Reminds me of Seneca's De Brevitate Vitae[1], an essay about (as the title suggests) the shortness of life. He argues that what matters is not how long one lives, but what he accomplishes and/or how "well" he lives.
I did write an SMTP and POP3 server to learn Go a while ago - I was still learning the language, so the code is messy and terribly designed, but it works for receiving and reading emails. Together with a sendmail wrapper, I have been using it instead of postfix/dovecot due to my naiveness to write postfix config files:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_fiscal_code_card