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Frequently Asked Questions

For the most part we've made these questions up; no one's asked us anything. We're just trying to anticipate the questions people may ask.

If we haven't got a question that matches yours, please e-mail [email protected] and we'll try to get it answered here. Be aware that anyone can read the webmaster mailbox, so don't send anything sensitive.

How do I create an address?
How do I check an address?
Where is a message I expect?
How do you handle abuse?
How do I send mail?
What if I need to confirm the address by sending a reply?
Is this secure?
Is this private?
How do I delete an e-mail?
Can I get an RSS feed?
Can I read messages through POP or IMAP?
Why does the HTML tell me it's broken?
Can I read a news feed?
How do I get an attachment?
Can I do this with my domain?
Are you going to make your site better looking?
Who are you?
Why are you doing this?
What does liamon mean?
This makes you rich, right?
What's with gp6?

Why does the HTML tell me it's broken?

When we recognize an e-mail as having an HTML body (perhaps as one of many multi-part messages) we try to parse the HTML and display it for review. Many times, instead of seeing the HTML there will be an error message, sometimes with a description of the problem. The HTML is broken for one of three common reasons:

The HTML is actually broken
The message is broken as part of the MIME attachment process
The message is broken as part of our data storage and recovery

Many junk e-mailers hastily throw HTML together and they rely on the forgiving nature of browsers to still display the messages. In order to provide some protection, we stop the display of broken HTML.

It does happen that the MIME formatting of the messages will break lines, and the MIME parser we use doesn't correctly reassemble them. In this case, the message may have originated correctly, but we've essentially broken it.

Finally, and similarly, when we store the data in our database, we sometimes have to break really long lines, and sometimes when we try to rebuild those lines, we do it a little wrong.

We are working on correcting the last two, but won't do anything about the first. The raw messages are still displayed, so the even the contents of broken HTML can be seen.

See also:
How do you handle abuse?

What's with gp6?

We're not sure who first used gp6, but that address started receiving e-mail even before we started testing.

Our first test e-mail address was postmaster, but even though it's a common e-mail address to have, and often gets a lot of unwanted e-mail, it hasn't come close to the number of messages gp6 gets!

We also expected address or liamon to get a lot more, because those are on the home page as valid addresses, but still gp6 beats 'em all!

How do you handle abuse?

This is an experiment, and a constant work in progress. We're trying to eliminate abuse by identifying its various forms, and coming up with an appropriate way to handle the abuse.

SPAM

The mail server receiving mail for this site has some limited checks for SPAM that it performs before sending mail forward to our service. This is largely limited to "open servers" to help prevent the spreading of unsolicited e-mail. If a connection is initiated by one of these untrusted servers, it is discarded without further consideration.

The mail server also attempts to verify the validity of the sending server's ability to send mail by both SPF and Domain Keys. If a message is sent from a domain that is configured with either of these "sender ID" services, the server will only accept mail from authorized servers. This domain is configured with both SPF and Domain Keys, so properly configured servers should not accept any mail sent from any server other than what we've configured (which is currently that no server is valid).

Other than that, which really means "content-based" filtering, the service does nothing, so mailboxes may be filled with junk. That's part of the point (and fun).

We're against SPAM and try to make sure that we're not causing any. Go ahead and check the abuse or postmaster mailboxes to see if someone is complaining about our domain sending junk. In the interest of full disclosure, we're not hiding even those messages. We check them, too.

Malicious Content

One of the biggest risks with receiving unrequested mail is malicious content. This can come in the form of icky attachments that turn out to be spyware or viruses or worse. It can come in the form of unwanted images. It can come in the form of undesirable pop-ups when looking at a message formatted in HTML, with an HTML compatible mail reader.

We help you avoid this by not displaying the icky content. We don't decode the messages to separate embedded images or attached files. We don't show HTML formatted the way they wanted you to see it; we show the raw HTML--sure, it may look confusing to most of us, but the good e-mailers also send a plain-text version of the HTML-formatted content included in the message. We now display some HTML content, and are working on safely displaying more. Essentially we display the content between <body> tags after removing any <script> blocks. We are working on allowing attachments to be retrieved and optionally show images.

Since we show only the raw safer text provided, there's little risk of malicious content making it through. Do be careful when following links, of course.

User Tracking

Since the images are suppressed, there aren't some of those tracking mechanisms that let sites know when e-mail is read; be aware that some of those mechanisms still lurk in links, and that following them may "track" the user. A small silver-lining to this is that the liamon.com user is tracked; a small smudge on that lining is that if you use a tracking URL, your IP address may be associated with that user. There's a big juggling act going on here, and mostly the other side is winning.

Inappropriate Content

One of the other big offenders is inappropriate content. Since we're not showing any attached images it's unlikely that anything more than potentially offensive language will make it to the screen. Images are not being shown, yet, but we are working on a way to safely and optionally show images. Please accept our apologies if you encounter anything disturbing. At this point we have no plans to censor potentially offensive language. Just remember the caveat: reader beware!

Storage

Surely keeping e-mail of unknown size for potentially randomly created addresses could take its toll. We have a few rules to help keep the storage needs for our messages down:

We only keep the last 10,000 messages received.
We only keep the first 100 lines of messages received.
We only keep the last 10 messages sent to any address.
We only keep messages for an address created or read in the last week.
We only keep messages for one week.

This should help keep our storage demands down to something we can manage.

We'll adjust the numbers as usage dictates, and as storage allows. It's not our goal to be a long-term archive of e-mail, just a short-term resting place while mail flows.

How do I get an attachment?

We currently have no mechanism, or any plans to develop one, through which you'd be able to take attachments from the provided e-mail. Since we trim messages, it's unlikely that the attachment survived unless it is very small.

If you find that the entire attachment did make it through, you could try cutting the message content and pasting it into a file that you could decode yourself, or perhaps open as an e-mail message in another program that allows retrieval of attachments.

See also:
How do you handle abuse?

How do I check an address?

Simply enter an e-mail address in the box on the right side of this page. Alternatively, you can select an address from one of the rolling statistics on the right side of the page.

There are no passwords, so just enter the address.

The 10 most recent messages will be listed in the middle of the page. Select the title of the message you wish to read and its content will be displayed beneath the list of available messages.

All e-mail is separated out by name, so don't worry about the "@" symbol, or anything following that. Everything sent to someone@liamon.com will end up in the someone mailbox, which you can visit here.

How do I create an address?

Very simply, have mail sent to one. When you encounter a place to provide an e-mail address, make up a name and put @liamon.com for the domain name.

When an address is first encountered, a tracking record is created. This helps us make sure that only "active" addresses store mail. The message will be stored, and all you need to do is put the name you created in the address box on the website.

How do I delete an e-mail?

You can't. The message will fade away after a week, or as other messages arrive, and eventually the one you're worried about out will be removed from the server.

See also:
How do you handle abuse?

Can I do this with my domain?

We're considering opening the service to other domains, or relasing the (really simple) software necessary to host such a site for your own use. At this time we're not offering such a service or the software. The best we can offer you is to forward everything to an address @liamon.com, which we're currently open-minded about.

Can I read a news feed?

No. While similar and arguably related, no direct correlation between network news (NNTP) and e-mail (SMTP) is being made here. We don't plan to publish our messages to a news server, nor do we plan to read messages from news servers for display on our site.

Can I read messages through POP or IMAP?

No. We only offer access through the website.

Is this private?

In a word, no.

Any address to which mail has been sent can be viewed by anyone and the address may be exposed by one of the statistics on the right side of this page.

We do not display the from address or any other e-mail addresses sent in the message To: or Cc: headers. We do this to protect people from individuals looking to find e-mail addresses by parsing our site. We do not hide stop e-mail addresses that may be in the body of an e-mail, however, so some innocent people may find their address is listed in mail that has been forwarded poorly. We're not stopping those addresses because they may be an important part of an e-mail. If we find that we've become a source for address farmers, we'll begin parsing out all e-mail addresses.

What if I need to confirm the address by sending a reply?

This usually happens for e-mail lists, although sometimes it happens when registering for access to some websites.

We don't recommend liamon.com for interactive uses. There are other free web-based mail services for that.

Because we don't allow e-mail to be sent from liamon.com, there is no mechanism for replying to confirm. In addition to that difficulty, we truncate messages to 100 lines of text, and we don't display images or make attachments available. The contents of a list submission are likely to be lost when sending mail to a liamon.com address.

This makes you rich, right?

Wouldn't that be nice? But the real answer is no.

This could surely be a way to slip into idenity theft, but we're strongly encouraging potential users to not use the service for real e-mail, so it should be the case that there isn't any actual useful information (about users--there may be useful information in the content) in any of the messages received.

We're doing this entirely out of pocket. We have context-sensitive advertising, provided by Google, for what it turns into.

If anyone has any ideas for turning this into a gold mine, go ahead and send some mail to the [email protected]. Be aware that anyone can read the message, so don't send anything sensitive.

Can I get an RSS feed?

Yes!

Here, and on the right side of this site is a link that will allow you to subscribe to the general feed. The general feed will provide the last ten messages received to any address.

If you review a mailbox, another link will be provided that will allow you to subscribe to the feed for that mailbox.

Use this button to subscribe to the general feed.

Is this secure or private?

In a word, no.

The service is designed so that anyone can get to any address. If you feel you need something more private, either try a more convoluted e-mail address, or use another service.

Note that even convoluted addresses can be viewed by others and the address may be exposed by one of the statistics on the right side of this page.

How do I send mail?

You can't.

We don't want anyone sending mail from our domain. Use any one of the free web-based services for that.

The service is meant to be a fake address to give out so you can safely get e-mail without being bothered by unwanted mail, not so you can use it as a fake address to send unwanted mail.

Are you going to make your site better looking?

While the site may not be pretty, it is functional. Our goal is to make it work first, then to make it look nice.

In the future, we'll probably introduce a few colors and styles to the site, to make it more agreable to look at.

What does liamon mean?

Liamon is "no mail" backwards and squished together. The "dot com" is just the most common top-level domain name, so we chose that as people will tend to remember that, or at least try it first.

We pronounce it "LEE-uh-mon" or even "lemon," but go ahead and pronounce it any way you'd like.

Where is a message I expect?

If it's a new message, have patience. The world of e-mail is nearly instantaneous, but not exactly instantaneous. In addition to network latency, there is a little checking done by mail servers along the way, especially ours, in an attempt to eliminate SPAM. It may be that your message is just taking longer than you'd like. Check again.

If it's an old message, be aware that we clean up frequently. We eliminate mail very quickly. Mail is only kept for a week, at most. We only keep 10 messages for any mailbox. We only keep 10,000 messages total on the server. It may be that your old message was wiped out. Check early.

See also:
How do you handle abuse?

Who are you?

We're batman. No, not really; that's just a favorite answer to that question.

Really, we're just some guys, sick of SPAM, trying to do a little something about it.

Why are you doing this?

We are tired of getting junk e-mail when all we wanted to do was access some information on some website, but they demanded an e-mail address, especially when we found that those addresses are then sold or stolen and used by unfriendly people for undesired reasons.

We wanted to develop a method through which a person could provide a valid e-mail, perhaps to receive some kind of confirmation to access the service, but not risk the onslaught of unwanted junk.

So we made this.

In addition to providing this up-front look at e-mail, we're working on evaluating the messages as they come in, trying to identify messages that are very similar, yet different enough to pass some anti-SPAM filters. Since we're open to receiving messages for any address, we're certain that the same messages will eventually start hitting multiple addresses. With some logic applied, we should be able to note what's junk, and help remove those messages from the streams.

We've also been alerted that a similar service exists at Mailinator, but we think liamon sounds cooler. We are in no way competing with them, nor are we affiliated with them.