Shorter Email Addresses for Posting to Reger.com Blogs

You can post to your Reger.com blog via email. It's simple, cool and fun. Just log in, go to Tools - > Post by Email and Camera Phone, choose a security pin and get a set of email addresses to send to.

This means that it's easy to forward messages that you want to keep from your email client (Outlook, in my case). It also means that you can send pictures from your camera phone... which I do.

In the past we had email addresses like:
accounturl.1.joereger.pass.2843.email@api.reger.com

These were just too long. Some camera phones wouldn't accept email addresses this long.

So, today we launched a new scheme that assigns a random key along with your password:
xpred7a.pass@api.joereger.com

The first seven characters create a unique keyspace of over 70 billion. We're using single-case alphanumerics. Which is 36 chars to the seventh power (36^7).

Still, somebody could concievably guess or randomly choose your particular key, so we added your email secret password to the mix. To post something to your blog a hacker would have to have the combination of the key and your info.

And you can change your email secret password whenever you like for increased security.

The random string bothered me a bit because it's not natural. But then I realized that when dealing with cell phones the shorter the better. And it's not like the gargantuan addresses we had before were all that great. While each of the items between the dots means something to us, it really doesn't mean much to the user.

So we think this is a good solution that will allow more people to send cameraphone pics to their blogs.