kureikain

I'm building mailwip.com (and my second saas right now)

My strategy is too simple, I don't think it will works but It work good enough for me.

- Just engage in the community. In early day, I helped on the cloudflare forum. I just help generic about anything related to email, explain concept and here and there try to introduce my service. I always introduce my service last. Give people free option first, always, even if the free option is my competitor. But I do explain pros/confs of my service

- Build plugin that may drive traffic: For me, CloudFlare offers plugin ability so I built a CloudFlare app for that. It may not benefit me directly but get my name out there

I shared my revenu and publish update on indiehacker https://www.indiehackers.com/product/hanami/revenue

Yes, exactly this. Mailwip has 2 features to discover this

1- Mailog(opt-in, disable by default): Once enabling you can choose the detail of logging to see the delivery status. 2- Spam digest: (opt-in, disable by default). We will send a daily summarize if there is email we flagged and didn't forward to you.

I build this for this use case:

I already had an email somewhere. Anytime I got a new domain, I just want to forward to that email. Consolidate all of my email in a single place. And support SMTP so I can also reply through the domain as well.

I want a dead simple way to manage these alias, help family all know what is up by forwarding all emails to their individual emails.

I don't want to get charge per sear, or have to convince the others to switch to a new mailbox. Just forward to them.

I had stuff like kid@ travel@ school@ insurance@ forward both to my wife and me for example.

CloudFlare isn't easy to use for a non-tech person to manage their email. It also require that you point the DNS to CloudFlare. If the DNS is on Route53, you cannot use Cloudflare.

ImprvoMX is something I really admire but I just need more feature they don't support at the time (Maillog, webhook, regex routing, search email) So I build this for me as a user and have. been growing it.

With the alias, I can also block/null route after a certain use when I don't want to hear from that alias anymore. Impossible to do with a standalone inbox.

My wife love it. She got her own domain and use it when signing for deal/coupon website then null route the alias to prevent being bombarding later on.

Most of the time these service works. But when it doesn't work you just don't know how to debug it.

Mailwip.com has a mail log with the detail so you can debug delivery issue. Also, manage email with namecheap ui dns is something I just don't want to deal with.

I want some nice UI, that also enable a few member of family to self-manage the domain and forward rule.

Sometime I also want to have webhook to parse receipt email from the bank. So I ended up building all of this.

If gmail and namecheap works for you, no need to look further.

Thank you. I build this.

Originally every time I had a domain and start a project, I have to setup email. Other services always lack something that I want. So I ended up building my own and has been growing it since 2021.

We also had a RayCast extension developer by Xmok https://www.raycast.com/xmok/mailwip

We had some very advanced routing rule based on regex, and wildcard domain, work in progress to support sieve filter. Had web-hook and API so you can do some cool thing with emails.

If you're still fighting with Chef slowness, hard to debug, complicated setup, you may want to consider Pyinfra.

It is very well thoughout and simple to design and run.

We did this in 2013, got serve with a lot of lawsuit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeighborCity

Be careful with the real estate industry

I had a Macbook Pro intel. I can ship it as well. Drop your email to me.

Email me your info. I will ship one.

In case if anyone want to read this book and live in bay areas, you can also access Oreilly media through your local library online and will be granted access to orelly media. this book is available there.

If you had a server around, considering just setting up https://mailcow.email/ it's super easy and straigforward. Everything is in docker compose. `docker compose up` and you go.

If you want a hosted SMTP for your own single domain, and volume is low, consider just using AWS SES. I run betterdev.link with it, send about 20k email per months and pay around $2

If finally you want some nice and easy UI to use for email forwarding and SMTP, consider my email forwarding app https://mailwip.com It was built for this use case.

it's first step. you gotta do something to bootstrap, solve chicken-egg problem. From what I can see around me, the "made in america" is a no joke branding. a lot of pppl going tobuyjust because of that. and may even consider it as social status and their policial support.

such a bad take. as a software engineer thing like this happen all the time. no matter scale we will screw it.

what steps we can take is that it's now a lesson to make it more caution when we went into that path.

Just ged rid if icloud and apple photos. slow as f*ck, crash all the time once the library get big enough on my mac. damn slow to scoll in the photos app with lot of picture.

I switched to https://immich.app/docs/features/command-line-interface and import all of my photo into it. 1.3TB and it's damn fast with all the face detection and ml features.

This means that we can finally do gRPC directly from browser.

I'm working on my email forwarding app https://mailwip.com to enhance and control my email.

Working on adding many small features such as webhook, email parser.

your ability to writing this out and provide in a liner way make it like a painting to me. You should have no problem in a real world work environment with the right support.

checking our your code, it's great as well, you surpass level of many engineers i know who has staff/principal in their title.

don't let the fact about those job or interview letting you down. You write out C code like nothing from these.

You're absolute a great programmer.

You will have better succeess doing your own SaaS instead.

Do you know why these are so short? What is the algorithm/magic in all of these?

I tried to make sense of it but cannot

Thanks for making Pyinfra.

It's one of the tool that get out of your way and let. you get the work done. The tool works for you instead of you fighting with the tool.

Pain point of ansible: storing state and checking later, coordinate state between server is all a breezy with Pyinfra because you write the Python code to perform those check.

The system is very well though out. No need to hack around host file, inventory is just a python script that export resource definition.

No more static, ad-hoc host var, you get a real python script to define and return your variable.

Using pyinfra I was able to focus more on the "compute". the state such as credential, inventory can managed and store outside such as in SSM or just call python ec2 api to filter instance by tag.

I run an email forwarding service[0] and it's damn hard to get into inbox of any major provider if SPF/DKIM aren't config properly. DMARC or ARC might be optionally but an email without SPF/DKIM, good luck having it hit any inbox.

Office365 is the toughest, email just randomly land on spam no matter what I do. Icloud, actually it's ProofPoint is tough sh*t too.

So I'm so surprise these guide just pop-up now like it's a new thing.

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[0] https://mailwip.com

I think for these use case a SSH server in Go would be way simpler such as https://github.com/gliderlabs/ssh

I don't see nmap, netstat, and nc being mention. They had saved me so many time as well.

anyone know a good guide to getting started with these kind of projects? such as say I have an idea any general guide to:

- development env with simulator - development board - production hardware

Just a few weeks ago we had an auth service. For some reason our CBO cannot login, reset password email takes a long time to come(another story for other days).

So I generated an argon2 hash, manually loggin to db to set it. I want to run:

``` update users set hash = 'hash' where email = 'cbo email'; ```

Unfortunately, the `;` character was used as part of the hash so during copy and paste the whole thing become:

``` update users set hash = 'hash'; where email = 'cbo email'; ```

It ran immediately and reset password for all of our users.

I had to make a new db from the point in time recovery to copy password back.

always use transaction and commit the result will be the way from now on.

Jenkins has improve a bot. before github action has self host runner, Jenkins has worker node years ago.

using jenkins declarative pipeline, almost everything can explain in code.

updating jenkins is a walk in the past.

the most tedious part is dealing with no longer maitenance or support plugin.

make sure to never expose jenkins out. use a relayer to bring webhook traffic in

I operated an email forwarding services[1] and have research this area extensively because eventually customer will keep asking for IMAP.

When hosting email, receiving is easy part. But storing and fetching it is hard. Sending out, on other side, is hard to configure but easy to store(there is not much to store except DKIM config).

But the hardest part is actually getting providrs to accept your email. I always had issue with ProofPoint and Outlook(Microsoft 365).

I also have issue with 800 emails per hours on fastmail.

Lot of thing like that come up when hosting your own emails.

However, it's worthed it, it open a lot of amazing thing once you own your own email.

With that being said, I recomend Maddy https://maddy.email/ it's a very simple deployment that handle pretty much everything. No need to glue multiple system together.

For spam filering, just use RSPAMD.

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https://mailwip.com

It has multiple mode. One of them is explicitly acknowlede mode. If the worker finished process the job but doesn't ack, the message will appear again.

I run a competitor of SES so I won't defend them.

But the problem is that Mailgun/Sendgrid/Postmark and the like is less senstive to spam and ban. The ban on SES is way heavier and the spam rule is stricer.

Maigun/Sendgrid even suggest to use dedicated IP pool to improve delivery, where as AWS SES doesn't https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/dedicated-ip.html https://docs.sendgrid.com/ui/account-and-settings/dedicated-... You can see the tone there.

This is bad advice.

SES is the best among the provider.

They treat spam very seriously, compare to other. You would need to maintain a baseline, failure to do so will get the account into soft-susspend or permanent suspended quickly.

AWS, being an engineering focus product, provider tooling and automated around bouncing, spam reporting handling. Having sophisicated tooling help user deal with that.

They strongly againtst and not suggest end-user to buy dedicated IP. Where as other providers always want user to pay more for "dedicated ip" to "get better delivery".

AWS has procedure, best practice to encounrage slowly warmup when sending mass volume. They had their own rate limit (14 messages per second by default), move the account out of sandbox, a good domain/sender verification.

They are the best among providers when it comes to email.

Sometimes they appear to be worst than others, but that is a specific case. The way email works will always have false positive. If user decided the email is spam(even it isn't) and keep reporting it may appear in a certain spam list.

In 2012, I need to sync data between a set-top box device(a karaoke machine) and an ios/android device to transfer SQLite data between them.

The ios/android app literally spin up a HTTP server run on the phone, the device just hit it to download file up to 20MB. I was dumb and didn' think much, and it just works. It works so well I never pay attention to it. Eventually the app evolve where the entire config is push this way, one can open the app, edit config, and it save these into XML file. The setipbox will download that XML file.

Then even better, there is a webserver run on the phone, where one on the same wifi network can hit it and edit all the config on a very simple website instead of using the app UI. Such as upload file from your desktop into the phone(the song book).

Of course, the app needs to be running for all this to work. When the app close, the webserver is also shut down.

So yes, even in 2012 on those cheap devices, one can run a full feauted webserver on the web server.