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Maildog – Hosting email forwarding service on AWS with GitHub Actions

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Re: Maildog – Hosting email forwarding service on AWS with GitHub Actions

#21

Post by tyingq »

Thev00d00 wrote: post #4

Seems like a lot more hassle than using purelymail[0] for $10 a year, which has full Sieve and SpamAssassin and sub-addressing. 0. https://purelymail.com/pricing

Purelymail does look great for personal use. But, be aware it wouldn't be economical for something like a big mailing list.

Try the calculator at https://purelymail.com/advancedpricing and put in some large number of outbound email sends, like 2 million in a year, and the cost gets into the thousands.

Purelymail sent emails are $2.03/1000 plus $0.18/GB. Compare to SES, which is $0.10/1000 plus $0.12/GB.

Re: Maildog – Hosting email forwarding service on AWS with GitHub Actions

#22

Post by tyingq »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #16
jasongill wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very cool looking but a bit hard to read, at least in the maildog readme

Totally! The isometric view is impossible to read.

A fair amount of that seems fixable with better color choices and fonts/size. It's curious to me that cloudcraft hasn't improved it. Lightish orange on a white background, for example?

Re: Maildog – Hosting email forwarding service on AWS with GitHub Actions

#23

Post by koolba »

Fileformat wrote: post #9
tyingq wrote: post #3

This feels like it's pushing the TOS for Github Actions a bit by using it for post deployment, live operations. Like the hourly health check and your dead letter queue scheduler. It made me curious, so I looked at their TOS[1], and they seem somewhat permissive about things like this. Though vague about where/when you cross the line. Like, this seems clear: "should not be used for...any other activity unrelated to th…

Also note that Github will deactivate cron actions if there is no activity in the repo for 60 days. https://github.community/t/do-disabled-scheduled-workflows-r...

Obviously you can automate that with another repo that has a cron job to push a dummy commit every 30 days.

Re: Maildog – Hosting email forwarding service on AWS with GitHub Actions

#24

Post by WoodenChair »

The complexity of setting up forwarding with AWS Simple Email Service/handling incoming messages without using their WorkMail is why I moved off it for my next project. There is no real option for this, although Amazon does provide a tutorial for rolling your own using a combination of S3 and a Lambda Function. [0] You'd think instead of creating a tutorial basically asking users to copy and paste their code, they may just want to add it as a feature.

In fact, I find almost everything on AWS overcomplicated. I ended up moving to a combination of MailJet for outgoing transactional mails and Zoho for incoming emails. This combination also happens to be free while in development.

0: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/forward...

Re: Maildog – Hosting email forwarding service on AWS with GitHub Actions

#25

Post by bredren »

tyingq wrote: post #3

This feels like it's pushing the TOS for Github Actions a bit by using it for post deployment, live operations. Like the hourly health check and your dead letter queue scheduler. It made me curious, so I looked at their TOS[1], and they seem somewhat permissive about things like this. Though vague about where/when you cross the line. Like, this seems clear: "should not be used for...any other activity unrelated to th…

Perhaps for the virtual machine. If this concerns you this could be used with GitHub Actions Self-Hosted Runners.

SHRs let you use github workflows while performing operations from local machines.

These machines can be set behind a firewall.

Perhaps some of the novelty of this project is that it doesn’t require any paid cloud resources other than AWS.

But it does not take much to set up a self hosted runner locally.

Re: Maildog – Hosting email forwarding service on AWS with GitHub Actions

#26

Post by fooblat »

This is not objectively less complicated than running your own mail server and certainly requires no less prerequisite knowledge, just different.

I get doing this for the fun of figuring it out and I'm all for that kind of project.

If you just want something easy, https://forwardemail.net/ has a free tier that would cover this need nicely without having to learn much at all.

edit: typos

Re: Maildog – Hosting email forwarding service on AWS with GitHub Actions

#28

Post by kureikain »

Another alternative is https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-ses-forwarder which is purely AWS lambda based.

I used to use it before now. Now, I run my own email forwarding service at https://hanami.run to expose a nice UI and a Rest API so I can `curl` my emails.

Re: Maildog – Hosting email forwarding service on AWS with GitHub Actions

#29

Post by JohnHaugeland »

This is a poor strategy

Not only is it a deep violation of their TOS, but also, they're just gonna shut you off at random when your 3000 hours run out

Doing this right on a VM costs less than two dollars a month

This is a ticking time bomb, and may cause Microsoft to be less generous in the long run

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