FAQs

Is your service secure?
Yes. User login, and sessions are SSL encrypted. Passwords are stored as one-way salted hashes. Users also have the option to turn off email storage so that there is no record of emails received. POST'ed emails can be validated using a hash created from a concatenated email message-id and the API secret key.

If my email processing needs grow, can you support this?
The service is built to be scalable. The overhead required to process a single email is about the same as a single pageview for a small database-backed website. There are two database queries when an email is received -- one to find the receiver's account, and one to find how the email should be processed. These tables are small and properly indexed, so the queries are quick. The service runs on a VPS that can be scaled up easily.

When posting to a URL, why are there strange equals signs scattered throughout the body of my email?
Your email may be sent with a content transfer encoding of quoted-printable. It's possible to decode these with PHP regular expressions such as:

// Remove soft line breaks
$message = preg_replace("/=\r?\n/", '', $message);

// Replace encoded characters
$message = preg_replace('/=([a-f0-9]{2})/ie', "chr(hexdec('\\1'))", $message);

PHP also includes a standard library function to handle this: quoted_printable_decode(). Also, there is now an option to automatically decode quoted-printable emails when using the key-value option for receiving posts.

When posting to a URL, why are do emails sent from BlackBerries have strange text?
These are likely posted base64 encoded. If you are using the key-value option for receiving posts, you can check the posted 'content-type-encoding' and 'content-type-encoding-html' values (for the plain text and HTML parts of the email, respectively) for the encoding type.

How long should it take for an email to be posted?
When sending an email from most popular US email services, such as Gmail, it should be instantaneous.

Why does this cost money?
Charging a small monthly fee makes the service easier to scale by limiting the amount of users and resources required to run it.