zkemail/archive.prove.email

On-the-fly brute-force selector guesser on failed user search, stream results to frontend

Opened this issue · 0 comments

New issue from this comment #70 (comment)

When a user searches for a domain which we don't have in the database, show a message such as "No selector found for example.com. Trying common selectors..." and then, if a result was found, update the list on the webpage.

Steps needed:

  • Do parallel brute-force check of the list of about ~2000 frequently used selectors. Needs to be routed via website server.
  • Need another, dedicated server (or 3rd party service) to perform it in parallel.
  • Implement a mechanism to propagate the result back to frontend.

Cost: > 2 weeks of work.

Cost/benefit:
My personal take is that this is an expensive feature, that has both an upfront cost and a long-term maintenance cost. I agree that IF a selector is actually found, then it would look really cool! But I think that in 99 % of the cases it will render 0 results, and possibly annoy the user more than it helps, because the user will wait on the progress just to see "nothing found".