mailnesia.com - Anonymous Email in Seconds

March 29, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

Mailnesia is a fully featured disposable email provider. Just like a real email service but without any password or the ability to send mail. Features at a glance:

  • Automatically visits registration/activation links in emails, completing any registration process instantly
  • Alternate mailbox names (aliases) for extra anonymity, use any name you want
  • Alternative domain names (all mail is accepted regardless of domain name)
  • Displaying HTML emails correctly including attached images, files
  • Multiple encodings supported: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian etc
  • RSS feed for every mailbox
  • New emails appear as they arrive, without needing to refresh the page
  • Fast, easy to use interface
  • Translated to 10+ languages

This repository contains the source code of Mailnesia. What it includes:

  • The website including everything: images, CSS, JavaScript etc
  • The email receiving server
  • Additional utilities for maintenance, testing etc
  • How to set up the SQL tables

What is not included:

  • Configuration for web server, database server or any other external utility
  • Scripts to start and monitor the website/RSS/email server processes

Architecture overview

Mailnesia is made with the perl programming language. It runs on Debian GNU/Linux. Nginx is used as web server, PostgreSQL as database server. Redis in-memory key storage server is used to store banned email addresses and IP's and other settings.

  • Custom SMTP server implemented in perl using AnyEvent::SMTP. Event based, using only one thread.
  • Website implemented using Mojolicious, powered by Nginx web server.
  • Emails are stored in a PostgreSQL database
  • Hosted on a virtual private server with SSD storage

The email server sends all received emails to several URL clicker processes using ZeroMQ to offload the email body processing which is somewhat CPU intensive.

Requirements and installation

Required Perl modules with versions are listed in the file 'cpanfile'.

Installation

Some modules might require compilation of C source code; these packages will take care of that on Debian 9 (Stretch):

apt-get install autotools-dev g++ gcc dpkg-dev cpp fakeroot gdbserver libalgorithm-merge-perl libalgorithm-diff-xs-perl libalgorithm-diff-perl libdpkg-perl libltdl-dev libltdl7 libpython2.6 python2.6 libreadline6 libsqlite3-0 m4 make manpages-dev patch python2.6-minimal g++-4.4 libstdc++6-4.4-dev gcc-4.4 binutils cpp-4.4 libc6-dev libc-dev-bin libmpfr4 libgmp3c2 libgomp1 linux-libc-dev

On Debian 11 (Bullseye):

apt-get update && apt-get install libzmq5 openssl libssl-dev zlib1g-dev autotools-dev g++ gcc dpkg-dev libdpkg-perl libltdl-dev libltdl7 libsqlite3-0 m4 make patch gcc-10 binutils cpp-10 libc6-dev libc-dev-bin libgomp1 linux-libc-dev libreadline8 cpanminus libpq-dev

The required Perl modules can be installed with the cpanm script. Install all requirements into a directory, for example ~/perl5:

cpanm --installdeps /directory/where/you/cloned/mailnesia.com/ --local-lib-contained ~/perl5/ --skip-satisfied

The path lib/perl5 under this chosen directory must be exported and used by each application, so they load their dependencies from it:

export PERL5LIB=~/perl5/lib/perl5

Setting up Redis

In /etc/redis/redis.conf:

Port 0
unixsocket /var/run/redis/redis.sock
unixsocketperm 777

Setting up PostgreSQL

Using password-less "trust" authentication for mailnesia PSQL user

This applies only if clients connect locally on UNIX sockets. In pg_hba.conf, after "Put your actual configuration here" but before the local and host configurations:

# TYPE  DATABASE    USER        CIDR-ADDRESS          METHOD
local   mailnesia   mailnesia                         trust

Create mailnesia user / database

  1. as root:
su postgres

cd
createuser --superuser mailnesia

2. createdb mailnesia 3. as any user:

psql -U mailnesia

Create tables

Execute tools/psql-create-tables.sh to create all necessary tables and relations. The script also contains some documentation.

Translation

The script tools/translation.py is used to download the Google spreadsheet containing the translations.

How to contribute to a project without knowing a damn bit about it

https://domm.plix.at/perl/2013_09_open_source_plus_plus_contribute_without_knowing.html

Compressing CSS and JavaScript

Minifying is done with yui-compressor. This code snippet will automatically compress .js and .css files in the project directory upon save in Emacs.

(add-hook
 'after-save-hook
 (lambda ()
   (dolist (element '(
                      "/directory/containing/project/mailnesia.com/website/js/javascript.js"
                      "/directory/containing/project/mailnesia.com/website/css/style.css"
                      ))
     (when
         (string= buffer-file-name element)
       (save-window-excursion
         (shell-command (concat "yui-compressor -o " (replace-regexp-in-string "\\.\\([a-z]\\{2,3\\}\\)$" "-min.\\1" element ) " " element " &>/dev/null &"))
         )
       )
     )
   )
 )

Testing

End-to-end tests

Description

Test running website and mail server by sending test emails.

Requirements

All services must be running, as well as Postgres and Redis. Email sending requires the swaks tool which can be installed with:

sudo apt-get install swaks -y

Execution

tools/test-mailnesia.pl

Unit & function tests

Description

Execute function tests under t/.

Requirements

These don't require the website to be up, but running Postgres and Redis are necessary.

Execution

prove