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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

#91

Post by mark242 »

habibur wrote: post #7

Reading 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. Now that we have domain verification services like DKIM SPF etc. Blacklist the domain.

SPF and DKIM require opt-in by the sending domain, of which the majority of non-commercial non-US outgoing MTAs do not do. IP-based blocklists, including Spamhaus PSBL Mailspike etc, are all valuable to catch IP addresses that should not be directly connecting to your MTA. I agree that signing up for an outgoing MTA service such as Sendgrid makes some IP-based checks obsolete but that's not where the majority of spam is coming from. Botnets continue to be the number one source of junk email and will likely continue as we add more and more insecure doorbells, garage openers, refrigerators, etc, to our home networks.

Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES

#93

Post by throwaway894345 »

stonesweep wrote: post #85
throwaway894345 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> email is a service and not a server. Those aren't mutually exclusive, which is my whole point. One definition of "server" is "a service in a network". Another definition is "a computer in a network". So you can have a server running on a server without contradiction. If the user isn't responsible for managing the underlying computer, then you have a serverless server. > which still has servers underneath it, you're…

> One definition of "server" is "a service in a network" Can you link to something where this is a common accepted definition? I'm a systems engineer by trade, talk to a bajillion people about all sort of things and we just don't call a "service in a network" a server in parlance. I was not nerd-sniping and could care less about serverless as a term, I'm specifically talking about calling a "service" a "server" in th…

> Can you link to something where this is a common accepted definition? I'm a systems engineer by trade, talk to a bajillion people about all sort of things and we just don't call a "service in a network" a server in parlance.

This seems to be a common point of confusion for people who aren't native English speakers. Oxford English Dictionary defines "server" as:

> a computer or computer program which manages access to a centralized resource or service in a network.

Similarly, a quick bit of Googling turned up [this][1] which isn't authoritative, but indicates that "server" can mean either hardware, VM, or software services.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/13118205/483347

Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES

#94

Post by fxleach »

xtracto wrote: post #33
GuB-42 wrote: post #22

A 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 was doing serverless pages back in late 90s when I uploaded PHP scripts to "website providers".

Now those are called "cloud" servers (gasps, awe)...

Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES

#95

Post by adrianpike »

xtracto wrote: post #33
GuB-42 wrote: post #22

A 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 was doing serverless pages back in late 90s when I uploaded PHP scripts to "website providers".

original lambda

Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES

#96

Post by mark242 »

When the documentation says "this may cost you money" what they really mean is "this will cost you a lot of money the moment your email address gets onto any spam lists". The number of lambda invocations will go through the roof, and even if you're able to catch 90% of the spam before dumping messages into S3, the cost of putting a message into a bucket will make your bill skyrocket periodically as spammers temporarily find their way past SES's built-in filters, which happens every so often.

Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES

#97

Post by g8oz »

oblio wrote: post #32
redwall_hp wrote: post #31

Earlier 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?

That depends on you and the SLAs you have in place with your cgi-bin provider.

Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES

#98

Post by throwaway894345 »

cortesoft wrote: post #77
throwaway894345 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

This would make a lot of sense if the de-facto restaurant experience involved you cooking your own eggs, especially if the egg-cooking experience was notoriously laborious and expensive.

If we swap "egg" and "cooking" with "VM" (or "bare metal" if it suits you better) and "maintaining", suddenly "serverless" doesn't sound so ridiculous.

Re: A serverless email server on AWS using S3 and SES

#99

Post by ape4 »

stonesweep wrote: post #90
ape4 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me think there should be a Linux tool to extract the Nth line of a file. With options to get the N-Mth lines, etc

Man pages can be tricky as the content can vary distro by distro (how up to date is your copy of man-pages, what changes have happened, etc.) - this technique is pretty portable to extract the synopsis of a man page specifically due to the format it uses (most times I'd use like grep -A3 -B2 foo /some/file, e.g.).

Ugly way to get the first indented line: `man systemd | grep '^ ' | head -1`

Which is the summary

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