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Mailinator has a blog, at http://mailinator.blogspot.com http://mailinator.blogspot.com - you should definitely read everything on there. Some things I recall r

Mailinator has a blog, at http://mailinator.blogspot.com http://mailinator.blogspot.com - you should definitely read everything on there. Some things I recall reading: - Mailinator is designed and written from the ground up to be efficient by someone who seems pretty good (Paul Tyma; on the implementation side, it's completely custom SMTP-to-web software keeping e-mail in compressed form in memory; on the design side, it "sheds load" far more aggressively than mail servers that are intended to be reliable, necessary for the constant DoS attacks); - Mailinator has lots of imitators, but they tend to find out that the cost of running servers is higher than the ad revenue (see "efficient and cheap", mailinator processes a ridiculous amount of e-mail and recently added its second server because getting that much bandwidth to a single server was more expensive); - As I understand, this is a hobby for Paul; he's not exactly getting rich (well, not from Mailinator anyway; he's on LinkedIn if you want an idea.) I don't mean to discourage you, it sounds like a nice project. Just don't expect to get rich off it, or to be done tomorrow...

davesmylie 15y ago
Yeah, I know what you mean. I'm not too concerned about costs/add revenue at the moment. The server is relatively cheap, and used for other apps anyway. I haven't even yet bothered to put up ads on the page - because I know the revenue off them is going to be pretty close to zero, and it means going back and trying to fit the ads on the page in way that doesn't look terrible. My main goal for this was to actually start a project, finish it and actually get some users. I've managed to achieve this (in a small way) at least. It was pretty discouraging to fail to get anywhere with the last few projects I attempted, so at the very least getting to this stage with dudmail.com should carry over into some motivation for the next attempt. (And I'm sure whatever my next project is, it will be the one that makes me rich and famous =)

davesmylie 15y ago

Yeah, I know what you mean. I'm not too concerned about costs/add revenue at the moment. The server is relatively cheap, and used for other apps anyway. I haven't even yet bothered to put up ads on the page - because I know the revenue off them is going to be pretty close to zero, and it means going back and trying to fit the ads on the page in way that doesn't look terrible. My main goal for this was to actually start a project, finish it and actually get some users. I've managed to achieve this (in a small way) at least. It was pretty discouraging to fail to get anywhere with the last few projects I attempted, so at the very least getting to this stage with dudmail.com should carry over into some motivation for the next attempt. (And I'm sure whatever my next project is, it will be the one that makes me rich and famous =)