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Mephisto

A RAM-only, ad-free disposable email PWA built with React

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Hi HN,I built Mephisto because I was frustrated with the current state of disposable email services—most are riddled with intrusive ads, trackers, and captchas.I wanted a tool that felt like a proper developer utility rather than a spam farm.The stack is React, Vite, and Tailwind. Key architectural decisions:1. Volatile Memory: The backend writes nothing to disk. Once a session terminates, the data is irretrievable. 2. Client-Side Entropy: The password generator runs locally in the browser; keys are never sent to the server. 3. PWA: It's installable and designed for low latency using WebSockets for incoming mail (no polling). 4. Mobile Handoff: You can transfer an active session to mobile via an encrypted QR code.It is completely free and open for public use. I'd love to hear your feedback on the implementation and UI.

HN · launched Dec 17, 2025 · 21 upvotes (top 34%) · 1 view

Niche: disposable and temporary email services · 60 launches, 2 in the last 7 days ▼ -75% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Communication
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 60 launches in disposable and temporary email services →

Could you build this?

Partial The PWA interface and local state can be generated easily, but reliably receiving inbound SMTP emails across custom domains in real-time requires maintaining specialized mail server infrastructure.

What it would actually take: The architecture combines a React/Vite PWA with an inbound mail transfer agent (such as Haraka or Postfix) or a custom Node/Go SMTP server that buffers incoming messages in an in-memory datastore (e.g., Redis) before pushing to the client via WebSockets. The primary difficulties are maintaining high IP reputation to avoid inbound blacklists, handling spam floods, and building secure ephemeral memory recycling. This requires Linux sysadmin and email protocol (RFC 5321/5322) operational expertise.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Guerrilla Mail, 1secmail, disposable email services

Concerns raised: Scrolling broken on Firefox, page not responsive, Using AI-generated code and Google AI Studio without proper attribution, Wrapper service with no original infrastructure (uses upstream providers), Domain enumeration vulnerability - random rotation allows scrapers to collect all domains, Risk of abuse as open relay for spam if reply feature implemented

Feature requests: Implement reply-only functionality with cryptographic message linking, Support SPF, DKIM, DMARC validation for address verification, IP-based or AS-based domain allocation instead of random rotation, Native WebSocket implementation instead of polling

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 104 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #31 of 105 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 47 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

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