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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

#101

Post by ipaddr »

ape4 wrote: post #87
stonesweep wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes no sense (too abstract of a statement), but here let's try this: $ man systemd | head -4 | tail -1 systemd, init - systemd system and service manager An email daemon (Postfix, Exim, Dovecot, UW-IMAP, Sendmail, etc.) are services running on a server. An "email server" would be a server running a daemon to provide email service in this example.

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

There are many. Sed is fast. This will give you lines 11 to 500

sed -n '11,500p' < file.txt

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

#102

Post by praveen9920 »

Great initiative but I see one major concern: Spam filtering. Most of the big mail providers provide spam mail filtering out of the box without which your inboxes are bombarded with spam. This can be probably solved by spam checking by adding additional lambda, now you need more compute per mail, translating to more cost per mail, which makes it easy for malicious parties to send mail bombs and bankrupt you.

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

#103

Post by stonesweep »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #93
stonesweep wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> This seems to be a common point of confusion for people who aren't native English speakers

Where did this come from and what value does it have, other than being condescending to non-native English speakers? I am a native speaker and we're having a discussion in my native tongue about words in my native language about work I do as a profession.

> Similarly, a quick bit of Googling turned up [this][1]

I do not accept Stackoverflow as an authoritative source for anything. Useful? Yes, great for finding random solutions to random problems. Authoritative source on terminology used in the industry I work? Nah.

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

#104

Post by irae »

This is a brilliant architecture.

Everyone here talking about no email clients, IMAP and AWS restrictions is missing the point. Although you could use this as a personal account, or as a company. This fully automated system is a perfect ground layer to a number of applications with a very cleaver API.

Say you are a small startup, and you will need some email functionality? Give your web server access to writing to outbox and you can send email. Use the sender with + rules and you get replies with customerId, threadId etc. Need to show email interactions in your service UI? Subscribe to the notification channels. Need customer support platform, it is almost built-in.

If you don't see value in this solution, you probably never tried to setup infrastructure to receive email. In fact, at $work, I developed a very similar architecture and it is running flawlessly for 15 months or so. We just don't do all this git+lambda craziness, we just had already setup EC2 that we added some routes.

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

#105

Post by dnag »

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…

Here's an illustrated guide to getting out of SES Sandbox: https://docs.sendwithses.com/how/send-email/how-to-increase-...

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

#106

Post by EGreg »

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".

Serverless has become a stupid marketing term, just like Facebook hijacked the words “Friend” and “Like”.

I look forward to true serverless software - that is either peer to peer or uses a distributed back-end with encryption. Now THAT is the future!

Serverless just means “we spin up a server for you”, similarly to how “the cloud” is just a euphemism for “extreme centralization of hosting myriad clients under the control of one company”.

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

#107

Post by hnlmorg »

kureikain wrote: post #76

This 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 RET…

In fairness, you could write support for those in lambda too if you wanted.

As a proof of concept though, this is interesting.

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

#108

Post by tryauuum »

pirsquare wrote: post #44
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" 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.

It is hard to fool an IP-address-based blocking system. Because it's easy to fake a domain name, but hard to fake an IP-address

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

#109

Post by Liquid_Fire »

stonesweep wrote: post #103
throwaway894345 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> This seems to be a common point of confusion for people who aren't native English speakers Where did this come from and what value does it have, other than being condescending to non-native English speakers? I am a native speaker and we're having a discussion in my native tongue about words in my native language about work I do as a profession. > Similarly, a quick bit of Googling turned up [this][1] I do not accep…

I'm surprised you need a source for this. Literally half of the server software out there refers to itself as " server".

Apache [1] "The Number One HTTP Server On The Internet". This is not referring to the machine hosting, it's referring to the software that you run to provide a service.

Postfix [2] "mail server"

IIS [3] "Web server"

I could go on...

[1] https://httpd.apache.org/

[2] http://www.postfix.org/

[3] https://www.iis.net/

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

#110

Post by benbristow »

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".

Different thing though.

When you uploaded your PHP script, you uploaded it to a single server, and it ran on a single server. Unless your provider were doing some kind of load balancing (doubt it).

With serverless you upload your 'script' to the 'cloud' and then it will run on any number of servers, usually assigned to one when it dry-runs. Then it'll unload from the server afterwards. And therefore unless you have a bottleneck (like a database server) then you can essentially scale as far as the cloud will let you.

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