
Show HN: Asdfasdf.co – emails from the internet's gibberish form fills - mikeortman
https://medium.com/p/52aad86af33a
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warent
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!

~~~
scrollaway
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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hoppelhase
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.

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xte
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 :-)

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mbrumlow
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.

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mikeortman
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.

~~~
richthegeek
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?

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

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nathancahill
> 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.

~~~
mikeortman
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.

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zachguo
I usually simply use a fake temporary email from mailinator.

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CommieBobDole
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.

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Aerex12
Pretty cool idea. How does it determine what information to extract to give to
the user?

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mikeortman
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

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londons_explore
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...

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mikeortman
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

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wingerlang
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.

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mikeortman
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

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

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tzfld
Would be better the asdfasdf.asdf domain.

