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Listing free mail providers

This is a fairly long list of free email domains.

It's not complete, but if a Nigerian cyberentrepreneur has heard of a particular free email service, then that service's domains are probably listed here. I use it as a list of domains whose users probably don't know each other, which is useful if you want to estimate a social graph. My estimate does not need to be 100% correct, so I'm not trying for 100% correctness in this list.

To regenerate the list, just run make -j50 and wait for freemail.txt to be updated.

Technical overview

There's a Makefile that runs a number of small shell scripts in parallel. Each shell script requires almost CPU or RAM, but causes quite some load on the local DNS server. There are (at present) five different scripts, each with its own mechanism for discovering free email services.

This uses a Makefile because Make is good at running a DAG of small scripts, which is exactly what this needs.

Pull requests welcome

To add a new service:

  • Add it to the typicals list if it operates a .com domain and eponymous other domains using the same name servers (as e.g. Microsoft does for hotmail.com, hotmail.fi etc). If its main domain is not a .com, add the main domain to freemail.txt as well, as the commit for gmx.de shows, and rerun make.

  • Write a custom script to download its signup form and list the domains if it has many (as e.g. mail.com does).

  • Add it to scripts/single if it's just a single domain (as mail.ru).

  • Do something else.

This never needs to run without adult supervision, so I haven't tried to make the scripts either robust or fast. If you want to write a prettier or faster script, or use a different language, you're welcome.