[nikblack]

it is loading really slowly for me

you should auto-gen an email address for every new visitor, makes it easier than having to check. people don't care what the username is for a throw-away email address anyway.

after auto-gen, set a cookie so if I do have to come back for something, I don't need to remember the username and I can click a link to see the inbox (or just put the inbox on the frontpage as well)

otherwise, pretty cool! a neat hack would be a bookmarklet that auto fills-in a reg form with the email address (say some javascript that searches for an 'email' text field and inserts a new unique email).

edit: come to think of it, I would probably pay money if you did this as a service for my own domain. eg. I could point a catch-all for all my email to you, which you can use to generate throw-away emails from my domain name (in that case the emails are less likely to be blocked by services).

[ntoshev]

Thanks for the suggestions, I like them and will probably implement some variation.

I hope to be able to run it off a minimal VPS account as I am doing now. The architecture is very slim (no disk access, no interprocess communication) but uses unproven libs. Still loads fast for me, though.

[jonknee]

CPU may not be your bottleneck... Mailinator is handling up to 2 million emails an hour off a single server. Bandwidth though is an issue, 3TB a month. You pay for all those connections that spammers open.

http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2008/11/so-our-core-duo-serve...

[ntoshev]

Yes, I expect bandwidth to be the bottleneck. But it can be pretty cheap: serveraxis for example has unlimited bandwidth at 10mbps starting from $40 a month.