Wednesday, October 31, 2007
new Mailinator alternate domains - (including putthisinyourspamdatabase.com)
The delay was in part this was due to all the new domains we added. Well, here is the list. Note this is NOT the complete list - because in general, we don't know what the complete list is. Anyone (even you!) can point any domain you like at mailinator.com and it will happily accept the email sent to that domain. So if you have a domain or two laying around - feel free to point it to us! (and let us know!)
Here's the list ! (note: capitalization doesn't matter, just added for effect)
anythingYouWant@mailinator.com is the same as:
anythingYouWant@PutThisInYourSpamDatabase.com
anythingYouWant@ThisIsNotMyRealEmail.com
anythingYouWant@binkmail.com
anythingYouWant@SpamHerePlease.com
anythingYouWant@SpamHereLots.com
anythingYouWant@SendSpamHere.com
anythingYouWant@chogmail.com
anythingYouWant@SpamThisPlease.com
anythingYouWant@frapmail.com
anythingYouWant@obobbo.com
anythingYouWant@devnullmail.com
We'll get these on the site very soon.
Monday, October 8, 2007
Mailinator gots new shoes!
That's right, a complete visual make-over. Perhaps you noticed?
First things first. Credit for the new design goes to Nicole Hanusek. She has a fine eye and the patience to deal with people who know exactly what they want, but are having a hard time describing it, because they really have no idea what they want. Except good, they want good. Oh, and like that other site. But not exactly. Or even really at all. Seriously, at least we both wanted basically the same thing, even if not quite exactly the same. We were definitely in agreement on almost every aspect, except that one bit. Oh, and that other bit.
If she ever rolled her eyes at us, we never saw.
Secondly, thank you for all the emails praising the new design. We really did get quite a few that complimented us by saying things like, "Hey, what happened to the rss feeds?", and "Where the hell are the alternate domains?", and also "p.s. yeah, um, the new site. it's ok." To all of the hundreds of thousands of people who use Mailinator every day, "You're welcome!"
To answer all your compliments, the rss feeds still work fine. We just forgot to paste in the little graphic. Oops. It's there now. The alternate domains also still work fine. You can keep using sogetthis.com, mailin8r.com, and the others. We're going to be adding more, and changing a few other things, so we decided to not put the list up just yet.
We didn't just put new make-up on the old Mailinator though, the back-end has been extensively tweaked to provide even better performance. Some bugs were fixed (though it seems like there's always one more). Throughput has improved, which is a good thing as we sometimes peak at over 10 million emails a day. The memory footprint is actually smaller now, so we should be able to keep emails around for longer. Yes, the whole thing still runs on a single server. If you need hosting, you should definitely consider ServerBeach. They've been great for us (much better than our previous host), and if you use the code BA83A6U6H2 you'll save $100.
There's more to come, too. For example, we're working on internationalizing the service by adding support for UTF-8 in email. We know that some of you want to read your Korean spam in Korean, and we're trying to help. To all you Germans who use Mailinator to sign up for accounts on sites that provide "art" videos, we want to process your umlauts with the passion they deserve. To everyone working hard in Bangalore (hi guys! hot enough for ya?) and using Mailinator to sign up for yet another linux forum, we would love - LOVE! - to be able to correctly render emails in each and every one of the 22 official languages of India. And do you think there's anyone in China who might appreciate an instant, anonymous, and disposable email service (but doesn't speak English)? Yeah, we thought so too.
Making the back-end do all that correctly is harder than we thought, but we're working on it. The real problem is that when we called up a professional translation service to ask how much it would cost to get our web site translated into, say, Icelandic, they wanted more than the cracked button, 5 bottle caps, and $2.87 in change we found under our desks. So we're asking for volunteers. If, for example, anyone out there speaks Lithuanian and would like to do us a favour, one of us could use a date. Oh, and also if you wouldn't mind translating some text for us so we can have a Lithuanian version of our homepage for all you Lithuanian speaking Lithuanians, that'd be great!
French would be nice too.