Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown?

Re:Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown? by amaurymartiny on Sunday June 21, 2020 @03:17PM (#23594562)

I built a tool to check if an email exists without sending any email. I also created a SaaS out of it: [link redacted].

The tool connects to the target email's SMTP server, and parses the response of the "RCPT TO" command. To avoid IP blacklisting, I use Tor.

The code is in Rust, 100% open-source. The core library is here: [link redacted]

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Re:Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown? by vincent_s on Monday June 22, 2020 @04:48AM (#23598355)

Hah, I did something very similar with MailExists [1], but not Open Source and using expensive proxies instead of TOR ;-)

[1] https://www.mailexists.com/

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Re:Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown? by jtokoph on Sunday June 21, 2020 @03:25PM (#23594624)

Aren’t Tor exit nodes mostly blocked already?

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Re:Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown? by amaurymartiny on Sunday June 21, 2020 @03:37PM (#23594729)

> mostly

Using Tor, I can verify around ~60% of emails. Notably, the exit nodes can connect to Gmail/GSuite servers. So it's not that bad.

If Tor's exit nodes are blocked by a server, I fallback to Heroku, where I have right now 3 fixed-IP instances. And if I see that one of these also gets blacklisted, I would have it self-destruct and relaunch, Heroku assigns a new IP on each new instance.

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Re:Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown? by acid303 on Sunday June 21, 2020 @06:58PM (#23596022)

Does Heroku reuse these IP addresses? Can someone get them after you?

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Re:Ask HN: What did you make during lockdown? by amaurymartiny on Monday June 22, 2020 @04:00AM (#23598134)

I unfortunately don't know the answer to these two questions.

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