A commenting system that works via email
Hi everyone, I made a commenting system that accepts submissions via email, instead of requiring a login. The back story is I wanted some interactivity for my site/blog, but I felt like requiring a signup wouldn't be a good UX. I'm looking to get feedback on it from the HN community. Please feel free to ask questions and let me know your thoughts, especially what you don't like about it. If it's a decent UX then I would like to make it OSS, as I feel that it could potentially fill a void, especially for beautiful small websites. Here's the basic flow of data: 1. When the site is…
In plain words
This is a commenting system that lets visitors submit comments via email instead of requiring account creation or login. When someone clicks a comment link on a website, their email client opens with pre-written instructions in the message body. The system receives and parses incoming emails to publish comments. It's designed for blog owners and small website creators who want reader interaction without signup friction.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi everyone, I made a commenting system that accepts submissions via email, instead of requiring a login. The back story is I wanted some interactivity for my site/blog, but I felt like requiring a signup wouldn't be a good UX. I'm looking to get feedback on it from the HN community. Please feel free to ask questions and let me know your thoughts, especially what you don't like about it. If it's a decent UX then I would like to make it OSS, as I feel that it could potentially fill a void, especially for beautiful small websites. Here's the basic flow of data: 1. When the site is generated, mailto links embed information for where the future comment will go 2. When a user clicks on a "comment" or "reply" link, it opens a draft comment in their mail client. Instructions are pre-baked into the email body. 3. When a user hits send, the email is received by my software, which parses the email, validates it for tampering against a pre-computed hash, and then opens a pull request. The user gets an "auto-reply" email, informing them that the submission was successful, along with a link to preview it. The site moderator (so, in this case, me) gets an email, with links to the PR. When the comment is approved, the site is rebuilt and deployed. Other info and potential gotchas: * Emails are all hashed for privacy (with a secret "pepper") that's occasionally rotated * Comments are represented as individual files, so there are no merge conflicts * DKIM, DMARC, and SPF are all checked to help prevent spoofing There's a FAQ on the link above that has more information, and you can also see a demo on my personal website: https://spenc.es/writing/email-as-a-commenting-system/ Thanks for reading!
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Hi HN! I’m proud to share that we have built a real 3rd party iMessage client for Android. We did it by reverse engineering the iMessage protocol and encryption system. It's available to download today (no waitlist): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.beeper.ima and there's a technical writeup here: https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works. Unlike every other attempt to build an iMessage app for Android (including our first gen app), Beeper Mini does not use a Mac server relay in the cloud. The app connects directly to Apple…
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- HA
Hey! I made Heynote entirely for my own use case. For many years, I always had an Emacs instance running with the scratch buffer open, even long after I had abandoned Emacs as my programming editor in favor of more recent IDE:s. The simplicity of having just one big scratch buffer appeals to me, but I still want to separate the different things I jot down somehow (without using tabs or similar). Previously, my solution was to insert a bunch of blank lines between the notes, but hitting C-A would still select the entire buffer. That's why I came up with the concept of "blocks", which turned…
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