I dont know if you're joking or not. But how is that going to generate revenue? I mean the site is cool and useful and all. But its just anoth http://mailinator.com/ clone.

Yes it is a mailinator clone. I hope to provide a better service with more features like auto-forward, private inboxes and stuff like that.

Ad revenue. Mailinator claims they get a million emails a day, that's a lot of money in ad revenue. My goal is to dethrone mailinator as the de facto temp email provider.

Paul from Mailinator here.

We get, on average 15million emails a day with peaks much higher.

Definitely don't confuse that with ad revenue. No one ever ever said we get millions of users a day. Alexa or Quantcast can show you real user traffic - please consider ad revenue to be more realistically based off those numbers.

Simply emails. Pure spam. Once a user signs you up - you're getting spam for them - forever.

If you think of a dead-simple feature Mailinator doesn't have - its because we've probably tried it and backed it out from abuse.

With no exaggeration, we get one or more subpoena inquiries or subpoenas a month. On top of that, we have more code in anti-abuse systems than features. A sad reality but otherwise we'd be long gone. Despite claims of Mailinator being often banned, we go a long way to prevent people from using a feature like forwarding to automatically do an internet vote thousands of times. While that would be fun, we'd be banned in short order and that helps no one.

The most interesting point to me is that you need very strong infrastructure, servers and bandwidth to handle the load if you become popular. In other words, there are many many Mailinator copycats and historically, once a copycat reaches a certain level of popularity, the owners need to make a decision.

Paying for all that isn't easy. As far as I know - this is exactly what happened to the now defunct disposable email sites Pookmail, 2prong, and dodgeit.

Death by popularity without revenue.

Hi Paul, thanks for your insight. Wise words I'll always remember when facing adversity. This project is just to get a couple of bucks a month, nothing else. Running on top of google infrastructure I'll try to see how much it can handle without breaking apart, I'll be reporting on any scaling issues.

This will be a great learning experience for sure.

"My goal is to dethrone mailinator as the de facto temp email provider."

"This project is just to get a couple of bucks a month, nothing else."

Which is it ?

Those statements were said at different times, before and after new information was available. Kilimanjaro is working to a plan that can adapt; this is something to admire not mock. Personally, I reckon what he's doing is great, and I'm also impressed by Paul's openness and willingness to give advice.

I agree. Kilimanjaro's enthusiasm is just what you need as an entrepreneur :)

In some sense, my "openness" might be too much reality. He may find the business model he needs (and I was serious when I said there were 10's of copycats already - good idea to check those out for ideas)

And, of course, Mailinator is surely just a "weekend project" for me too. It just has an advantage of a good few years worth of weekends.

Both.

Started as a weekend project to make a couple of bucks a month, it has the potential to grow and scale backed by google infrastructure. As a side effect, it may grow bigger than mailinator taking its place as number one disposable email account provider.

I hope that clears the confusion about my intentions and future goals.

aren't all those million emails almost by definition value-less? its the lowest value emails to send.

Yes and no. It all depends on how many are spam and how many are welcome emails with registration info. People register in websites and go check their confirmation links. Then forget about it.

Out of that, one percent of welcome emails means 10K real visits daily, and that is good enough for a steady ad revenue flow.

If only 10% signup, then 10% of that purchase....These are dangerous ways to make a business, though we all do them while daydreaming...

most of those emails are probably never viewed... but I wish you luck regardless.

And Pepsi is just a coke clone...

if pepsi could have bought coke's recipe for $99, that analogy would make sense:

http://www.alstrasoft.com/disposable-email-script.htm

You're missing the point: Business ideas do not need to be either unique or non-trivial to succeed when the goal is so small; he's not building an empire here.

Could it be possible to get some info on how you built that site? Frameworks, technologies, tools, ... I am new to this, and trying to learn a bit.

It is really simple since the core of the project is just a catchall email account and a cron job to purge emails after 24 hours. The hard part I am still working on is decoding emails, 7bits or 8bits, UTF8, ISO-*, etc. and handling attachments.

All built using AppEngine, python, webapp and notepad2.

Actually, bringing in $100/month from a website, even a blog, isn't too hard, but does take persistence and time.