Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

The majority of the work was done through testing lots of emails and I must have sent at least a thousands emails to myself from different providers and sites.

I've deleted the bookmarks in an attempt to reduce the PTSD it caused, but I think the main one I visited was RFC 1341 as I had some difficulties understanding the boundaries and encoding.

What was really tricky is getting it to work with all the different types as some emails didn't have boundaries while others had them, some were encoded entirely in base64, some partially, some of them were just plaintext, others were HTML while some were mixed or even offered multiple versions depending on what the email client supported.

Best thing is honestly to try it out and just pick a random address and send a really tricky email to it, would love to see you break the parser and telling me so I can improve it.

You can get all the stuff you mentioned for a fraction of the time and money it would cost to create a disposable email service and then you would also only target the service you wanted instead of sitting around and hoping that a user creates an account at the site you're looking for.

The real value would in the reputation and history of the account (e.g a popular account on a social media site or community) and this isn't a thing that someone would use a disposable email service for as they wouldn't want to risk losing access to the account.

> Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue

It's not privacy conscious. Privacy conscious would mean A) does not use Cloudflare as a CDN B) does not require JavaScript C) does not discriminate against Tor users.

There are a few services like this already, which I'm not going to spoil for cred on HN, but my rating of this site as of now is 0/10, unusable in the literal sense.

For example, the platform approach? Allow people to easily set up a temporary email service with their own domain. That would go around the problem needing changing domains all the time. You could make it easy for people to search and buy their temp email domain through you.

Or if that is too much, work, allow people to self-host your service by open sourcing it and creating Docker compose configurations etc.

I would personally also write a spec for one-click account delete link that can be recognized automatically, sent with the email. If that takes traction, then it would benefit everybody. It just might, as it benefits the service provider the most.

What is the difference between the two though?

This kind of reasoning is why people can't run their own email servers anymore and instead have to rely on the big services.

>If you know the space, you'll be aware CAPTCHAs are trivially defeated today, regardless of the provider.

They are a lot more reliable than an email which is basically just a domain that anyone can buy and setup within mere minutes giving them access to endless email addresses.

>you generally need some sort of unique relatively hard to get many of identifier

Why not use phone numbers instead if the issue is truly important to them? This would cost spammers and bots way more money than emails.

Perhaps it's due to the fact that they won't be able to use the phone number to send their spam (or they could I guess, but it would cost them some money).