
Show HN: Kinda like posterous? - dotmatrix22
Always loved posterous, but I thought it would be really cool if somehow you could treat email addresses like twitter hashtags and usernames.<p>So after 2 days of coding, it's here and works. It's not pretty, but it's really neat &#38; kinda addicting.<p>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.<p>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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coderdude
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?

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dotmatrix22
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.

~~~
coderdude
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.

~~~
dotmatrix22
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.

~~~
coderdude
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.

~~~
dotmatrix22
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.

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

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rokhayakebe
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.

~~~
dotmatrix22
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.

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waleedka
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?

~~~
dotmatrix22
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.

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dotmatrix22
Just created a page for HN: <http://beta.inboxi.us/hackernews> . Right now we
only accept pictures, just email them to hackernews@inboxi.us

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swalsh
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.

~~~
dotmatrix22
Hey Swalsh, thanks for the feedback. We're working on a home page that helps
you discover what's being posted. Stay tuned.

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

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dotmatrix22
Hey mike right now you can only post a pic. Try sending one to hello@inboxi.us

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

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dotmatrix22
Ha, thanks rdl for the great feedback!

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

I assume these are coming.

~~~
dotmatrix22
Hey zdgman, currently its only public. We are considering adding private pages
and do plan to add edit features for only what you submitted.

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

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felixchan
What javascript plugin did you use for the Pinterest layout?

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dotmatrix22
Hey Felixchan, its an opensource JQUERY plugin called isotope:
<http://isotope.metafizzy.co/>

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sejje
This idea rocks.

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

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dotmatrix22
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.

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

~~~
dotmatrix22
Thanks fumar. Based on today's feedback we plan on supporting more media and
content type.

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aw3c2
Whatever I try, I get: Relay access denied

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dotmatrix22
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.

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aw3c2
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

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

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mtgentry
Nice work!

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ThaddeusQuay2
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?

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dotmatrix22
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.

~~~
ThaddeusQuay2
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.

