they switched to a fixed width it would look a lot better and easier to read and scan through. You can try this in Google Chrome. Right-click on their page and select "inspect element". Then in the developer tools window find the <body> element and click on that. The body {} selector should come up on the right hand pane of the developer tools window, click to the right of the last bracket } and it'll let you add another rule, put in width:1000px; and then margin:auto; now go back and see the changes on the page. (refreshing the page will return it to normal btw). See. Much better.

There's a reason why most websites use a fixed width. People complained about fixed widths in the early 2000s because they used to be only 800px wide and they weren't used to the white bars on the side of their websites. Now that our monitors are about 1600 pixels wide fluid 100% widths are just too stretched out and it's harder to read and scan through text.

You can also use CSS3 media querries to change the width according to window size (I made a site using this http://timeforzen.com (resize the window and watch the layout change))

Forums and websites get lists of throw away email address domains and block them...how are you going to combat this problem? spamgourmet.com still has it, and it dozens to choose from and you only have one...

Also, where you say "the only cookie we use is to keep track of the most recent inbox that you've visited" - This isn't true. You use Google Analytics, so there is a cookie in use there too.

EDIT: Hmm, I probably should have mentioned this before, but if you visit that URL, the XSS that happens will lead to your IP address being displayed on a public page.

The thing I like about mailinator is that I know I'll be able to pick up the message that gets sent to it...