Introducing asdfasdf.co: emails from the internet’s gibberish form fills
Have you ever filled out an online form or survey like this?
Good news! You can now see the activation email and the account updates in one click:
Introducing asdfasdf.co
A public wildcard email address. All emails sent to any of these domains will appear in the list in 30 seconds or less. An image is generated of the screenshot for the super-paranoid as well as raw MIME files for the nerds out there. There is an API available to provide the last 50 email summaries with more on the way as I add new features.
Warning: Please do not send emails to this domain from an email address you don’t want to be made public. Display names are not currently shown on the site, but are available for viewing in the raw MIME files.
Multiple domains available
Emails to asdfasdf.co, sdfsdf.co, asdfsdf.co, asdfasd.co, asdsd.co, and asdasd.co are also sent into that inbox. asdfasdf.co was just the first one I registered. If anyone has suggestions for more domains or are willing to donate an unused domain, let me know in the comments and I can get in touch!
… but why?
Two reasons:
It is a form of internet privacy awareness; filling out forms with a gibberish email account is a hidden danger, especially if you fill the rest of the form out with real information! The data collection started about a week ago.
On a less scary note, I really just wanted to provide the public with a wildcard email address service to get around some pointless email validations on a website you will never use again. I plan on creating private, one-click email accounts for those wanting to sign up for free trials over-and-over again.
The technical bits
Here is how this system works
- A website or user sends an email to [any account]@asdfasdf.co (like someone filling out a form with junk).
- That email is routed through AWS Simple Email Service (SES). I have a rule to catch all emails and shove them into an S3 bucket.
- I created an AWS Lambda function that reads the MIME file, parses it, extracts all the useful bits, strips out the sketchy stuff (in theory), uses PhantomJS to render the HTML into a PNG, creates an HTML file containing the email’s HTML inside a sandboxed iframe, and finally creates a record in DynamoDB of the email’s metadata.
When a user hits the website, they are hitting a CloudFront distribution to serve the static files out of an S3 bucket. The home page contains javascript to fetch data from a REST endpoint to populate the table. This endpoint is configured on AWS API Gateway. API Gateway triggers a Lambda function which pulls the relevant email metadata from DynamoDB.
It’s absolutely overkill, and I love it. Its fast, stable, and pretty cheap to host.
Terms of Service and the data I collect
- Remember that this is a side project with no source of income. Abusing the system will only cost me money. Don’t ruin the fun for everyone.
- If you find a bug, exploit, illegal content, or anything of concern, please let me know! Contact me at mikeortman@gmail.com
- While I do my best, there is no guarantee that your email will arrive nor will I provide any SLA uptime guarantee.
- I collect all of the email metadata provided to me by SES from incoming emails.
- Google Analytics is used for tracking basic website access information. I do not currently nor plan to collect any identifiable user information from website users. Feel free to Adblock the analytics script; I won’t be upset.
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