[HN Gopher] Show HN: maildog - Hosting email forwarding service ...
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Show HN: maildog - Hosting email forwarding service on AWS with
GitHub Actions
Author : gmegoj32
Score : 116 points
Date : 2021-07-13 11:48 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| mhw wrote:
| Would be more accurate to say "Hosting your own email forwarding
| service on AWS", as the README does. The GitHub Actions piece is
| for managing it.
| fooblat wrote:
| This is not objectively less complicated than running your own
| mail server and certainly requires no less prerequisite
| knowledge, just different.
|
| I get doing this for the fun of figuring it out and I'm all for
| that kind of project.
|
| If you just want something easy, https://forwardemail.net/ has a
| free tier that would cover this need nicely without having to
| learn much at all.
|
| edit: typos
| foreigner wrote:
| I use ImprovMX for this.
| ents wrote:
| I use a similar service, forwardemail.net for this, and it's
| free.
| songzme wrote:
| Very cool! My friends and I built https://m8l.me/ which is very
| similar and we've been using it for the past year. Instead of
| forwarding to email address like maildog, m8l.me forwards all
| emails to your server (or any server) as a POST request. If you
| don't receive many emails a month you could use the free AWS EC2
| instance and store the emails in sqlite, thereby creating
| unlimited custom email addresses on your domain for free.
| opheliate wrote:
| M8L looks great, nice work! Are you able to give any insight
| into the architecture? I'm always paranoid when putting free
| tools online that they're going to suddenly get a wave of users
| & cost me a ton.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I run email for two companies. In both cases, everything from SES
| goes straight to quarantine and users never see it. I would just
| reject SES altogether but once in a while something legit comes
| in and someone asks me to release it. I see a massive amount of
| spam from SES and pretty much all email service providers.
| moehm wrote:
| > I see a massive amount of spam from SES
|
| Okay.
|
| > and pretty much all email service providers.
|
| Uh, how do you handle email then? Which provider do you use /
| can you recommend?
| admn2 wrote:
| ImrpovMX.com handles this nicely too (for free)
| jaden wrote:
| There's a typo in the URL. It's https://improvmx.com/ and is
| free for 1 domain, $9/month for up to 100 domains & 100 aliases
| per domain.
| devops000 wrote:
| How it could be use to send email using Gmail "send as alias"?
| Like sending as sales@example.com from your own gmail account
| geocrasher wrote:
| Please, oh please, do not forward email.
|
| https://www.tidbitsfortechs.com/2018/06/email-forwarding-is-...
|
| ^ I am the author of that article. If this is a different kind of
| mail forwarding, then please educate me as to how. Thanks :)
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Doesn't Google Domains do this at no extra charge if you host
| with them, or am I nuts?
|
| (I may be nuts, its almost a certainty actually)
| delduca wrote:
| Yes, they do.
| johnsolo1701 wrote:
| I am not sure how common this is, but my domain registrar does
| this for me. In case someone else is looking for a simpler way to
| do this.
| [deleted]
| kureikain wrote:
| Another alternative is https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-
| ses-forwarder which is purely AWS lambda based.
|
| I used to use it before now. Now, I run my own email forwarding
| service at https://hanami.run to expose a nice UI and a Rest API
| so I can `curl` my emails.
| asah wrote:
| neat!
|
| I usually just use gsuite + aliases/groups, which includes spam
| filtering, web console and a lot more. Granted, it's ~$6/mon,
| doesn't scale to 20,000 email addresses and you have to be cool
| with Google.
|
| There something else I'm missing out on?
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Yours isn't a DIY hack for fun.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| This is a poor strategy
|
| Not only is it a deep violation of their TOS, but also, they're
| just gonna shut you off at random when your 3000 hours run out
|
| Doing this right on a VM costs less than two dollars a month
|
| This is a ticking time bomb, and may cause Microsoft to be less
| generous in the long run
| kelt wrote:
| Taking Amazon SES to production can be a little tricky, I think I
| am talking to robots with templated messages. Maybe I don't have
| luck or didn't explain myself well enough.
| psanford wrote:
| I didn't have any trouble with getting them to enable
| production mode SES for my personal email domains. The only
| thing I can think of that might have helped me (besides making
| it clear I wasn't using this for marketing emails) was that my
| AWS account had been open and in good standing for quite a
| while before enabling SES.
| tyingq wrote:
| This feels like it's pushing the TOS for Github Actions a bit by
| using it for post deployment, live operations. Like the hourly
| health check and your dead letter queue scheduler.
|
| It made me curious, so I looked at their TOS[1], and they seem
| somewhat permissive about things like this. Though vague about
| where/when you cross the line.
|
| Like, this seems clear:
|
| _" should not be used for...any other activity unrelated to the
| production, testing, deployment, or publication of the software
| project associated with the repository where GitHub Actions are
| used."_
|
| But then:
|
| _" but a low benefit Action could be ok if it's also low
| burden"_
|
| [1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-
| terms-f...
| bredren wrote:
| Perhaps for the virtual machine. If this concerns you this
| could be used with GitHub Actions Self-Hosted Runners.
|
| SHRs let you use github workflows while performing operations
| from local machines.
|
| These machines can be set behind a firewall.
|
| Perhaps some of the novelty of this project is that it doesn't
| require any paid cloud resources other than AWS.
|
| But it does not take much to set up a self hosted runner
| locally.
| Fileformat wrote:
| Also note that Github will deactivate cron actions if there is
| no activity in the repo for 60 days.
|
| https://github.community/t/do-disabled-scheduled-workflows-r...
| koolba wrote:
| Obviously you can automate that with another repo that has a
| cron job to push a dummy commit every 30 days.
| danappelxx wrote:
| In fact, they can play ping pong and keep each other going
| forever :)
| OJFord wrote:
| But you do get an email warning you, with a button to say
| 'no, keep going'.
|
| (I maintain docker images for gocryptfs & mergerfs -
| https://github.com/OJFord/docker-gocryptfs
| https://github.com/OJFord/docker-mergerfs - that check for
| updates to those respective projects and push an updated
| image; if there's no new upstream version for a while then I
| get that email and have to click it to keep it running.)
| Thev00d00 wrote:
| Seems like a lot more hassle than using purelymail[0] for $10 a
| year, which has full Sieve and SpamAssassin and sub-addressing.
|
| 0. https://purelymail.com/pricing
| fiatjaf wrote:
| This is great! Thank you.
|
| There is also https://forwardemail.net/ which is a different
| service.
| jtolj wrote:
| Was just about to post this. I've been using it from the
| beginning for all of my "pre-launch" domains and it has been
| flawless.
| freedomben wrote:
| I also use forwardemail.net and pay for premium. It's
| fantastic, although I haven't made use of the APIs yet so
| can't speak to that.
| [deleted]
| tyingq wrote:
| Purelymail does look great for personal use. But, be aware it
| wouldn't be economical for something like a big mailing list.
|
| Try the calculator at https://purelymail.com/advancedpricing
| and put in some large number of outbound email sends, like 2
| million in a year, and the cost gets into the thousands.
|
| Purelymail sent emails are $2.03/1000 plus $0.18/GB. Compare to
| SES, which is $0.10/1000 plus $0.12/GB.
| CR007 wrote:
| Add AWS to title, please.
| smmnyc wrote:
| Somewhat off topic but how does one make that cool 3D
| architecture diagram?
| nathancahill wrote:
| https://www.cloudcraft.co
| jasongill wrote:
| very cool looking but a bit hard to read, at least in the
| maildog readme
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| Totally! The isometric view is impossible to read.
| tyingq wrote:
| A fair amount of that seems fixable with better color
| choices and fonts/size. It's curious to me that
| cloudcraft hasn't improved it. Lightish orange on a white
| background, for example?
| WoodenChair wrote:
| The complexity of setting up forwarding with AWS Simple Email
| Service/handling incoming messages without using their WorkMail
| is why I moved off it for my next project. There is no real
| option for this, although Amazon does provide a tutorial for
| rolling your own using a combination of S3 and a Lambda Function.
| [0] You'd think instead of creating a tutorial basically asking
| users to copy and paste their code, they may just want to add it
| as a feature.
|
| In fact, I find almost everything on AWS overcomplicated. I ended
| up moving to a combination of MailJet for outgoing transactional
| mails and Zoho for incoming emails. This combination also happens
| to be free while in development.
|
| 0: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-
| targeting/forward...
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2021-07-13 23:01 UTC)