Email Driven Apps
“Email As API” concept
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Salmon - A Python Mail Server is a fork of ZedShaw’s lamson mail server.
Third party hosted email services
After considering different alternatives, migadu appears to be a good solution to host email on; Nov 2019.
Moving off Google
Using gmail
- Use a basic Gmail account to “Send mail as” with a domain that uses Cloudflare email routing; Nov 2022.
Self Hosting email
notmuch — “If you want the convenience of fast, reliable search of all your email, but don’t want to give a 3rd-party access to your email… Then notmuch may be exactly what you’ve been looking for.”
How To Run Your Own Mail Server
Synergetic Labs | Email Alchemy; HN
Having recently had a small side project which required email capabilities whilst simultaneously wishing to avoid adopting any specific ecosystem, I set about building a self-hosted email solution.
Mail is not hard via [HN] where I found this interesting comment by user skrause.
I think the biggest pain in hosting your own mail server is getting your outbound mail delivered into the mailboxes of the large providers without being marked as spam. Especially if you don’t actually send a lot of mail, so you can never really build up a good IP reputation.
That’s why I generally recommend a hybrid setup: Host inbound mail completely by yourself so that you have full control, but ship off outbound mail to a trusted relay of a privacy oriented provider. For example https://posteo.de/en doesn’t filter any outgoing messages by sender, so you can send mail from your own domains. Your local Postfix can DKIM sign your mail before sending them to Posteo and if you add include:posteo.de to your SPF record all your mail will be DKIM signed, SPF authenticated and coming from a reputable IP, so all your deliverability issues will be gone.
How to run your own mail server (2017) | Hacker News; some new discussion in Nov 2019.
vedetta-com/caesonia: OpenBSD Email Service
Stalwart Mail Server | Stalwart Labs Ltd.
maddy is an email server designed for transactional email, with web hooks on different events. It replaces Postfix, Dovecot, OpenDKIM, OpenSPF, OpenDMARC and more with one daemon with uniform configuration and minimal maintenance cost. Maddy Mail Server implements all functionality required to run a e-mail server. It can send messages via SMTP (works as MTA), accept messages via SMTP (works as MX) and store messages while providing access to them via IMAP. In addition to that it implements auxiliary protocols that are mandatory to keep email reasonably secure (DKIM, SPF, DMARC, DANE, MTA-STS).
- Learn and Test DMARC
Here, you’ll get a visual breakdown of how email servers communicate, giving you a better understanding of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC and how they work together.
Self-Hosted email is the hardest it’s ever been, but also the easiest.
Calendars
Searching Email
Elasticsearch For Beginners: Indexing your Gmail Inbox | Hacker News; see links within.
Email testing
- MailCatcher — Catches mail and serves it through a dream.
MailCatcher runs a super simple SMTP server which catches any message sent to it to display in a web interface. Run mailcatcher, set your favourite app to deliver to smtp://127.0.0.1:1025 instead of your default SMTP server, then check out http://127.0.0.1:1080 to see the mail that’s arrived so far.
last release of mailcatcher was in 2016.
- mailhog/MailHog: Web and API based SMTP testing claims to inspired by mailcatcher and easier to install.
Mailhog: How to Use It and Why | Mailtrap Blog
“Mailhog alternatives MailCatcher, SMTP Bucket, FakeSMTP, and LunaticSMTP are good replacements for MailHog.”
In contrast to these tools, Mailtrap is a purely online service. You don’t have to tinker with any sort of installation or setup. All you need to do is to configure your SMTP server according to the provided credentials. After that, you can get on with testing.
Securing email
- Protect domains that don’t send email - GOV.UK; see also https://dmarcian.com
- My e-mail honeypots
- nicanorflavier/spf-dkim-dmarc-simplified: Email security is a key part of internet communication. But what are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and how do they work? This guide will explain it all in simple terms to make these concepts clearer.
Sending Email
- Brevo API for commercial uses (newsletters, transactional, customer service etc)
- mjml-The Responsive Email Framework
MJML is a markup language designed to reduce the pain of coding a responsive email. Its semantic syntax makes it easy and straightforward and its rich standard components library speeds up your development time and lightens your email codebase. MJML’s open-source engine generates high quality responsive HTML compliant with best practices. MJML rolls up all of what Mailjet has learned about HTML email design over the past few years and abstracts the whole layer of complexity related to responsive email design.
- A Deep Dive into Email Deliverability in 2024