Author: Alex

TempMail February 2024 Updates

See the new TempMail updates for the past few months

Hello everyone! It has been several months since the last update, and a lot has changed!

Introducing TempMail Accounts

Instead of using a 24 number and 36 character authentication method, you can now use a TempMail account, linked to your (non-temporary) email address and API Key, which you can use to access the TempMail API. If your API key is ever compromised, re-create one on the dashboard.

TempMail Plus and TempMail Ultra are now subscription based, but can be cancelled anytime through the dashboard. Crypto payments are currently not available until I figure out a solution on my end.

Server Upgrades

Thanks to everyone supporting TempMail, we have been able to make some server upgrades. Some of which were overdue.

First thing I want to address is the 500 errors. Many of this was due to several year old software working overtime to keep up with the amount of requests. We have since switched from using Redis to using MongoDB for everything, including statistics.

The server itself has been upgraded to have more than three times the amount resources than last blog post, and nearly all issues have been resolved with the server.

Subdomains

Now it’s time to talk about subdomains. Until now, all of the domains which I have been using have been on the root domain (such as example.com), however, the current solution allows you to use ANY subdomain on a domain, and even allows you to choose which subdomain you want! Keep in mind that this will only allow you to choose subdomains from current domains, so you will have to check the site periodically for new domains, or just get it from the API.

Subdomains can be chosen the same way that normal domains are chosen through the API or libraries.

Subdomains on Custom Domains

Subdomains on Custom Domains are supported as well! (Though, they were technically supported before, now they are officially supported!).

New Custom Domains

Version Two of the TempMail API included a lot of changes, including a brand new way to register domains to your TempMail account. Instead of using a password, you can now POST /v2/custom with your domain in JSON POST data (and authorization), and we will give you a UUID which you can use to verify ownership of the domain by adding it to your domain’s records.

This new system will help to reduce TempMail detection, as well as make it easier for users. Your API Key will be used to access it, the same one used to POST to the domain, and no more password will be required for you to access it. Pretty cool, huh?

You can access the documentation for this on the TempMail Wiki.

Retiring BananaCrumbs IDs

I’ll admit that this system was flawed at the beginning. I wanted to make sure users had the privacy they needed, but I quickly realized this was beginning to be a problem, especially for corporations which wanted to use the API. An interface like that looked sketchy at best.

All BananaCrumbs IDs will continue to work; however, no new time can be added to them. This will allow people to migrate to the new system, which is easier for me and everyone else to manage.

Migration of BananaCrumbs IDs

You can migrate your ID at the TempMail Accounts Page, where you will be prompted to enter your ID and token for your old ID once you create a new account. Keep in mind though, if your new account gets time added to it before migrating, you cannot migrate an old ID to that account.

Subscription-Based Pricing

Since BananaCrumbs IDs were purely based on adding 30 days of time, this new system works with Stripe’s Subscription platform to have auto-renewing subscriptions, instead of having users add time to an ID. You would not believe how many issues there were with the old system…

Statistics

I cannot believe that we have over eighty million emails received! This is an incredible milestone, and I can’t wait until we reach in the nine-digits!

Conclusion

Thank you for reading! And as always, feel free to contact me on Discord if you need help. If you want, please let us know how you use TempMail in the Discord server in the new #showcase channel!

TempMail Is Now Using Bun!

We switched to Bun, and the results are outstanding

It’s been a while since we’ve posted last! In the background, the TempMail server is now faster than ever before, thanks to Bun.sh, a JavaScript runtime which has proven to be faster than the default Node runtime in our cases.

First Things First

Thank you to Ashton Memer for converting the server to Bun!

Stats

Since switching to Bun, we have seen the startup time for our server decrease from 15+ seconds to less than one second! Users were getting 500-level error codes because the default Node runtime could not keep up with the amount of request per second our server is getting. Since switching to bun, the average API request time went from 100 ms average to 20 milliseconds!

At peak, our service has had more than 200,000 inboxes active at any given time! A feat that would’ve resulted in many 500-level errors given the standard Node runtime.

In terms of memory, we’ve found that Bun, on average, uses 1.5 times more memory than the Node runtime. We believe that this is a fair tradeoff between performance and resources.

Next for TempMail and BananaCrumbs

We’re also excited to announce a new account system for BananaCrumbs, one where you can use your Email to register and create API keys! We will be releasing a post about this in the future.

Using the TempMail Plus API

TempMail Plus was designed to be backwards-compatible with the existing API. Learn how to use it here!

The TempMail Plus features are designed to be backwards compatible with the existing API; that is, you should not have to change any code to get your setup working.

Generating Emails

First, support for our libraries will come in future updates. To generate an address using your TempMail Plus account for higher rate-limits, include the following headers:

  • X-BananaCrumbs-ID this will include your 24-number BananaCrumbs ID.
  • X-BananaCrumbs-MFA this is your (about) 36 character MFA token that was included with your BananaCrumbs ID.

Once these headers are sent inside the request, you should receive a normal email and token! Note that while TempMail Plus inboxes do last for up to ten hours, you will have to check it every ten minutes to ensure it does not get erased early.

There are some common errors that may occur if you enter the wrong information. The error is displayed inside the JSON information when the API returns data.

Custom Inboxes

Custom inboxes are not tied to your BananaCrumbs ID. Simply having an ID is enough to use custom domains. They still use the same system that has been in place before, but requires the two HTTP headers as mentioned in the Generating Emails section of this article.

Assistance

When it comes to setting up your program using our API, we can help through our Discord Server. For questions regarding billing, purchases, etc., please find our email on our contact page.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading! You can check out TempMail Plus at the following link: https://tempmail.lol/pricing.html

Upcoming Updates for TempMail

See some of the upcoming features for TempMail in this article!

1,200,000 emails and 500 hourly inboxes are incredible numbers! With the growth of the website, I would like to make some additions to further help people with their privacy in using TempMail.

These features will be added during November of this year through February of next year. They will not be added in any particular order, though.

Desktop App

While navigating to the website is easy, a desktop app can save a few clicks. The desktop app will be available to download on Windows, Mac, and Linux-based systems in the upcoming month.

POP3/IMAP Support

This has been planned for a while. Our customized protocol is not compatible with others; however, we plan to add support for POP3/IMAP soon as well. The intended design will allow users to sign in with the temporary email with the token as the password, instead of using HTTPS with our own protocol.

More Language Support

English is one of the most common languages; however, a great deal of our traffic comes from outside English-speaking countries. We will add multiple language support for the website. Our app, AnonyMail, already supports a few languages!

More (Programming) Language Support

We plan to create more libraries for more programming languages. As of now, we have one for JavaScript, Java, and Python, which are the most commonly used languages for scripting. Our next target languages include Rust, C, and Go.

Conclusion

Thank you to everyone who has used the website so far, and to those who will use it in the future! If you have any questions, feel free to write a comment below.

Major Updates for TempMail

We’ve released one of our biggest updates yet. This update includes custom domains, public domains, and more!

TempMail.lol has been running for almost a year since it started as Exploding Email. In that time, we’ve made a lot of changes to the website. In this article, we’ll go over some of the major changes that have been made recently.

Custom Domains

While this used to be a feature of Exploding Email, it has been added back into TempMail with a great implementation. You can now choose if you want your custom domain to be private (that is, only you can access it), or public (anyone can make Alternative Emails through your domain).

Private Domains

With private domains, you are given a token to “login” to the domain to retrieve emails. This prevents random people from reading the emails on your domain. Note that private domains can only store up to five emails across the entire domain before needing to be emptied by getting the emails (earliest emails are stored).

Public Domains

Public domains are a bit different: they are put into the pool of Alternative Domains, so people can generate emails with your domain, helping to avoid TempMail detection. If you have a spare domain you are not using, consider adding it!

Overview of Custom Domains

Overall, custom domains will help everyone. Private custom domains are currently in beta and are free during this period, they may be behind a subscription-based service in the future. Adding public pool domains will always be free.

Custom domains have also been added to the API. Support for custom domains will be added to libraries within the upcoming weeks.

API Changes

You can now choose a domain you want to generate! This allows you to choose from any existing default/alternative domains. Here’s an example:

curl https://api.tempmail.lol/generate/example.com

This will generate an email at the domain you specify (in this case, example.com).

Conclusion

As September starts, we have added more features to the website while keeping the core principle of the website the same, a temporary email generator. If you just use the normal website with its .com domains, nothing will change. Alternative emails will be getting a larger pool of domains to pick from, which will help avoid detection.

Looking ahead, we plan to add even more features, such as support for the POP3 protocol, bigger storage for private domains, and more!

Lastly, we’ve processed 520,000 emails! This number is insane, and we hope it will continue to grow as more people use our service. Spread the word, and bookmark our site! If you have any questions, suggestions, or just want to talk, join the Discord server below!

Introducing Alternative Domains for TempMail

Introducing our new feature: alternative domains! Alternative domains allow you to generate emails that bypass certain website restrictions.

Ever tried to signup for a website using one of our domains but have had it fail? Thankfully, we are introducing something new: alternative domains.

Alternative domains allows you to use less common website endings (such as .cfd, .lol, and .shop). These endings are much cheaper than common endings (such as .com, .net, or .org), but may not work as reliably as common endings.

What does this mean for me?

If you use the regular domains, nothing will change. The website will still function the same way it has.

How do I use it?

Simply toggle the switch on the homepage under the Copy and Regenerate buttons.

If you do not see the switch, hold Control and click F5 on your keyboard to reload the page.

Developers: does this break the API?

No. For the TempMail.lol API, the /generate endpoint will still work. If you wish to generate alternative emails, please use the /generate/rush endpoint instead. This will be added to TempMail APIs in the following weeks. Alternative domains are on the same rate-limit as normal domains (30/minute).

Conclusion

Thank you to everyone who has used the website so far! We are approaching 300,000 emails received and have around 200 hourly active users. We hope this addition to the website will help people get around websites censoring our email addresses.

My Take on GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is one of the most practical uses of AI; however, it has some key disadvantages.

GitHub Copilot is one of the most advanced and practical uses of artificial intelligence that I have seen. I started using it around the middle of 2021 and have been ever since; however, I have noticed that it has changed throughout this time, and for the better, too.

What is Copilot?

Copilot is an Artificial Intelligence trained on public code using the OpenAI Codex engine. It is able to complete code you write, turn comments into code, and even write code based on the name of a method.

Is Copilot free?

During the technical preview of Copilot, it is free to use once you have been accepted. You can signup for the waitlist here, it took around one week for me to get in.

After the technical preview, GitHub Copilot will be free for students and verified open-source projects, while requiring a subscription for other users. According to their plugin page:

Once GitHub Copilot is generally available, it will require a subscription. It will be free for verified students and maintainers of popular open source projects on GitHub.

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/17718-github-copilot

There is no posted cost for the subscription as of now.

As of July 2nd, the cost for a subscription is $10/month, and if you pre-pay for a full year, it is $100

My thoughts on Copilot

I think it is amazing to see practical uses of Artificial Intelligence. Having AI write code is going to help write even better AI in the future, and with the GPT-4 engine coming out in the near future, it will soon be able to write code on-par with any person.

This comes at a cost though. Depending on the cost of a Copilot license, companies can hire less experienced developers and give them Copilot to write their code. People have been saying this for a while now, but I think that companies may be skeptical to adopt this new technology.

According to their FAQ, GitHub states that 0.1% of the suggestions will be directly from training:

We found that about 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain some snippets that are verbatim from the training set.

https://copilot.github.com/

This could create problems with code under attribution-based licenses, or worse, proprietary licenses that do not allow you to redistribute the code. It is unlikely that Copilot would take the blame for any copyright infringement.

There is a video on YouTube by Engineer Man that covers some of these points in detail, it is well worth the watch:

Of course, using Copilot is going to help save you time, and if you are an experienced developer, it will not be as big of a crutch. The problem comes when people who are new to coding use it; for example, students who are just learning to code may use it without actually understand what the code that Copilot wrote is actually doing.

Writing your own code, making mistakes, and improving from those mistakes is the way I—and many others—learned to code. My concern is that this can be used for cheating in assignments, and when it comes to actually writing code for a test where students do not have access to Copilot, they likely will not be able to do so.

Does this mean you should not use Copilot?

Depends. If you are an experienced developer, I would say that it is fine, as long as you actually understand what Copilot is writing and can write it yourself without Copilot. If you are new to programming or somewhat proficient, I would suggest not using it, as you will become dependent on it.

My experience with Copilot

I’ve used Copilot for a while, and for new projects that I start on, Copilot can be a distraction. Granted, my IDE has a keyboard shortcut to disable/enable Copilot, it can be distracting when you’re thinking about how to write something and a block of code appears before you. Your attention is diverted to the code Copilot wrote, and if it is not what you want, it wastes time.

In this example, I wanted to make it so that four specific items were removed from local storage. Since Copilot does not seem to notice the code below where the completion suggestion is, it does not know the fields I want to remove.

Code in cyan is Copilot

For this, clearing all of local storage would be bad, as there are other things that need to be stored besides those four variables.

Copilot has been useful in other ways though. For this website, https://tempmail.lol, I used Copilot to help write some of its code. In particular, getting certain Unicode characters in HTML form can take time, whereas Copilot can do that in just a few seconds.

Code in cyan is Copilot

Conclusion

Even the name of the service, “GitHub Copilot”, is enough to say that it is not something to write code for you, but rather to assist you in writing code, or to be your… copilot… get it?

While I will use it occasionally to help with writing tedious code, it does not mean you should as well. Look at the code Copilot produces, could you have written that code yourself without looking it up online? If not, maybe you should wait to use Copilot.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me: [email protected] (public key here). I am also on Session if you want to talk directly.

See if your Email Client is Leaking your IP Address

Email is used every day, but did you know your email client may be leaking your IP address? Here, you can tell if your email client is leaking your personal IP address.

Email is used every day, but did you know your email client may be leaking your IP address? Here, you can tell if your email client is leaking your personal IP address.

First, thanks to macvk for making this test open-source. You can click the button below to generate an email, then email it to determine if your email client is leaking.

Your IP address:
Start Test

What if my client is leaking?

Update your existing mail client. If no update is available, download a new one. For Windows and MacOS users, the default mail app works well.

If you use an online Email provider, such as Gmail, you do not need to worry about your IP leaking, as long as you use the official Gmail website.

I tested several email clients that allow you to connect a Gmail account, and some leaked. If you want to ensure no-one gets your IP address, use the official Gmail client.

Conclusion

Stay safe! If someone does get your IP address, it isn’t the end of the world. There’s… not much they can do with it, besides get your internet provider and the city you live in.
Simply, you can unplug your router, wait 30 seconds, and plug it back in. Chances are that your ISP will have assigned your router a new IP address since it disconnected.

If your ISP assigns static IP addresses, contact them on how to change it, make sure to note your IP address before and after you unplug, as certain areas will only have IP addresses that are off by one or two digits.

This test made available from vpn-leaks-test by macvk, licensed under the GPLv3 License.

The TempMail Python API is out!

Want to use the TempMail API using Python? Try our easy-to-use library built for Python!

Ever wanted to interact with the TempMail.lol API using Python but didn’t want to use raw HTTP requests? Well now we got your back.

First off, I would like to say thank you to Alex Torres for making the Python library. You can view the code here, feel free to contribute!

Important – read before using

The TempMail.lol API has a few limitations:

  • You must use the token to check for emails within 10 minutes of the last check or the creation of the inbox, otherwise it is deleted.
  • Inboxes expire after 1 hour.

Installing

Use the pip command to install the library:

pip install tempmail-lol

Example Usage

from TempMail import TempMail #imports everything from TempMail library
import time #import time module

inbox = TempMail.generateInbox() #returns an Inbox object with Email and Token

print("Email Address: "+ inbox.address) #View output below
print("Authorization Token: "+ inbox.token)

#output: 
"""
    Email Address: [email protected]
    Authorization Token: RCfc1og1z1JzuN1mkXL2eFdAc_8uxSRAwcGhUoXuH26e7nnJMdVVtSxxasZLD9D2OHTKIjVEvLhK7S0K5QIanA
"""

while(True): #Infinite Loop
    emails = TempMail.getEmails(inbox) #Returns list of Email objects
    print(emails) # View output below
    time.sleep(30) #wait 30 sec

#output:
"""
    [Email ([email protected], [email protected], 
            subject=Subject line, body=Text Area, html=<div dir="ltr">Text Area</div>, 
            date=1652824961713 )]
"""

Conclusion

Thanks again to Alex Torres for making the API. If you found it useful or have any suggestions, feel free to ask on GitHub. Let us know what you end up creating!

How to use the TempMail API

Want to use the TempMail.lol API? Now you can! Check out our pre-made libraries or use the raw API.

Thank you to everyone who is using the TempMail.lol website. If you are a developer, you can use our API on your own platforms (as long as it isn’t your own TempMail site)!

The API for TempMail.lol is under the GNU AGPLv3 License.

Libraries

As of now, we have libraries for the following languages:

Raw API

Do we not have a library for your language yet? Feel free to reach out to me via email: [email protected] if you want your library added. In the meantime, you can use the raw API via HTTP requests to access our services.

The base URL should be stored as a constant. It is https://api.tempmail.lol

There are two endpoints currently. First, to generate emails, the /generate endpoint. Upon successfully generating an email, the server will return the following data:

{
    "address": "[email protected]",
    "token": "token_to_check_for_emails"
}

Afterwards, use the token to check for new emails.

Important

Inboxes expire after one hour, there is no avoiding this. If you do not check for new emails within 10 minutes of last check (or inbox creation) it will be deleted early.

To use the token to check for emails, GET the following endpoint: /auth/<token>

If you get an email (or multiple emails), you will be returned an array of email objects:

{
    "email": [
        {
            "from": "[email protected]",
            "to": "[email protected]",
            "subject": "sub",
            "body": "hi",
            "html": "this field may not be present",
            "date": 1652814863785
        },
        {
            "from": "someotheremail@address",
            "to": "[email protected]",
            "subject": "subject",
            "body": "hello",
            "html": "<b>hello</b>",
            "date": 1652814873785
        }
    ]
}

Note: once you get the emails, they are permanently deleted from our servers.

If there are no emails, the following response will be returned:

{
    "email": null
}

And finally, if your token is invalid, the following response will be returned:

{
    "email": null,
    "token": "invalid"
}

Conclusion

Let me know what you end up creating! I can be reached via email at [email protected]

You can also join the Discord server below by clicking the “connect” button: