Mailbox Zero

Can't reach Inbox Zero? Just create a new one.

MailboxZero is a server that provides you an infinite number of mailboxes that you can check via a REST API.

It combines a SMTP server that accepts incoming emails and a web server that provides access to the emails over a REST API.

How to use it

mb0.wtte.ch is a demo instance of MailboxZero

1. Send an email to somerandomstring@mb0.wtte.ch
2. Visit http://mb0.wtte.ch:8880/api/somerandomstring@mb0.wtte.ch for a list of messages in your mailbox
3. Retrieve an individual message by visiting http://mb0.wtte.ch:8880/api/somerandomstring@mb0.wtte.ch/<messageID>

Messages get deleted about ten minutes after arriving. You get a parsed version of the email, not the raw email. MailboxZero will show you:

• the richest body, usually the HTML version
• the simplest body, usually the plain text version
• the URLs in each body
• the headers of the email as a list of (name, value) pairs
• the subject, from and date fields

Deploying your own instance

Quick start:

1. Install Python 3.8 or newer
2. Install MailboxZero pip install -U mailboxzero
3. Run mailboxzero as root.

To run an instance reachable from the public internet you need a public IP, assign a hostname to it, and setup a MX record to point to that hostname. You should also use something like systemd to run MailboxZero in order to limit its privileges and not run it as root.

Development

Setup the development dependencies with python -m pip install -U -r dev-requirements.txt. We use pytest to run the tests in tests/.

Main libraries used:

• aiosmtpd
• tornado