Cover image for I Built a Temp Mail & Webhook Tool — Reddit Instantly Thought I Was a Spammer

yobox

I spent the better part of two weeks living on caffeine, error logs, and the kind of optimism only a solo developer at 3 AM can produce. The goal was simple, or at least it sounded simple when I wrote it on a sticky note: build a clean, fast, free developer toolbox. No signups. No dark patterns. No "upgrade to Pro to copy your own output."

I called it YoBox — a single home for the small tools developers and QA engineers reach for every day: disposable email, webhook capture, Docker Compose scaffolding, regex testing, password generation, and Lorem Ipsum that doesn't look like it was generated in 2008.

Then I launched it on Reddit.

Reddit, in its infinite wisdom, decided I was a spam bot operating out of an undisclosed bunker.

This is the story of how that happened, what I learned, and why I now have more respect for spam filters than I ever wanted to have.

The Infrastructure Battle

Before any of the funny parts, there was the unfunny part: the infrastructure.

Domain, DNS, and the Cloudflare Dance
I bought yobox.dev on a whim because it was short, memorable, and ended in .dev — which forces HTTPS by default and feels appropriately nerdy. Then came Cloudflare: nameservers, proxy toggles, SSL modes, page rules, and the perennial question of whether "Full (strict)" is going to make my site work or break it in a way that's invisible until a user complains.

DNS is the only system on Earth where you make a change, wait 24 hours, and then find out you typed one character wrong.

GitHub, Render, and the API Backend
The frontend lives as a Vite + React app. The backend is a small Node/Express service deployed on Render, sitting behind the same Cloudflare proxy. Setting that up was its own small adventure:

Configuring render.yaml so the backend builds from the backend/ directory of the monorepo.
Wiring environment variables for allowed origins.
Getting CORS to actually behave — which, if you have ever fought CORS, you know is a spiritual journey, not a configuration task.
Adding a /health endpoint so Render stops killing my service every five minutes.
The Temporary Email System
The Temp Mail tool proxies a disposable inbox API through my backend so the frontend never has to expose tokens or worry about third-party CORS. It supports rotating addresses, polling for new messages every few seconds, and reading message bodies inline.

This part alone took longer than I expected. Email is a deceptively complex domain. "Just give me a throwaway inbox" turns into "okay but how do we handle token refresh, expired accounts, attachment rendering, and HTML emails that try to load tracking pixels?"

The Webhook Capture Service
The Webhook Tester was the part I was most excited about. You generate a unique URL, point any service at it, and watch requests arrive in real time — method, headers, query string, body, timestamps. Perfect for debugging Stripe events, GitHub Actions, Zapier flows, or any of the dozen other integrations that fail silently because you can't see what they're sending.

Building it required a small in-memory store, a capture middleware, and a polling endpoint so the frontend can show new requests without WebSockets (Render free tier and persistent connections are not friends).

The Moment Everything Finally Worked

There's a specific kind of joy you only feel after fighting infrastructure for days.

I opened the Temp Mail page, generated a new inbox, pasted the address into a SaaS signup form, and hit submit. Five seconds later, the OTP email appeared in my polling UI. I clicked it open. The 6-digit code was right there, ready to be copied.

Then I opened the Webhook Tester in another tab, generated a URL, and pointed a curl -X POST at it from my terminal with a JSON payload. The request showed up in the UI before I could alt-tab back. Headers, body, IP, everything.

I sat there grinning at my laptop like an idiot. The thing worked. The thing actually worked.

I deserved a launch.

Then Came Reddit...

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This article is part of the YoBox Developer Blog.

Read the complete guide here:

https://yobox.dev/blog/reddit-thought-i-was-a-spammer

⭐ More developer tools:
https://yobox.dev

⭐ GitHub examples:
https://github.com/hocineman4/yobox-examples

About YoBox

YoBox is a collection of free developer tools for API testing, disposable email, webhook inspection, Docker utilities, regex testing, password generation, and QA workflows.

🌐 https://yobox.dev

⭐ GitHub Examples

https://github.com/hocineman4/yobox-examples