I'd love to see the cost difference between this solution and running an EC2 instance with a traditional lite mail server (like perhaps courier).
A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
41–50 of 217 posts
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#42Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding of it has been "look, I reinvented cgi-bin."
Is cgi-bin highly available and will someone else have to wake up at night if it crashes?
It can be, and not necessarily. `cgi-bin` can be as stateless as you want it to be. Just as stateless as lambdas, or other forms of "serverless" functions.
And thus, it can be distributed as well as any other stateless function.
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#44Reading it I get that AWS now by default restricts email by - 200 mails per day max. 1 per second. - Can only send mail to verified addresses. Not sure how they verify though. - Can only send mail from the domain you own and verified. All these are good steps. Guess that will gradually take AWS IPs out of all those mail blacklists. And while we are on the topic, I find IP based mail blacklist services such as BRBL ob…
"I find IP based mail blacklist services such as BRBL obsolete and possibly harmful"
Fully agree to this. I've always wonder why spam filters don't place more importance on domain reputation. So many senders runs on the same IP for deliveries and it's really silly to blatantly block someone based on IP.
For example, $89.95/mo is the starting price to get a dedicated IP for sending with Sendgrid.
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#45I'd love to see the cost difference between this solution and running an EC2 instance with a traditional lite mail server (like perhaps courier).
Email from EC2 instances will be blocked because of the high amount of spam that comes from those IPs.
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#46This is really interesting! Currently trying to solve a similar problem thing myself, so having a look through to learn from your solution. I'd recommend having a look at AWS CDK to manage the AWS resource creation, is much nicer than raw CloudFormation: https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk/ For my solution to this I've also then got a frontend ontop of my backend to setup view mailboxes, email list per mailbox, email view…
I'd love to see a fork/branch that does the same as the linked repo, but using the cdk for comparison.
Yeah potentially I could extract the relevant CDK parts of my project out and combine with the code here to produce what you're asking for. I'll try and set aside some time and have a look.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#47I was trying to set up Amazon Cognito (an authentication service) recently which basically needs a verified email address to send users emails for user verification and password reset, and I was shocked that Amazon has no basic email hosting service. Of course it’s easy enough to work around for my use case, but I was surprised nonetheless.
What's extra annoying is that they need a verified email address and can't use a verified domain via SES.
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
These restrictions are only for the SES sandbox mode. You fill in a form to get out of sandbox mode and then you can send many more per day (still only 14/second or so). You only verify addresses you want to send from (for testing you might verify one to try sending to as per the sandbox rules). You wouldn't get customers to verify their addresses here, as that would let you send email on their behalf. See here: http…
All very good info that as far as I know is all pretty unique to SES regarding the default/sandbox vs the upgraded production capabilities. The set up makes a lot of sense to prevent abuse and it works just fine out of the box for dev purposes. The production version also operates way more how you'd actually expect an email service to work. All that said, I don't know of any other services that have this "production"…
Sandbox mode is also great for low-volume internal mail like notifications from cron.
My guess is that the main argument for sandbox mode is that it requires you to explicitly say you don’t spam and will handle reports, giving them carte blanche to yank your account if you do. Given how slimy email marketing is I suspect someone at AWS didn’t want to deal with people lying to their support people all of the time.
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#49A serverless server? It is a great illustration of how the term "serverless" has shifted from literally no server (ex: sqlite database) to "somebody else's computer".
This comment shows up on every thread about lambdas, and despite the FUD it still proves its value to me every single day.
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#50I'm not sure what the point is, since this solution doesn't give you an IMAP server to connect to with your email client. Also the solution seems a bit complex with all those CodePipelines and CodeBuilds. I think all you really need is one or two Lambda functions if you're just going to store stuff in S3.
We use exactly this solution internally at $work to handle our customer support, inbound sales, and other 'generic' group email that gets read by software and eventually gets to humans. It all goes through a separate inbound path and domain vs. our corporate email domain. Our outbound email from all of our apps goes through sendmail locally on the app servers and then out via SES.