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Note that @mailinator.com email addresses are blocked at a significant number of sites due to its popularity. Throwaway email sites that alternate between sever

by gm_ 14y ago

Note that @mailinator.com email addresses are blocked at a significant number of sites due to its popularity. Throwaway email sites that alternate between several different domains work best.

jonknee 14y ago
Mailinator has a ton of different domains. You can check them all from mailinator.com though.
- eli 14y ago
  You can even donate a domain or have your own "private" mailinator domain by simply pointing the MX record for a domain or subdomain you control to their server.
  - chadrs 14y ago
    I've always wondered why a site that blocks mailinator sites wouldn't just do an MX lookup on any domain you put in and check for mailinator redirects.
    - Groxx 14y ago
      Probably because it's harder than /@mailinator.com$/i. And the determined will always succeed anyway, so why go to great lengths?
    - eli 14y ago
      How much effort are you willing to expend to fight users who insist on giving you a throwaway account?
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
- AgentConundrum 14y ago
  You can't get a full list of them on mailinator.com, since it makes it easy for a misguided website administrator to just ban the whole list. Instead, the site will randomly show one of the alternate domains on every page load. At one point, it would even give 'gmail.com' and other legitimate domains as the alternate if you tried to scrape them too quickly (or rather, they hypothetically-yet-definitely-didn't-do that).[1] Today, the alternate domains are shown as an image[2], and even that isn't a complete list, since other people can simply redirect mail incoming to their domains to mailinator.com. Mailinator explicitly condones this.[3] [1] http://mailinator.blogspot.ca/2011/05/how-to-get-gmailcom-banned-not-that-i.html http://mailinator.blogspot.ca/2011/05/how-to-get-gmailcom-ba... [2] http://www.mailinator.com/get_alt_domain http://www.mailinator.com/get_alt_domain [3] http://mailinator.blogspot.ca/2007/10/new-mailinator-alternate-domains.html http://mailinator.blogspot.ca/2007/10/new-mailinator-alterna... (end of second paragraph)
  - sirn 14y ago
    You can still ban Mailinator by simply resolving DNS (or even only MX record) and reject if it matches 72.51.33.80.
    - jrockway 14y ago
      That will only work if you know exactly how your entire mail stack will handle resolution and you re-implement it exactly on your frontend. Consider this case: Resolving not-mailinator.whatever.com returns: not-mailinator.whatever.com. 86400 IN MX 10 a.bad-mailserver.com not-mailinator.whatever.com. 86400 IN MX 10 b.bad-mailserver.com not-mailinator.whatever.com. 86400 IN MX 10 c.bad-mailserver.com not-mailinator.whatever.com. 86400 IN MX 10 d.bad-mailserver.com not-mailinator.whatever.com. 86400 IN MX 10 e.bad-mailserver.com not-mailinator.whatever.com. 86400 IN MX 10 f.bad-mailserver.com not-mailinator.whatever.com. 86400 IN MX 10 g.bad-mailserver.com not-mailinator.whatever.com. 86400 IN MX 10 h.bad-mailserver.com not-mailinator.whatever.com. 86400 IN MX 10 mailinator.com If you choose one at random, your frontend has a 90% chance of choosing a mail server that isn't mailinator. But when your MTA tries to send the message, it will notice that bad-mailserver.com is offline and try the other MXes, eventually hitting mailinator and delivering the message you tried to block. You could put a limit on the number of MX records a domain can have, but Gmail has 5 and so you'd only reduce the chance of success to 80%. Then you have to consider the mechanics of DNS. How many layers of CNAME indirection will you follow? Will you cache results? (If so, how will you trust that the responses are valid?) How long will you wait for DNS responses? A poor implementation of DNS lookups will use unbounded time, unbounded bandwidth, and unbounded file descriptors. This isn't a hack you are going to code up in an afternoon, and one mistake means your website is going to randomly go down. And so you have to ask: why? Why do you care if someone uses mailinator? Spammers are just going to set up their own domain or use someone's malware'd Windows box. And someone that wants to ignore your email is just going to have a procmail rule auto-submit your messages to Spamcop anyway. So you gain nothing, spend a lot of time programming, and it won't solve any problems. In conclusion: worst idea ever.

by gm_ 14y ago

Note that @mailinator.com email addresses are blocked at a significant number of sites due to its popularity. Throwaway email sites that alternate between several different domains work best.

jonknee 14y ago

Mailinator has a ton of different domains. You can check them all from mailinator.com though.

eli 14y ago
You can even donate a domain or have your own "private" mailinator domain by simply pointing the MX record for a domain or subdomain you control to their server.
- chadrs 14y ago
  I've always wondered why a site that blocks mailinator sites wouldn't just do an MX lookup on any domain you put in and check for mailinator redirects.
  - Groxx 14y ago
    Probably because it's harder than /@mailinator.com$/i. And the determined will always succeed anyway, so why go to great lengths?
  - eli 14y ago
    How much effort are you willing to expend to fight users who insist on giving you a throwaway account?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
AgentConundrum 14y ago
You can't get a full list of them on mailinator.com, since it makes it easy for a misguided website administrator to just ban the whole list. Instead, the site will randomly show one of the alternate domains on every page load. At one point, it would even give 'gmail.com' and other legitimate domains as the alternate if you tried to scrape them too quickly (or rather, they hypothetically-yet-definitely-didn't-do that).[1] Today, the alternate domains are shown as an image[2], and even that isn't a complete list, since other people can simply redirect mail incoming to their domains to mailinator.com. Mailinator explicitly condones this.[3] [1] http://mailinator.blogspot.ca/2011/05/how-to-get-gmailcom-banned-not-that-i.html http://mailinator.blogspot.ca/2011/05/how-to-get-gmailcom-ba... [2] http://www.mailinator.com/get_alt_domain http://www.mailinator.com/get_alt_domain [3] http://mailinator.blogspot.ca/2007/10/new-mailinator-alternate-domains.html http://mailinator.blogspot.ca/2007/10/new-mailinator-alterna... (end of second paragraph)
- sirn 14y ago
  You can still ban Mailinator by simply resolving DNS (or even only MX record) and reject if it matches 72.51.33.80.
  - jrockway 14y ago
    That will only work if you know exactly how your entire mail stack will handle resolution and you re-implement it exactly on your frontend. Consider this case: Resolving not-mailinator.whatever.com returns: not-mailinator.whatever.com. 86400 IN MX 10 a.bad-mailserver.com not-mailinator.whatever.com. 86400 IN MX 10 b.bad-mailserver.com not-mailinator.whatever.com. 86400 IN MX 10 c.bad-mailserver.com not-mailinator.whatever.com. 86400 IN MX 10 d.bad-mailserver.com not-mailinator.whatever.com. 86400 IN MX 10 e.bad-mailserver.com not-mailinator.whatever.com. 86400 IN MX 10 f.bad-mailserver.com not-mailinator.whatever.com. 86400 IN MX 10 g.bad-mailserver.com not-mailinator.whatever.com. 86400 IN MX 10 h.bad-mailserver.com not-mailinator.whatever.com. 86400 IN MX 10 mailinator.com If you choose one at random, your frontend has a 90% chance of choosing a mail server that isn't mailinator. But when your MTA tries to send the message, it will notice that bad-mailserver.com is offline and try the other MXes, eventually hitting mailinator and delivering the message you tried to block. You could put a limit on the number of MX records a domain can have, but Gmail has 5 and so you'd only reduce the chance of success to 80%. Then you have to consider the mechanics of DNS. How many layers of CNAME indirection will you follow? Will you cache results? (If so, how will you trust that the responses are valid?) How long will you wait for DNS responses? A poor implementation of DNS lookups will use unbounded time, unbounded bandwidth, and unbounded file descriptors. This isn't a hack you are going to code up in an afternoon, and one mistake means your website is going to randomly go down. And so you have to ask: why? Why do you care if someone uses mailinator? Spammers are just going to set up their own domain or use someone's malware'd Windows box. And someone that wants to ignore your email is just going to have a procmail rule auto-submit your messages to Spamcop anyway. So you gain nothing, spend a lot of time programming, and it won't solve any problems. In conclusion: worst idea ever.