Closed. This question needs to be more focused. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.
Closed 4 years ago.
Improve this question
In Cuba, web access is extremely censored, so I created a tool that allows more than 50,000 people to browse the Internet through email. Cubans send me an email with an URL in the subject line, and I email them back with the response. Read more at https://apretaste.com.
It was working like a charm, till the communist government of Cuba started blocking my emails. My solution was rotation.
I started with Amazon SES, and I was changing the domain each time it was blocked, but Amazon adds a header to all emails, and once they blocked the header no email from SES was able to reach Cuba any more. The same happened with Mailgun and others, they all add headers.
Currently I am creating Gmail accounts and sending via SMTP, but Google blocks me for no reason and only allows to send 100 emails a day per account. Also I can only create few emails using the same IP address/phone, so I was forced to use anonymous proxies and fake Chinese phones. Now I am fighting a war on two fronts.
An email can be blocked by three parameters: IP address, domain, and email address.
It will be terrific if I can set up my own Postfix server at a VPS that auto-rotates the IP address. Even better if I can simulate "gmail.com", to avoid purchasing a new domain every day.
All the intents to create what I call "the ultimate sender" just either reach the spam folder or add unwanted headers making it too easy to block. I feel exhausted. I hit a knowledge barrier here.
I know I am crossing to the dark side, but this is for a very good cause. Thousands count on this service as their only source of unbiased news, social network and to feel part of the 21st century.
Can you please help me implementing "the ultimate sender", or pointing to another solution that I may be missing?
I have a few suggestions for you.
The first one relies on The Onion Router also known as Tor.
Since you are crossing to the dark side, why not also take a look into the darknet?
Take a look at this list of Tor email providers. If you have your own email server that can be accessed through Tor, it becomes much harder for anybody to stop people from using this service. After all, Tor was developed to offer people uncensored access to the web.
You can read about Tor in detail here, it uses Onion Routing and this is how you would set up your server to use Tor.
Here is an example how you could use it:
The steps that involve the setup, receiving an URL request and sending back the reply are as follows:
Set up an email server.
Configure your email server to use Tor.
Publish the public service name. (e.g. "duskgytldkxiuqc6.onion")
Deploy a client that takes the service name and a URL, and let it send an email with a request to your server.
The client now waits for a reply.
You send a reply and the client receives it.
You can change your service name on a regular basis, but you need to make it accessible to those who will use this service.
Having an own email server means being able to control the email header.
Here is one example how you could make use of it:
Configure your email server so that it receives and recognizes
emails which contain the requested URLs.
Before you send a reply modify the email header so that it shows a random IP address and a random sender email address including a random domain name.
Send your reply.
Sending an email that way means that you cannot be replied back to. But since your reply already contains the requested information there is no need to.
I hope this helps.
Crowd source it.
Find a way that volunteers can send some emails for you. This is the only long term approach that I can think of. A simple web interface with mail to links would be be enough to get started although there are other potential problems with this approach too.
Because you are talking about low numbers of users, you could also use crowdsourcing to create the single email address per person approach. They can create an account on a specific set of email providers and give you the credentials. This would allow the single email per user approach or could be used to rotate through a large set of email accounts to send emails.
The simplest solution is perhaps to set up a local SMTP server on your own computer. You don't even need a server per se.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/winsmtpserver/
There are many other such applications. They are usually used to test SMTP functions during local development, but there is nothing against actually sending spam through them.
I know this would be quite a large task, but how about pairing the users with one or just a few emails so they always receive an email from that email.
I'd assume people wouldn't have more than 100 queries per day, if so they could start receiving them from a backup email
I'd imagine it would look less suspicious for them to appear to be in constant contact with one unique email rather than 50,000 being in contact with one
I know this would be a huge undertaking, but I feel like it solves your issue.
Since the users are willing to receive emails form you then your shouldn't be blocked.
When you mentioned you are getting block does it mean your mail is going in spam or is getting lost in between sending and receiving or it is getting bounced back??
My suggestion would be to setup your own mail server and follow as below:
-Get approx 25 or more ip to rotate. (IP is the most imp part which is tracked and is accountable for the reputation of your mail server)
Don't start sending emails in bulk from the word go it is better to gradullay increase the email volume so that mail server reputation nicely built
keep changing the format of the email often
encourage user to add yourself to there contact list
your best part is user are willing to receive emails from you and you would reply to revived email is the USP of yours but still i will recommend you to register for FBL so that you would know which user is reporting you as spam and you can remove him from your list and never send him email again.
using best practice to send emails like dkim, SPF, dmarc are also vital.
Hope my answer was of some help to you. If you need step by step guide to step up mail server let me know.
My friend, do you remember what made Hillary Clinton lose the last elections to Trump?
It was the "mail" affair. And what was it? People discovered she shared confidential information through a non-official, non-governmental email account (i.e., she used some Gmail, Yahoo or another of a kind). Until here, nothing new with direct relation to your matters. But there is an small particularity on this history, and this can put, maybe not a solution, but maybe a light on a new path you could follow: Clinton actually never sent those emails; the email account she used had the password shared and the communication between people (Clinton-someone) occurred only using the drafts of the account.
How? One side logs in and accesses the drafts folder. There he/she reads the last message and edits it, cutting and writing new data - then save the draft message. On the next turn, the other side of the communication line logs in and do the same. And so forth, so never really sending those messages, but instead just updating the drafts (this "Hillary" method does schooled people... Dilma Rousseff, impeached ex-president of Brazil, actually did this method down there in Brazil too).
So, maybe if you could establish a pact with your user that he/she doesn't delete the account's password, you could pass those information by this method - without "really" exchanging emails. Maybe a "parent" email account (some that could reset a lost password) could be useful too.
Alternative: aren't you able to contract a regular HTTP webserver? You could rely on FTP to publish data to your user, he/she asks for it and you publish a page with that content.
Salvi, have you tried something with Telnet? OK, we are talking here about a text-only environment, but if nothing more would rest in the future, this could be better than nothing. Maybe you could implement a podcast-like, or push-like service based on it. Look what people do with it with references to your walk on the dark side...
If in Windows, open your command prompt.
Type telnet and press Enter.
Type "o" without quotes and press Enter.
Type "towel.blinkenlights.nl" without the quotes and press Enter.
We are planing to develop an extension for a software which will detect the email client software or interface of the recipients and report it.
In many forums this subject is told that is not possible but in this site they claim that they provide a reporting in a large scale.
http://www.adestra.com/email-client-detection-with-messagefocus/
I would be glad if someone could tell or show me a way to do it in any platform.
There are 2 situations here:
- detect the client email agent of the sender
- detect the client email agent of the receiver
The SMTP protocol does not define anything that would allow you to identify the client agent. So in theory you cannot guess it. Some clients will send some sort of identification in the header, though also this is not standard, and it can be fake. You can guess the client agent base on these identifiers though.
To find out the client agent of the receiver, you need to include content that will eventually connect to an http server. From there you can get the client agent (of the browser that opens it). So again, you have to do some guessing work. (ex. if it's yahoo.com and it is chrome .. then .. if it's ie then .. and so on.)
So to cut it short, there is not reliable way of finding out the client mail agents, it's more guessing and statistics.
The only way to do this is via the user-agent from a tracking image, you need the interaction via http. From there, you could determine, although not reliably, the email client in use.
Attempting to set up an automated texting service for customers, where people can text a number, and get an automated response from some sort of server. The cellphone user should be able to hold some sort of exchange with the server through text. Any one have any idea how to implement this?
You can set up a server to respond to MO (Mobile Originated) messages.
You need to have a relationship with an SMS provider/aggregator that will forward MO messages to your server. Based on keywords, you can decide how to respond - since you have the originating phone number you can easily reply to the sender.
I have developed systems like this, so if you need more details just ask.
For an application we are building, it is required to give certain registered accounts the ability to send emails to other registered accounts.
As part of the registration, we obviously collect the real email address of every user.
I do not want to expose any of my users' email addresses so I would like to have the ability to proxy them through fake email address that basically forward to the real email address.
For example, if someone want's to email John Doe, they would send an email to abcdefg12345#mysite.com which would then forward the email to john#johndoe.com.
In case its not obvious, the purpose of this is to protect the end user from spam and keeps their real email address private. Since my application acts as the proxy, I could easily block certain email's from going through.
The most famous example of this is Facebook's email proxy for Facebook Apps.
My Question: Are there any patterns, servers, 3rd party services, or libraries that provide such a feature? Does anyone have any suggestions for how this could be built?
I've never seen a service that offers this directly. The hardest part here is the receiving of the emails and wiring things up to your app for the authentication. You could use a service like http://cloudmailin.com in order to receive the email and then forward it on or even use some sort of custom install. Another option would be to create a script that modifies a server such as postfix's configuration.
Finally although I wouldn't recommend it you could try and create your own mail server to do this. I would read up a little more on SMTP/IMAP and see what options you have.
It looks like there is no 3rd party service or tool\library to accomplish this. It is going to be a bigger task than I was hoping for so I will be putting it off until I have the time to implement it.
I think the solution is to use a mail daemon that has an API or at least allows you to manipulate the users\emails\aliases in it such that you can create new mailboxes on demand and set them to forward from someuser#proxy.mysite.com to user#theirdomain.com
I found out that there are services that provide this type of functionality as part of their offerings:
http://mailgun.net/
http://www.sendgrid.com
Both of these services are very cool and offer quite a bit for sending and analyzing emails including the ability to create forwarding\proxy emails.
I was developing a simple SMS application using the Email-SMS Gateways that various Phone companies provide.
So for instance you can send a SMS message by appending a carrier specific email suffix to the mobile number. i.e for AT&T:
For the phone number 111-222-3333, it's corresponding Email is 1112223333#txt.att.net
The specific Mobile provider that I am trying to send/receive from is China Mobile (中国移动通信集团公司). I have found very extensive lists for virtually all other carriers (Both US and International), but can't seem to find one for this Chinese Carrier.
So my question is:
Is there a public Email-SMS gateway (Such that you could fire an SMS message from a standard email client or server-side scripting langauge like PHP)
If not, then is there any way to get around it, via other services (legally of course).
Thanks
I just found this. This seems useful. I'm gonna test it soon for my company.
http://www.now.cn/mobile/ (In Chinese. The English version doesn't seem to have the information about SMS sending)
Plan 1: 1000 SMS for 99 RMB.
Plan 2: 5000 SMS for 449 RMB.
Plan 3: 20000 SMS for 1699 RMB.
It might be blocked in China (best way to see this is to check if other Chinese carriers offer this).
If no public e-mail address pattern is found for China Mobile, try another service that already provides this for CM and check if they have an API.