tempalias - down for now

After running tempalias.com as a fun project for a bit more than a year and a half, I would say that the experiment is now finished and tempalias.com is down for now.

There are both personal and technical issues. Let me list them here:

• the tempalias codebase relies on a very old version of node.js and some very old additional libraries which wouldn't even work with newer versions of node.js.
  I'm concerned about running outdated software, so I would have to put a considerable amount of work into modernizing the infrastructure
• As the database size has exploded in that year, my very dumb method for garbage collection has reached the end of its possibility for scaling. I would need to find a better method in order to ensure that this machine keeps running smoothly
• This machine is now in use for other projects of my company which are actually making my company money (and thus pay my bills) and as such, I'd rather make sure these projects can run unhindered (for example by above garbage collection issue
• Email providers here in Switzerland have some obligations for logging and handing out these logs which is not at all compatible with my idea of trying not to log. I'd rather not have to deal with legal issues should they come up.
• While the whole concept of tempalias is helping to prevent spam, it also provides a means for third parties to hide the actual origin of their spam. I don't want to be helping a spammer - even more than I want to prevent spamming (obviously)
• As this is a personal fun project about learning whether I can do what I did, it was never my intention to provide free support to anybody. Now in general, I don't get many requests, but there are some and I have enough support-requests to deal with in my real life, so I'd rather not have them in my fun-project

This means that tempalias.com is down for now. You can't create more aliases and no more mail will get delivered.

If you want to have a service like this, remember that the source code of tempalias.com is freely available at my github page

I hope you undestand

Philip Hofstetter, November 16, 2011