I was hoping this would include a lambda set up to respond to incoming requests on ports 25/465/587, but all the SMTP parts (both server/inbound and client/outbound) are being handled by Amazon SES, not by the serverless functions.
A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
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Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#72Reading 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.
If the smtp server is allowing spam to be sent through it, then it is not trustworthy. It doesn't matter which domain it was sending on behalf of. Though the real reason is that we've only had spf records and what not for a relatively short amount of time, so most systems are designed from the perspective that you can't trust the domain a message is claiming to be from.
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#73It's a nice POC but I wouldn't actually use it.
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#74This is awesome & I totally intend to play with it :D
Do you have any plans / any ideas on feasibility to plop an imap server on top of the s3 store? I have really wanted a serverless aws solution and this moves the needle on work I did not wanna do so I’m reinterested again. Something like an s3 object change -> dynamodb index might work well for latency concerns and keep the serverless spirit alive. I just have such a starting problem on “building/learning imap intricacies when it may never work”.
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#75Note that using the + address "trick" in email addresses is silly: everyone knows it and can strip it out with a simple regex. It doesn't accomplish the main things that it exists to do, which are to a) make it non-obvious what your username for a site is and b) make it obvious where a spammer got your email.
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#76This is great but it's a bit misleading.
It only store email on S3, that mean you cannot read email with your email client.
Seem thing with outgoing, you upload email to s3 in a certain format to be send out, not smtp protocol
This is more like an API for sending and receiving. You cannot say generate SMTP credential and drop in your mail client.
Also, one of the limitation with AWS SES is you cannot sent FROM or RETURN-PATH to anything, even in production mode, you can only set frm or return-path to verified domain.
I have an internal AWS SES/Lambda stacks that I used for email forwarding(only receiving) which use SES to accept email, trigger a lambda and use SES to send a copy to a personal inbox. Plan to cleanup it a bit and release
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#77A 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".
> serverless server? This isn’t a contradiction. “Server” is an overloaded term and the “server” in “serverless” refers to a different meaning of “server” than the “email server” bit. “Serverless” means there is no physical or virtual hosts to manage, you just supply the request handler i.e., the email server . It's amusing because it sounds like a contradiction, but it's not one.
So if you get an omelette at a restaurant, I can call it an eggless omelette because I didn’t have to cook the eggs myself?
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#78One micro instance with Postfix is more than enough and can beat this setup not only in performance but in simplicity. What a year to be alive ...
In cost? Running postfix.org mail sever on a VM must have a nonzero cost, with the additional need to maintain the underlying OS.
EC2 micro instances are free.
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#79A 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".
I guess a Heroku hosted application counts as serverless then.
Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES
#80This is awesome & I totally intend to play with it :D Do you have any plans / any ideas on feasibility to plop an imap server on top of the s3 store? I have really wanted a serverless aws solution and this moves the needle on work I did not wanna do so I’m reinterested again. Something like an s3 object change -> dynamodb index might work well for latency concerns and keep the serverless spirit alive. I just have suc…
At that point why not use Amazon WorkMail[0]? Then you don't have to maintain anything at all.