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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

#211

Post by hipjiveguy »

danielvinson wrote: post #173
irae wrote: post #104

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 ou…

As somebody who has been an early engineer at many startups, I would never use this in almost any case because a managed solution is just better. If I can pay somebody else to do something hard with zero maintenance so I can focus on shipping a good product, I’m going to do that every time.

200% - outsource managing until you're making so much money that you can afford to bring it home, and pay the difference for the scale

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

#212

Post by irae »

danielvinson wrote: post #173
irae wrote: post #104

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 ou…

As somebody who has been an early engineer at many startups, I would never use this in almost any case because a managed solution is just better. If I can pay somebody else to do something hard with zero maintenance so I can focus on shipping a good product, I’m going to do that every time.

It really depends on what you are doing. Even though I have a similar setup, we are still outsourcing customer support with a third party for now. But when you do need the data from emails, I would expect this solution to be a better choice.

Fiddling with outsourced APIs has a lock-in factor as well as not guaranteeing time-save if you don't have someone on the team already familiar with the third party product. I've certainly burned myself excessive outsourcing as well.

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

#213

Post by irae »

femto113 wrote: post #185
irae wrote: post #104

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 ou…

> Give your web server access to writing to outbox and you can send email. SES is already in the mix, so why not just use it directly to send emails from your web server?

True. Why not though? It really depends on your software choices. Security might be one. But with just writing to S3 you get to have the JSON stored as sent, and might be easier to write tests against, since in dev you can write the same JSON to FS and write some assertions... really up to whomever is implementing

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

#215

Post by fxleach »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #98
cortesoft wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No no, it still sounds ridiculous.

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

#216

Post by axelthegerman »

irae wrote: post #104

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 ou…

Got to admit that I only looked at the diagram in the repo and instantly closed it.

I know email is complicated, but not sure I'd call a couple dozen AWS services glued together "a brilliant architecture".

Keeping servers running sucks but throwing together "serverless" services is not really a solution to build more robust software systems

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

#217

Post by fulafel »

sethammons wrote: post #86
diveanon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPv6 has entered the chat.

Meh. Something like 95% of mail servers wont work with IPv6 last I checked. Source: I helped build and maintain an MTA that moved over a trillion emails last year.

Deployed mail servers are very homogenous, there are probably 10000 implementations of MTA software but 99.999% of mail is handled by the top 10.
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