Show HN: Heimdall – Self-managed email alias/forwarding service • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Heimdall – Self-managed email alias/forwarding service

#51

Post by technion » Sun, Feb 02, 2020, 7:18 AM UTC

srhngpr wrote: post #33

btmiller wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agreed, I do not want to manage my own workflow in a manner like this. I actually just put a doc together[1] last month for anyone looking to do the same through providers that support this workflow. The one killer feature that is missing in Fastmail right now is the ability to reply to email as the same alias it was received as. I.e. if Airbnb support emails me at airbnb@mydomain.com, it'll default replay as…

I am using Exchange Online, and I cannot reply using aliases that I've created. It also always defaults to the primary username. Anyone figure out a way to make this work in Exchange Online?

I can't find the link on mobile but this was a recently announced "coming soon".

Re: Show HN: Heimdall – Self-managed email alias/forwarding service

#52

Post by Keverw » Sun, Feb 02, 2020, 8:17 AM UTC

technion wrote: post #50

Keverw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and seems like the big providers don't like self hosted emails. I know someone who runs a hosting company using cPanel and his clients email go to spam a bunch even though not spammy emails, his answer is to just pay extra for Google Apps and that running a email server is too complicated. Not sure how true that is... For my own future projects I plan to run everything in containers, Node, etc so not PHP/MySQL s…

Hosting company cPanel servers are a bit of a special case though. I've run these before and once customers start installing WordPress it can be a matter of hours before a bad plugin gets turned into a spam bot. It's at a point where blocking port 25 outbound is a responsibility imo. WordPress contact forms are routinely abused - I regularly see forms where enter a victim as "my address" and then it helpfully copies…

Yep, contact forms in WordPress but even non WordPress sites too. Then of course if you got a plugin to detect brute forces, seem like WordPress sites get ton of them! Probably because you can detect if a site runs WordPress or not, so bots use that.

Sounds like the only solution to contact form spam might be rate limiting and/or captchas but even bots can bypass captchas too unless you use one like Google reCaptcha maybe but sucks your system has to rely on third party services then.

Re: Show HN: Heimdall – Self-managed email alias/forwarding service

#53

Post by VvR-Ox » Sun, Feb 02, 2020, 9:17 AM UTC

I like the idea but I do not understand why someone would want something self-managed/hosted and then use AMZN SES to send/receive mail and S3 to save mail/attachments.

1. AMZN has access to your mail (inc. your contacts) so you could just use any other service you do not trust. 2. Why would I process mail just so save it on another machine and not do both on the same server?

Probably it has to do with "serverless" (you have to use at least 2 "servers" now, don't you?) but maybe I am just missing the point.

Re: Show HN: Heimdall – Self-managed email alias/forwarding service

#54

Post by techbio » Sun, Feb 02, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

fterh wrote: post #31

thatha7777 wrote: post #22

Self-managed email means using SES? The dream of the 90s exclaims “ouch”. It’s a realistic choice and I am not judging it, but still, ouch.

I was born in the 90s so I'm not familiar with the "dream of the 90s" haha - care to explain?

The quoted line is from the theme song to the TV show Portlandia.

“The dream of the 90s is alive in Portland...”