📚Developer Documentation

Welcome to the Maildrop developer docs!

Maildrop provides an easy-to-use API that lets you programmatically retrieve mailbox listings and individual messages, delete messages, and more.

Maildrop Architecture

Maildrop is built on a very straightforward architecture - as messages come in, they are checked against a variety of antispam filters written by Heluna. Messages which pass the filters get immediately queued and placed into a database.

The first time you email a maildrop.cc address from a mail server that Maildrop hasn't seen before, Maildrop will respond with a temporary failure telling your mail server to try again. This is a concept known as "greylisting", which is one effective antispam technique. Most mail servers will retry their delivery within 15 minutes, which Maildrop will then accept.

Temporary, Throwaway Mailboxes

Maildrop mailboxes are temporary; that is, if a mailbox doesn't get a message within 24 hours, it erases all of its messages. Additionally, during periods of high usage, mailboxes which have not had a message added recently may be evicted to make space for new messages.

Maildrop mailboxes can hold a maximum of 10 messages, after which the oldest messages will be deleted.

Sending Email from Maildrop

Maildrop can not send email under any circumstances. The SPF record for Maildrop is set so that no host on the internet should be sending messages from the maildrop.cc domain - you can (and should) ignore all emails from a maildrop.cc address.

% nslookup -type=txt maildrop.cc
Server:		100.100.100.100
Address:	100.100.100.100#53

Non-authoritative answer:
maildrop.cc	text = "v=spf1 -all"