Guerrilla Mail – behind the scenes; Today or open source PHP SMTP server is released!
The technology behind Guerrilla Mail has undergone through a number of iterations in the last few years.
In the beginning, Guerrilla Mail was running the Exim mail server, and the emails were fetched using POP. This proved to be inefficient and unreliable, so the system was replaced in favor of piping the emails directly in to a PHP script.
Soon, the piping solution became a problem too; it required a new process to be started for each new email, and it also required a new database connection every time.
So, how did we eliminate this bottleneck? Conveniently, PHP has a socket library which means we can use PHP to program a simple and efficient SMTP server. (SMTP = Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)
If the server runs as a daemon (which is a never-terminating program), then the system doesn’t need to launch a new process for each incoming email. Also, because Guerrilla Mail emails are deleted after 1 hour, our server doesn’t need to run and insane amount of checks for each connection (eg, NS Lookups, white-lists, black-lists, SPF domain keys, Spam Assassin, etc).
We only need to open a single database connection and a single process can be re-used indefinitely. The PHP server is able to multiplex simultaneous connections, and it can pass the email directly to the MySQL database as soon
as it is received.
So now we can receive, process and store email all in the one process and we only hit the disk when necessary.
The performance improvement has been dramatic.
Today, we release the source code to our server under open source!
Open source PHP SMTP server: https://github.com/flashmob/Guerrilla-SMTPd – we welcome other temporary email service sites to use our server.
The purpose of this daemon is to grab the email, save it to the database and disconnect as quickly as possible.
Only simple MIME processing of the email is performed:
- For each email, the header is parsed to determine if the email intended for the domains serviced. (You wouldn’t believe how many spammers do this!)
- For each email, the body of the email is identified, decoded and converted to UTF-8.
Proposal for using Bitcoin to implement a postage stamp system for email
Here we put forward a proposal for adding stamps to emails. The advantage of Bitcoin is that it allows extremely small transactions with little or no transaction fee. Stamps can be purchased in small quantities, and a digital stamp can be created and added to an email seamlessly, using the existing standards and protocols.
The following is a description of how such a system may work. (This is from an technical point of view; there would be less steps involved from an end-user’s point of view, and perhaps it could be made invisible to the end-user. eg. the user’s ISP could buy and attach stamps to emails and also collect payments)
1. Before sending, the sender will check a public directory to find if the recipient supports bitcoin stamps. (The directory may be just a DNS record which is pointing to a BitCoin Stamp Service URL. This URL can be queried by the sender to find the price of the stamp, perhaps fetch other policies, but not necessarily confirm that the address exists or not)
2. The sender will query the Stamp Service URL with the intention to buy stamps for the recipients’ address. (The sender can buy one stamp or a quantity of stamps that can be used in the future) The service URL will immediately issue a Bitcoin payment address and the amount to pay. The service will issue the sender with the stamps, the stamps can be given out before the payment is made. The stamps are nothing more than cryptographically signed tokens, so that only the Stamp Service can verify their authenticity. (Also, anyone else could verify the tokens by contacting the Stamp Service URL. Actually, there would need to be two tokens: a secret token which is never transmitted with the email, and a public token which is transmitted with the email like a stamp – this ensures that tokens cannot be re-used).
3. The sender can send out the email at any time with the signature token (or stamp) added to the header of the email. (This will be invisible to anyone reading the email, unless they know how to view the headers)
4. The payment for the transaction is sent via Bitcoin to the Stamp Service. Once the payment is verified, the status of the tokens changes.
5. The recipient verifies the payment. When the Bitcoin payment is received and verified, the email can be specially marked, the spam score can be lowered, or other rules can be applied.
Notes:
- This system is not necessarily client-server. It can also be server-to-server, and transparent to the end clients. For example, the sender’s SMTP server could automatically place orders for stamp tokens and make Bitcoin payments from the server’s Bitcoin wallet.
Questions?
What is the purpose of the system? The purpose is to enhance the current state of spam filtering methods by putting a price on sending email.
Does this scheme eliminate spam totally? No, the intention is not to eliminate all spam, but reduce it by putting a price on sending email. The payment would not guarantee 100% delivery, but reduce the spam score by a certain percentage, depending on how much the spammer pays or how the receiver set their policy.
Hold on, if they could earn something from receiving an email, then they would give their email address to as many senders as possible, and subscribe to every list and newsletter, they could make some money, right?
That is to say if the system catches on, this kind of behaviour would be foreseeable. However, this phenomenon may kill mailing lists in general because it will pollute the lists with addresses which have been given for the purpose of earning bitcoins. Any decreased incentive to mass mail is good, right? Anyway, it is impossible to predict the effects right now – for example, senders could get smart about how they collect your email address, or simply ignore this system all together, and send email without any stamps. It would be an interesting experiment never-less, so why not give it a try?
Will everyone need to use this for it to work?
No. Email without stamps can still get through and process as normal. People who want increased reliability of their email can use stamps.
Even if it costs 1 cent to send an email, it would be too expensive?
Bitcoin allows for very small fractions, eg 1 tenth of a cent may be possible.
Guerrilla Mail Accepts BitCoin
If you keep up with the latest news on technology, then you have probably heard of Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is still in the early stages, however it is showing a lot of promise. Perhaps Bitcoin has the potential to substantially shake the micro-payment industry, and may also revolutionize the way we use cash and think about money in general. It unequivocally solves the problems with electronic payments which up to now were either costly, slow or, well… unlike normal cash. Also, it is probable that people will start using Bitcoins in ways in which we haven’t thought of before, which are not obvious to us now.
Guerrilla Mail is a big fan of Bitcoin and wishes the Bitcoin community success. (Bitcoins could be also used to fight spam in interesting ways in the future).
One way to help with the success of Bitcoin is to offer it as a payment option for as many products / services as possible. Therefore, today we have added BitCoin as a payment option.
New domain and improved anti-spam weaponry.
Guerrilla Mail replaced guerrillamailblock.com email dowmain with sharklasers.com
The new domain name is used for receiving email, ie. your name @ sharklasers.com – the site web site address remains www.guerrillamail.com as always.
Now, the exciting announcement is that it’s no longer necessary to pre-visit guerrilla mail to get your temporary email address! When you are filling out a form, simply think of any email address ending with @sharklasers and then head to guerrillamail.com to check it. (Click on the address to edit it)
Guerrilla Mail gets an API
App developers: Did you know that Guerrilla Mail has an API? Here is the doc – http://www.guerrillamail.com/GuerrillaMailAPI.html
What can the API be used for? It can be used to create a new version of the site for a different platform / programming language. For example, Android, iPhone / iPad App, Facebook App, or to create a text version of the site, or add Guerrilla Mail to your own apps!
The API is accessed through the HTTP protocol using GET or POST, and the results are returned in JSON.
Version History:
version 1.0, 19th Apr 2011 – First Draft
Happy Coding!
New Features: Display Images
Guerrilla Mail blocks all remote images on emails by default, because images are often used as beacons to track you. Today we have added a new feature, so that when an email with images is displayed, a ‘display images’ link will be shown above the email… Click on this link and the images will be loaded in.
Also, displaying of HTML emails was improved, so now more HTML email should be formatted correctly. (For those who want the technical details, we use the excellent HTML filtering library from htmlpurifier.org to filter our HTML email)
New User Interface Launched
Today, GuerrillaMail is pleased to announce a new version of our website! The old Guerrilla Mail web-app has been scrapped and replaced by a shiny new user interface. The new Guerrilla Mail is easier, faster and more refined – everything was re-built from the ground up. The new site uses some of the latest features found in the current browsers, including Javascript, HTML 5 and CSS3. Google’s Gmail has been a big influence on the concept. We hope you like it and welcome your feedback! Cheers, GuerrillaMail Team.
Server Upgrade
Guerrilla Mail will be undergoing a server upgrade on the weekend (4th Dec to 5th Dec). We will be shifting the site to a new server, there may be some service disruptions during these dates. We apologize for any inconvenience, we will try to minimize the disruptions as much as possible.
GuerrillaMail.com T-shirt
Get a Guerrilla Mail Tee and help support Guerrilla Mail.
Great as a Christmas gift or general wear for yourself.
T-Shirts are available form here
http://cafepress.com/guerrillamail
Dark Design
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About Cafe Press
CafePress is the ultimate source for holiday gift ideas for Thanksgiving aprons, Christmas coffee mugs and even Valentine
Latest Improvements to Guerrilla Mail
We have made the following improvements to Guerrilla Mail in the last few days
- You can now get a Guerrilla Mail address without the need to to visit Guerrilla Mail first! When you are on a form which requires an email address, simply think of a random email address for @guerrillamailblock.com, use it, then check it later. (To check your email, visit Guerrilla Mail and set to the address that you thought of, then refresh so that the system will load your email form the quarantine. Emails are held in the quarantine for 1 hour). The old way still works too.
- Fixed bugs with character encoding so that non-English emails display correctly. (Previously, the emails were not correctly converted to UTF-8)
- Made changes to our server back-end so that emails are placed directly in to the database as they arrive. (Before they were placed on disk by the mail server and then fetched using POP, which was very inefficient)
- Added a simple AJAX list to the home page showing the subjects of the latest emails received and other statistics. Now you can see what Guerrilla Mail is up to in real time!
We welcome your feedback on these features.
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