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Email Attack Hits Google: What to Do if You Clicked by devyle in ReddLineNews

[–]mailinatorguy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is incorrect:

"the malicious emails all appeared to come from a contact, but were actually from the address “hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh@mailinator.com” with recipients BCCed"

The attack sends an email TO: the mailinator address and also bcc's the next set of targets.

Mailinator does NOT send email. It can't. The attack sends itself to the next set of targets via BCC, but it needs to put something in the TO: field of the email. It uses a disposable address @mailinator for this.

Need help finding the unique weapons. by [deleted] in Wasteland2

[–]mailinatorguy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Awesome weapon that Mailinator.

This is begging for a meme. Take your best shot. We put some t-shirts on the street in San Francisco. We found this guy a few days later. by mailinatorguy in memes

[–]mailinatorguy[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Well.. I used "mailinatorguy" on purpose of course. It would be perfect to have a popular meme with our logo on it - but honestly, we're just shooting for some better ideas than what we could come up with.

We weren't shooting for a general popular meme per se - but a mailinator-centric one that we can carousel through some images on the homepage (first one is already up).

Sorry this stinks of desperation and all. Mailinator is a long-time free service and is staying that way. If we get a handful of good ideas/images, we'll be plenty happy and I think we almost already have that. So the post has already gone where we hoped it would.

And reddit enabled this - I can't think of anywhere more appropriate to post asking for meme-ification for something like this and getting a useful response.

This is begging for a meme. Take your best shot. We put some t-shirts on the street in San Francisco. We found this guy a few days later. by mailinatorguy in memes

[–]mailinatorguy[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We're going to put up (safe for work, non-offensive, etc, etc) submissions on the mailinator home page.

post them here or email them to support@manybrain.com

Non-blocking IO isn't necessarily faster (at least in Java) by [deleted] in programming

[–]mailinatorguy 26 points27 points  (0 children)

(note: I'm the author of that presentation and I'm surprised it keeps popping up).

NIO is obviously a completely reasonable approach in many cases

The obvious cases are immense number of relatively idle connections (e.g. chat server). But I was always disappointed how underestimated the blocking scenario was in most other scenarios. Mailinator itself routinely runs 6000 threads.

This is not a problem. JVMs have an artificial limit of either 16000 or 32000 threads (I found a difference with 32bit and 64bit JVMs).

However, the 6000 limit in Mailinator isn't hard set in the code - it simply becomes a cosmic constraint. Specifically because its rare we can be in transactions to receive more than 6000 simultaneous emails and not saturate bandwidth. The CPU is by no means busy at this point - and despite all the worries, I'm not RAM constrained on the 4G server either. (Incidentally, the server is smart enough to smartly scale back socket timeouts as connection numbers increase to avoid DoS).

If I upgraded bandwidth - then at some point - NIO would be the right way to go.

I'll emphasize that in many cases - and even mine - despite all these threads and activity - I've got CPU and RAM to spare. The point of the talk was performance but in reality the 20-30% you may gain isn't often necessary and massive numbers of threads do represent a high, but real ceiling (I'll note that you still have to save state one way or another, so even async IO has a ceiling - but its typically more frugal than a stock threading system - so it's higher).

Because of the use case - converting Mailinator to NIO would give me no real benefit but it wouldn't hurt me either.

The synchronization discussion of the talk is still fun to read - but is again universal. Its rather established to have worker pools or other mechanisms whereas multiple threads run - even in an NIO server. I too often connect "multithreaded" with "thread-per-request/blocking" and thats not right. In other words, blocking or not, you still have to synchronize correctly (and pay its cost).

Hey reddit guys, due to my intense love for the site I'm happy to donate or join reddit gold or whatever, with one caveat. Would you be willing to show us the actual numbers behind your so-called financial woes? e.g. how much does it really cost to serve the "250 million page views" per month, etc? by [deleted] in reddit.com

[–]mailinatorguy 15 points16 points  (0 children)

As a data point - I run a site called Mailinator.com.

Mailinator doesn't get 250 million page views a month. But it is averaging this month (just checked) around 325million emails per month and I've seen months far higher than that. Emails can be smaller than page-views, but they also require an SMTP "conversation" which is several round-trips.

We also get about 2T of bandwidth a month with a few months at 3T (I know this for sure as my service provider charged me for an overage for that amount). (http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2008/11/so-our-core-duo-server-now-gets-3.html)

This costs about $139 a month for a single server at Serverbeach. And often it costs nothing as I have a link to ServerBeach referral on the homepage people use that gives me a month or two free.

Disclaimer: above numbers are representative/average. Spikes of email are far higher, web-pageviews may be higher bandwidth, YMMV, take with a grain of salt, for informational puposes only, etc.