Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

#1

Post by TemporaryMail » Sun, Jul 14, 2024, 4:35 PM UTC

Made this privacy conscious temporary mail extension as a hobby a few years ago as I found a cool domain.

I've now revamped the UI, added more domains and created an extension that shows your inbox in your browser (it only asks for permission to read from TemporaryMail.com and not all sites like the other extensions), it's also free from ads (paying the service out of pocket and perhaps adding an upgrade feature later on).

What makes this site a bit more unique is that I wrote the email parser from scratch following the RFC (took me 2 months and tons of testing) so it should display all incoming emails exactly as they are displayed in your favorite email client.

The site itself: https://TemporaryMail.com

Firefox Extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-ema...

Chrome Extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/temporarymailcom-a-...

Edge Extension: https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/temporarym...

Opera Extension: https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/temporarymail...

Please give me your worst and criticize it to oblivion as I want to improve it. Also thinking about adding an API for it so let me know your thoughts on that too.

PS

I launched this back at the end of December 2020 and posted here on HN and it didn't get much traction.

Re: Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

#2

Post by singron » Sun, Jul 14, 2024, 4:51 PM UTC

Do you have a commercial interest or is this just for fun or a kind of public service?

Re: Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

#3

Post by xlinux » Sun, Jul 14, 2024, 5:31 PM UTC

The only feature temp mail service should focus on having tons of domains.

Many temp mail domains are blacklisted. only way to get around is rotating the domain name everyday.

I will give it a try.

Re: Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

#4

Post by TemporaryMail » Sun, Jul 14, 2024, 6:35 PM UTC

singron wrote: post #2

Do you have a commercial interest or is this just for fun or a kind of public service?

Just for fun.

It started with me getting annoyed with SHEIN as they sent out spam to me and their unsubscribe link was set to localhost (127.0.0.1 - they are still using this last I checked) and in the same time period I found a suitable domain at an auction so I thought I'd give this a go.

Re: Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

#5

Post by TemporaryMail » Sun, Jul 14, 2024, 6:38 PM UTC

xlinux wrote: post #3

The only feature temp mail service should focus on having tons of domains. Many temp mail domains are blacklisted. only way to get around is rotating the domain name everyday. I will give it a try.

You're right about that and I'm doing my best at rotating, but it's very easy to detect these addresses as the "detectors" can simply just set a cron to grab the latest domains once an hour.

I'm however thinking about creating a paid service with a low price (maybe like $2/month) just to filter out the majority of the bots and then using that money to get a lot of domains.

Re: Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

#6

Post by KomoD » Sun, Jul 14, 2024, 9:49 PM UTC

xlinux wrote: post #3

The only feature temp mail service should focus on having tons of domains. Many temp mail domains are blacklisted. only way to get around is rotating the domain name everyday. I will give it a try.

This is what the top sites do, e.g. temp-mail.org

And they also don't allow you to view all the active domains which helps against getting blacklisted quickly

Re: Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

#7

Post by KomoD » Sun, Jul 14, 2024, 9:52 PM UTC

Why generate the random names on the server? That could just be done on the client, reduces load and is faster.

Re: Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

#8

Post by omoikane » Sun, Jul 14, 2024, 11:00 PM UTC

KomoD wrote: post #6

xlinux wrote: post #3

The only feature temp mail service should focus on having tons of domains. Many temp mail domains are blacklisted. only way to get around is rotating the domain name everyday. I will give it a try.

This is what the top sites do, e.g. temp-mail.org And they also don't allow you to view all the active domains which helps against getting blacklisted quickly

I find it amusing that a .org site (temp-mail.org) has ads all over it while a .com site (temporarymail.com) does not, given that .org was mostly used by non-profits while .com is intended for commercial use.

Re: Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

#9

Post by TemporaryMail » Sun, Jul 14, 2024, 11:13 PM UTC

KomoD wrote: post #7

Why generate the random names on the server? That could just be done on the client, reduces load and is faster.

It's a pretty big list of names that I've scraped together.

There's barely and load on the server to generate the names and it only happens once for the new users so it wouldn't be worth putting that load on the client just for that one time, especially not with the traffic it's currently getting (currently around 1k users/day).

Re: Show HN: An ad free temporary mail service

#10

Post by TemporaryMail » Sun, Jul 14, 2024, 11:15 PM UTC

omoikane wrote: post #8

KomoD wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what the top sites do, e.g. temp-mail.org And they also don't allow you to view all the active domains which helps against getting blacklisted quickly

I find it amusing that a .org site (temp-mail.org) has ads all over it while a .com site (temporarymail.com) does not, given that .org was mostly used by non-profits while .com is intended for commercial use.

I remember when this was a thing like back in the early 2000s, but nowadays everyone bombards their users with ads regardless of TLD.