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Archive for the ‘10MinuteMail’ Category

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Updated 10MinuteMail.com

Friday, August 10th, 2007

I just launched an updated version of 10MinuteMail.com. I gave it a new look and feel. Hopefully people like it. I've also added a neat link which will copy the e-mail address into your clip-board for you, so you don't have to select and copy yourself. It uses a combination of javascript and Flash and seems to work on every browser. And I swapped in a new e-mail domain of fishfuse.com as the old domain was getting an amazing amount of spam daily (around 250k).

Behind the scenes I've upgraded to Seam 2.0beta, which went smoothly enough, once I remembered that I'd modified the build.xml in some important ways, and the initial issues weren't releated to the Seam upgrade, but to the build not setting a few custom flags. Easily solved.

Tell me what you think of the new site, and give me feedback or suggestions for new features.

Thanks!

Devon

Posted in 10MinuteMail, Seam | 2 Comments »

Firefox, xhtml, JBoss 4.2.0, JSF, and Google Ads

Sunday, June 10th, 2007

I upgraded the JBoss instance on my server just over a week ago from 4.0.5 to 4.2.0. Two things happened after that: Firstly, my google adsense revenue dropped by half, secondly I was contacted by two different people who were having some e-mails show a big error in Firefox, instead of showing up correctly. I don't use Firefox myself, I use Safari about 98% of the time and Camino when I find a site that doesn't render correctly in Safari. Today I discovered, while working on a new ad layout, that in Firefox the Google ads weren't rendering at all, throwing this error in the Firefox error console:

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Object cannot be created in this context" code: "9" nsresult: "0x80530009 (NS_ERROR_DOM_NOT_SUPPORTED_ERR)" location: "http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js Line: 4"]

Basically iframes can't be programatically inserted into strict xhtml elements. I did some googling and discovered that there were some discussions around this, but most of them simply said "either ditch google ads, or use text/html instead." But I WAS using text/html, both in the meta content tag in the pages, and then later (while working on this issue) in the JBossWeb web.xml mime type configuration for xhtml, just in case. Using wget with --save-headers didn't show anything unexpected. However, Firefox kept getting the response header saying the page was application/xhtml+xml which caused it to perform very strict validation, both breaking the google ads, and not letting sloppy tags or duplicated tags into the page, which are inherently going to happen when you're rendering html e-mail within a page.

The cause of the break was not moving to JBossWeb in 4.2.0, nor any JBoss code itself. It turns out that when the JSF implementation was changed from MyFaces to Sun's JSF-RI as part of the JBoss and Seam upgrade I did, the default content mime type changed as well. JSF-RI sets it to application/xhtml+xml. The fix was simple, add the following tag just before the <head> tag in each .xhtml faclets page:

<f:view contentType="text/html"/>

Posted in 10MinuteMail, JBoss, Java, Seam | 6 Comments »

How to cleanout your postfix queues by sender

Tuesday, May 29th, 2007

This post is mostly to help me remember how to do this, if the situation arises again.

I just had a lot of mail backup on my server. The 10MinuteMail inbox was over 300 MB (usually it kept below a megabyte), Postfix's active queue was maxed out at 20,003 entries (why the 3, I don't know), and the incoming queue was another 20,000+. Basically everything was all backed up. I'm not 100% sure how this condition gets started. I've seen it a few times on my old server when super high volumes of incoming mail deliveries combined with other sites I hope serving up high bandwidth to end users. This is the first time it's happened on the new server. It may be time to change out the domain that the 10MinuteMail e-mail addresses are using.

Regardless, using qshape I was able to identify a handful of from addresses (presumably either spammers or a cyclic bounce issue) which accounted for over 8,000 of the mail in the active queue. By using the following command I was able to purge out just those messages from the queue:

mailq|awk ' /^[0-9A-F][0-9A-F]*.*error.mag2.com$/ {print $1}'|tr -d '*'| xargs -rn1 postsuper -d

Where error.mag2.com is the domain, or from address you wish to delete. This works pretty well. I may whip up a bash script to handle this in the future.

For reference, the worst offenders are:

  1. magerr.combzmail.jp
  2. prjapanmail.jp
  3. error.mag2.com
  4. accessmail.jp
  5. mayld.net

Why so many from Japan? I have no idea....

Posted in 10MinuteMail, Debian, Spam | 1 Comment »

Spam

Sunday, December 24th, 2006

When I launched 10minutemail.com, tons of forum admins decried the idea. They screamed that it would let spammers on to their forums, and that they wouldn't sell e-mail lists to spammers, etc...

A month goes by, and let's see what we have. My server used to get around 200-300 e-mail a day. In the past week it averaged 20,000-30,000 e-mail a day. Virtually all of those were to old (expired) 10minutemail.com accounts. Presumably virtually all spam. 30,000 a day!?

This proves that the average person simply CAN'T trust a random site or forum with their real e-mail address. Are there some forums/sites that are trustworthy? Sure! Does the average net user have any ability to tell with certainty if a given site or forum will sell their e-mail address or spam them direction? Unfortunately not.

For me at least, this reiterates the usefulness of the service.

In order to save my server from the crushing spam, I've swapped out the e-mail domain to fificorp.com, and will continue to swap out the e-mail domain on a regular basis. This will serve two purposes. One, it will save my server from dying under the spam. Two, it will keep admins who block registrations by domain on their toes at least once a month.

Note: Fifi is my pet iguana.

Posted in 10MinuteMail, General, Spam | 6 Comments »

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