Building an Alternative to cock.li Email Service

Andrew | andrewgx.site

Reading Time : 15 Minute

Tags: Emails

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With the rise of Google, Microsoft & Apple - Which provide email services, they aren't exactly secure nor private. These email services are great as they are trusted by most, if not all of the compaines that requires auth. I hate such big tech not respecting our privacy and how gmail, outlook, icloud mail can be easily traced back to us - not good privacy wise.

As you may all know, i use 5 email provider:

Tuta.io
cock.li
pissmail.com
gmail.com
SelfHosted Mail Server

Why Must I Use All These?

I use tuta mainly for all my signup, clients and other shit, as it is privacy friendly and i may have gotten the revoultionary mail plan for free for a year. This itself is not enough, So i hosted a mailserver on the cloud for only $4 a month. Which is cheap but if you consider that i only get 20 gig on my VPS, and the Software take up 8Gig - I only have around 8 - 10 Gig of Storage. Yes i could attach a storage slab to my VPS but it'd cost me $30 a month for 250Gig.

People might criticize me for using Gmail, but we sadly cant fully escape big tech without losing some services. I use Gmail for my bank as they DO NOT accept tuta mail nor any of my own custom domains (which is really weird but i guess this is to aviod spam).

The other 2 provider - pissmail and cockmail and sometime yopmail. I use it for most of my signup on sketchy websites or for signups on image boards. I LOVE LOVE Imageboards - espically 4chan, but due to the recent hack, i've been having a good time at soyjak.

Why Am I Building This?

Mostly for shit & giggles but its mostly to gain experience when it comes to setting up auth and a mailserver for prod.

Building My Own Alternative To Cock.li & Pissmail.com

Obviously, my target is a free-userfunded private mail service. running an Mail service similar to cockmail & pissmail will be hella expensive ($60 / 300,000MMK a month per 12,000 user) but it obviously will be user funded as my target audience is people looking for funny mail domain name & temporary mail solutions.

MailServer

Before we setup the service, we need to choose what Mailserver to use. I use Postfix in my current mailserver for a lightweight mailserver. But for this prod ready mailservice - i will use Exim mailserver - as it is lightweight, scalable, routing control, customizable, and it is good for email queuing.

Domain names

We will also need a tonna edgy, based, and controversial domain names - right now, i have 4 domain name (not edgy) lying around but i will accept domain name as a donation as I want to offer at least 15+ domain name. I've searched some edgy domain names and I'll probably register slaves.sale - hitler.art - youare.gay - gokys.lol - hitler.art - chingchong.email. But I plan to make a preminum plan where you can unlock more rare domain and connect your own domain - haven't figure that out yet.

Storage Options

All user will get 100mb of FREE storage but if they have ads enabled, i will plan to increase it to atleast 250mb. If they donate, i will increase storage by 5Gib/$10 donated - i plan to implement aliases, so user will be able to signup for multiple services, with just one mail account. Obviously, as i am an indie dev, i can't afford to give everyone FREE storage. I mean - 100mb is already enough for most signup/ activation - as they only take 500kb - 2mb atmost.

Preventing Spam & Abuse

Not really sure how to prevent this fully as i will be using my selfhosted SuperToken auth server, although 2FA will not be available for FREE accounts, that does not donate nor buy the service. I will obviously put a rate limit to 1 signup per day from a single ip and device - not really sure how to implement this yet. The accounts will also be deleted, if not logged in for over 7 days, or if law enforcement request us to investigate and delete the account. I will research more about preventing but overall im not even sure how to prevent spam and abuse.

Overall

I like what cockmail and pissmail offers, but they're not reliable in long term - as cockmail is now unmaintained and pissmail's maintainer is really shitty with support and stuff. If you wish to help me in anyway please contact me, andrewgx.site/contact.

I plan to release this for prod ready maybe next year. If you wish to join the alpha / beta stages, you may stay updated on my blog posts - andrewgx.site/blogs.

UPDATE - 20 / SEP / 2025

Project abadoned... litterly after configuring most of the settings...

Due to Burma's Laws, i also want to stay out of sketchy stuff.
I do support free speech though...