Some related previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3617074 2012
And a blog post by me in reply to those comments, which is how I remembered it :) https://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/18065079081/cogs...
Very useful service that I have used for many years. However, in the updated version of Mailinator I can't find the "Alternate Inbox Name" anymore. Do anyone know why this function was removed?
Before I used mailinator I was using the + addressing feature at google. I just did username+site@ . The thing I found (at least back a fairly long time ago) - a lot of folks you don't even think DO in fact sell your emails or get bought and sell your email, or maybe it's their order processing or shopping cart software. I couldn't fully figure it out.
It seems to matter a lot less now. I assume my email is out there, but google does a remarkable job filtering my inbox (paying customer if that makes a difference). And I've added DMARC / SPF / DKIM as well to my outbounds (went from thousands of forged outbound to basically none so presumably spammers are also watching some of these signals for whatever reason).
I always loved how fast mailinator was, and once I had that for all those random quick orders I used it. Now I've just started using amazon for just about everything - so less of a need for the mailinator emails.
The AgingHashmap is basically a rate limiting device. Nowadays, Guava provides something like this "out of the box".
Oh, and thanks for Mailinator.
I must say I'm surprised a Java application could handle 2.5M emails/day (29/second) in less than 1 GB of RAM.
Is there a container/vm out there that's ready to serve up a private Mailinator-type instance that you can just point a domain to?
(2007)
Surprised to see this here now after 11 years.
Needless to say, this is incredibly out of date. Mailinator now runs across several servers with a real-time websocket system tied to Redis channels for incoming emails. The multiple server system is more for fault-tolerance than scaling issues.
The Websocket-to-redis connection allows incoming emails to be available the instant they arrive (fully) at Mailinator. Instantly - no polling front-end or otherwise. Public email storage is still in-memory with a system that chunks emails into common parts and reuses them. A reference counting garbage collector cleans them up once no email in the system is still using that part. I tried compression a million different ways but nothing beat reusing parts of emails.
http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-mailinator-compre...
The 2007 article is a valid picture of things then, but the system has come a long, long way since that time.