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Plunk: The open source email platform

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Re: Plunk: The open source email platform

#31

Post by warkdarrior »

weego wrote: post #29
teddyh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is literallly what it means.

This is self hosted. I think we'd all accept that a "self hosted Stripe" that obviously had to offload payment processing to a third party gateway could still be self hosted because the platform is, not every dependency. Volume email is not something you should be looking to 'self host' and would leave the product dead on arrival if it did. It feels like pedantry to critique that aspect so heavily over spirit v lette…

Agreed. I've been self-hosting my email with Gmail for 15 years and it's perfect. /s

Re: Plunk: The open source email platform

#32

Post by kevindamm »

kevindamm wrote: post #30
Spivak wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To most shops, using SES is considered "doing it ourselves" so I somewhat get the characterization. It's very common for self-hosters to use DO, Lightsail, Hetzner because the thing you're hosting is the software. With SES the line between it and SG can be huge if you're using all of SG's high-level features or razor thin if you use SG as SMTP over API.

I would say self-hosting is not equivalent to DIY. It's about owning the whole stack, not about bought-vs-made.

Furthermore, the thing that complicates the current discussion is with email services in particular, so much depends on reputation and avoiding getting on block-lists. There's also the header wizardry that has become a requirement for interoperating with a lot of large email servers that isn't required for using the protocol but is practically required to ensure delivery.

On the flip-side of that, there are those who want the extra amount of customization that can only truly come from owning the entire stack. Or perhaps they already have a high-reputation IP address they have been sending from for years, and a self-hosted solution is necessary to continue with that (barring some transfer of that IP address to the operation of another company). In that case, calling this self-hosted is being disingenuous.

In some ways I see the dependency on SES (or other third party provider) as being a benefit for email hosting, especially for a new venture/property. It's why there is some value in depending on other examples of managed services. But I would be clear about that and not call it self-hosted.

Re: Plunk: The open source email platform

#33

Post by johtso »

bgentry wrote: post #24

Having recently adopted Resend and skimmed a bunch of different email APIs, I'm still waiting to find a single provider whose API supports Stripe-style idempotency [1] so that I can guarantee I don't send the same email through their API multiple times. I'd like to confidently avoid accidentally spamming a user if i.e. a background job retries multiple times due to an unrelated error, or merely from failing to receiv…

This is exactly what I've been wrestling with recently.. it's so disappointingly absent in all the offerings out there.

The solution I ended up with was to build my own pseudo-idempotency around Postmark. It helps that Postmark at least has proper persistence so you can query their API to check if you've already sent a certain email. I had to move away from Mailchimp because, if an email gets queued for some reason, it isn't reflected as sent in the API so there's no way of knowing whether an email is hiding in "queued limbo". Postmark doesn't have this problem.

The only caveat is that there is a delay between sending an email and it being reflected in the API (seems pretty standard across the different services). This means I had to implement a simple database backed lock to make sure I never try to send the same email more than once in quick succession.

It's kind of ridiculous, but.. I couldn't find any alternative.

Edit:

Wonder if it would be worth wrapping something like this up into some kind of a self-hostable proxy service. You'd provide the idempotency key in a header and it would do the rest

Re: Plunk: The open source email platform

#34

Post by v3ss0n »

trallnag wrote: post #12
prmoustache wrote: post #7

> built on top of AWS SES. [...] can be considered as a self-hosted alternative to services Someone doesn't really understand self-hosting.

self-hosting does not have to mean that you host the whole stack yourself

Its like saying Opensource dosen't mean your code needs to readble for everyone . Doesn't make sense.

Re: Plunk: The open source email platform

#35

Post by nirvdrum »

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #16
prmoustache wrote: post #7

> built on top of AWS SES. [...] can be considered as a self-hosted alternative to services Someone doesn't really understand self-hosting.

The last time I tried to use Sendy with SES I received a NNN from AWS after I stating I would be using it for email marketing (MailChimp alternative). It seems that my "self-hosting" idea was cancelled by a 3rd party.

What is an “NNN”? I can guess the general context, but I couldn’t find anything with an Internet search.

Re: Plunk: The open source email platform

#36

Post by nrabulinski »

Based on the title I thought it was something I could selfhost on my own metal, but the first sentence says

> Plunk is an open-source email platform built on top of AWS SES.

I’m out. That’s everything I needed to know about this project to never look at it again.

Re: Plunk: The open source email platform

#37

Post by mirzap »

nrabulinski wrote: post #36

Based on the title I thought it was something I could selfhost on my own metal, but the first sentence says > Plunk is an open-source email platform built on top of AWS SES. I’m out. That’s everything I needed to know about this project to never look at it again.

You host it yourself. It's an email marketing platform (not an email server), but you use AWS SES as an email infrastructure because it is cheap and reliable. You cannot build or host your own infrastructure since emails are hard these days, you use AWS SES or alternative to send emails like most of these services and apps do. It's so easy to get blocked or blacklisted by other email providers.

Re: Plunk: The open source email platform

#39

Post by PakG1 »

mirzap wrote: post #37
nrabulinski wrote: post #36

Based on the title I thought it was something I could selfhost on my own metal, but the first sentence says > Plunk is an open-source email platform built on top of AWS SES. I’m out. That’s everything I needed to know about this project to never look at it again.

You host it yourself. It's an email marketing platform (not an email server), but you use AWS SES as an email infrastructure because it is cheap and reliable. You cannot build or host your own infrastructure since emails are hard these days, you use AWS SES or alternative to send emails like most of these services and apps do. It's so easy to get blocked or blacklisted by other email providers.

The wording is awkward and suboptimal. If you don't know what AWS SES is, you'd easily get the wrong impression. In fact, I'd even say it's factually incorrect. It's not built on top of AWS SES. It's built to utilize AWS SES for its functionality. Slightly different, pedantic really.

Re: Plunk: The open source email platform

#40

Post by nucleardog »

teddyh wrote: post #14
trallnag wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

self-hosting does not have to mean that you host the whole stack yourself

That is literallly what it means.

Where's the line, then? You're always going to have external dependencies, so in your usage it seems like an unattainable ideal more-so than a useful phrase anyone could use to convey ideas.

In my utility room I've got a box running TrueNAS with a pile of hard-drives serving data over SMB and NFS. I've got a bunch of tiny business desktop PCs all set up in a k3s cluster hosting a variety of services for myself, family, and friends. Is this self-hosting?

The entire thing's half-useless without a tiny VPS that provides ingress since I'm behind CGNAT. Speaking of, I've got no way to get bits to and from the internet without my ISPs. I also rely on external services for off-site backups and some other storage. While I run my own IMAP/webmail services, I rely on AWS SES for sending email because managing email deliverability (especially from a shared residential address) is something I just don't have the time and patience for.

I think it's generally more useful to take it to mean "taking more control over your dependencies, data and privacy" without drawing a hard line. If someone migrates their social group off of Facebook and on to their own mastadon/something instance running on a VPS somewhere, I don't see any reason to gatekeep the term "self hosting". Making the goal unattainable just discourages people from making positive steps.

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