I'm building mailwip.com (and my second saas right now)
My strategy is too simple, I don't think it will works but It work good enough for me.
- Just engage in the community. In early day, I helped on the cloudflare forum. I just help generic about anything related to email, explain concept and here and there try to introduce my service. I always introduce my service last. Give people free option first, always, even if the free option is my competitor. But I do explain pros/confs of my service
- Build plugin that may drive traffic: For me, CloudFlare offers plugin ability so I built a CloudFlare app for that. It may not benefit me directly but get my name out there
Yes, exactly this. Mailwip has 2 features to discover this
1- Mailog(opt-in, disable by default): Once enabling you can choose the detail of logging to see the delivery status.
2- Spam digest: (opt-in, disable by default). We will send a daily summarize if there is email we flagged and didn't forward to you.
I already had an email somewhere. Anytime I got a new domain, I just want to forward to that email. Consolidate all of my email in a single place. And support SMTP so I can also reply through the domain as well.
I want a dead simple way to manage these alias, help family all know what is up by forwarding all emails to their individual emails.
I don't want to get charge per sear, or have to convince the others to switch to a new mailbox. Just forward to them.
I had stuff like kid@ travel@ school@ insurance@ forward both to my wife and me for example.
CloudFlare isn't easy to use for a non-tech person to manage their email. It also require that you point the DNS to CloudFlare. If the DNS is on Route53, you cannot use Cloudflare.
ImprvoMX is something I really admire but I just need more feature they don't support at the time (Maillog, webhook, regex routing, search email) So I build this for me as a user and have. been growing it.
With the alias, I can also block/null route after a certain use when I don't want to hear from that alias anymore. Impossible to do with a standalone inbox.
My wife love it. She got her own domain and use it when signing for deal/coupon website then null route the alias to prevent being bombarding later on.
Most of the time these service works. But when it doesn't work you just don't know how to debug it.
Mailwip.com has a mail log with the detail so you can debug delivery issue. Also, manage email with namecheap ui dns is something I just don't want to deal with.
I want some nice UI, that also enable a few member of family to self-manage the domain and forward rule.
Sometime I also want to have webhook to parse receipt email from the bank. So I ended up building all of this.
If gmail and namecheap works for you, no need to look further.
Originally every time I had a domain and start a project, I have to setup email. Other services always lack something that I want. So I ended up building my own and has been growing it since 2021.
We had some very advanced routing rule based on regex, and wildcard domain, work in progress to support sieve filter. Had web-hook and API so you can do some cool thing with emails.
In case if anyone want to read this book and live in bay areas, you can also access Oreilly media through your local library online and will be granted access to orelly media. this book is available there.
If you had a server around, considering just setting up https://mailcow.email/ it's super easy and straigforward. Everything is in docker compose. `docker compose up` and you go.
If you want a hosted SMTP for your own single domain, and volume is low, consider just using AWS SES. I run betterdev.link with it, send about 20k email per months and pay around $2
If finally you want some nice and easy UI to use for email forwarding and SMTP, consider my email forwarding app https://mailwip.com It was built for this use case.
Just ged rid if icloud and apple photos. slow as f*ck, crash all the time once the library get big enough on my mac. damn slow to scoll in the photos app with lot of picture.
your ability to writing this out and provide in a liner way make it like a painting to me. You should have no problem in a real world work environment with the right support.
checking our your code, it's great as well, you surpass level of many engineers i know who has staff/principal in their title.
don't let the fact about those job or interview letting you down. You write out C code like nothing from these.
You're absolute a great programmer.
You will have better succeess doing your own SaaS instead.
It's one of the tool that get out of your way and let. you get the work done. The tool works for you instead of you fighting with the tool.
Pain point of ansible: storing state and checking later, coordinate state between server is all a breezy with Pyinfra because you write the Python code to perform those check.
The system is very well though out. No need to hack around host file, inventory is just a python script that export resource definition.
No more static, ad-hoc host var, you get a real python script to define and return your variable.
Using pyinfra I was able to focus more on the "compute". the state such as credential, inventory can managed and store outside such as in SSM or just call python ec2 api to filter instance by tag.
I run an email forwarding service[0] and it's damn hard to get into inbox of any major provider if SPF/DKIM aren't config properly. DMARC or ARC might be optionally but an email without SPF/DKIM, good luck having it hit any inbox.
Office365 is the toughest, email just randomly land on spam no matter what I do. Icloud, actually it's ProofPoint is tough sh*t too.
So I'm so surprise these guide just pop-up now like it's a new thing.
My strategy is too simple, I don't think it will works but It work good enough for me.
- Just engage in the community. In early day, I helped on the cloudflare forum. I just help generic about anything related to email, explain concept and here and there try to introduce my service. I always introduce my service last. Give people free option first, always, even if the free option is my competitor. But I do explain pros/confs of my service
- Build plugin that may drive traffic: For me, CloudFlare offers plugin ability so I built a CloudFlare app for that. It may not benefit me directly but get my name out there
I shared my revenu and publish update on indiehacker https://www.indiehackers.com/product/hanami/revenue