Warning! If you do this, anyone might be able to create HTTPS certificates for your domain name!

A lot of certification authorities will allow you to get a certificate for example.com if you can prove that you can reply to an email sent to an email address @example.com. If you configure an MX record pointing to the mailinator MTAs, then anybody can request a cert and ask to validate domain ownership by contacting [email protected], and can subsequently browse the whatever@ mailbox on mailinator to read and reply to the confirmation email.

Are you skipping over something in that explanation about which email(s) one must be able to read? Because the way you said it makes it sound as if anyone could make fake certs for hotmail, gmail, etc. And that can't be right... I hope.

This is partially right(!)

A security researcher once obtained a certificate for Microsoft's live.com domain by registering an email account [email protected] and using it to reply to the CA's verification email.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/11/state_of_ssl_analysi...

Presumably something like "root" or "webmaster," but those aren't illegal on mailinator: http://mailinator.com/maildir.jsp?email=webmaster&x=0...

You're right, but I was just proposing to use one of your own domain, not your real, business, holy domain. You can register a new one for less than 10$/year, or you can just use a free third level subdomain (like trashbin.example.com)

Nice. Hopefully I can just CNAME something.example.com to mail.mailinator.com, and everything will just work.

Edit: yes, this works perfectly.

It would be nice if there was a quick-and-easy open-source version of an in-memory mail server. I'd like to run my own service, but not enough to write a robust SMTP server from scratch.

I still think that mail servers could really use a disruption. It is still way too complex just to get something simple set up.

I haven't surveyed the field extensively but this has been my experience with the common recommendations. If anyone knows of a server that already exists and would make it trivial to set up basic SMTP/IMAP/POP3 with authentication let me know.

Ideally the only configuration info I would need would be something like this:

allow_imap = True

allow_pop3 = True

allow_smtp = True

accept_mail_for = ['this_domain.com', 'another_domain.com']

#users

users = ['jeff@this_domain.com', 'molly@another_domain.com']

#forwards

forwards = {'jeff@this_domain.com': 'cookiecaper@some_domain.com'}

and then, a program like mail_server_passwd would ask me for my username and let me set a password, and that would be that. It shouldn't be any difficult to bootstrap a mail server, and right now setting something that has POP3, IMAP, and SMTP up can take hours for experienced admins unless they know the mail server(s) very well ahead of time.

Keep an eye on OpenSMTPD. For a taste, look at the sample configurations at https://calomel.org/opensmtpd.html.

[Warnings: OpenSMTPD apparently hasn't eaten anyone's mail yet, but it's hardly done. By design, it doesn't include as many options as other mail servers, some of which may be useful. I don't think OpenSMTPD been ported to non-OpenBSD yet. calomel.org tends to be out of date, inaccurate or dangerously incomplete.]

OpenSMTPD comes very close to your ideal simple configuration, a 5 line configuration gets you up and running. Tie this together with openbsd's extremely simple pop3 server, you have something that is both extremely simple and easy to set up.

http:///opensmtpd.org

What about using a ramdisk? Of course, it wont be as optimized since the software thinks it's writing to disk, but..

Also, some SMTP servers are probably pretty easy to modify. I use qpsmtpd[1], which is probably quite easy to modify. Then, all you need is a IMPAD that can read from memory..

I would like to have my mail in something like Redis. It would give easy access from different languages etc..

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qpsmtpd

This is what you're looking for: http://quintanasoft.com/dumbster/