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Show HN: Heimdall – Self-managed email alias/forwarding service

130 pointsby fterhover 5 years ago

12 comments

jedbergover 5 years ago
&gt; <i>Known Limitations</i><p>&gt; Currently, attachments are not supported.<p>That&#x27;s kind of a biggie. What happens when someone sends an attachment? Does it bounce? Are they warned? Do I get a notification? Is it silently dropped?<p>From reading the code it seems like it just doesn&#x27;t include the attachment and then deletes it from S3?
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thatha7777over 5 years ago
Self-managed email means using SES? The dream of the 90s exclaims “ouch”. It’s a realistic choice and I am not judging it, but still, ouch.
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mmcclureover 5 years ago
This is a really cool project, so I don&#x27;t mean to be overly negative, but personally this workflow feels quite a bit more laborious than just having a catch-all email address. Before signing up for a service, I need to email myself to get an address to use for the service?<p>I have all emails for my domain route to me, so when I use a service I just do [service-name]@my-domain.com. If a bad actor gets a hold of it I set up an inbox filter or black hole the email address at the service level. The big advantage of this project seems to be that you can reply, but I&#x27;ve found that a huge proportion of these email aliases are inbound only for me.<p>I&#x27;m using GSuite for my personal email but I&#x27;ve been considering Fastmail. Just checked and it looks like they also support sending from those catchall aliases: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fastmail.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;receive&#x2F;alias-catchall.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fastmail.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;receive&#x2F;alias-catchall.html</a>
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christefanoover 5 years ago
FYI, the developer has a writeup about the design behind this project: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@fabianterh&#x2F;how-i-built-heimdall-an-open-source-personal-email-guardian-68e306d172d1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@fabianterh&#x2F;how-i-built-heimdall-an-open-...</a><p>At first I was confused and trying to figure out what AWS services Heimdall uses to work, and this was the section that explained it:<p><pre><code> Infrastructure I’m using AWS’s Simple Email Service (SES) to send and receive emails, S3 for storage, and Lambda functions for serverless computing. Here’s how it works: All received emails trigger SES to store the email as a file in a S3 bucket, which triggers a Lambda function. Depending on the email, one of several things could happen: 1. The email gets forwarded to your personal email address 2. The email gets forwarded to the original sender (when you reply) 3. A command is invoked by you (e.g. to generate a new alias) 4. Nothing happens (when someone emails an invalid&#x2F;disabled alias) I chose to use AWS for practical reasons: I’m totally new to cloud computing, and AWS being the most popular cloud computing service means it is easier to find guides and resources online.</code></pre>
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kazinatorover 5 years ago
I wrote and use a web service called Tamarind for managing throw-away mail aliases:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kylheku.com&#x2F;cgit&#x2F;tamarind&#x2F;tree&#x2F;README" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kylheku.com&#x2F;cgit&#x2F;tamarind&#x2F;tree&#x2F;README</a><p>It integrates into Apache as a CGI program serving up a web UI for managing your aliases.<p>It works by managing the content of an alias file read by your mail server.<p>Authentication of the webUI is via IMAP or SASL.<p>Each throw-away alias is associated with a memo in which you can have text and URL&#x27;s (that get rendered into links), and a creation time. You can regex search through the aliases, edit the memo fields, rearrange their order and delete them.
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andrewkdinhover 5 years ago
You might consider using a different name, as there’s already a pretty popular dashboard called Heimdall [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;linuxserver&#x2F;Heimdall" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;linuxserver&#x2F;Heimdall</a>
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VvR-Oxover 5 years ago
I like the idea but I do not understand why someone would want something self-managed&#x2F;hosted and then use AMZN SES to send&#x2F;receive mail and S3 to save mail&#x2F;attachments.<p>1. AMZN has access to your mail (inc. your contacts) so you could just use any other service you do not trust. 2. Why would I process mail just so save it on another machine and not do both on the same server?<p>Probably it has to do with &quot;serverless&quot; (you have to use at least 2 &quot;servers&quot; now, don&#x27;t you?) but maybe I am just missing the point.
rodneyg_over 5 years ago
I love you. Thanks for this
whatsmyusernameover 5 years ago
This service is offered by most domain registrars out of the box.
albertgoeswoofover 5 years ago
And if you don’t want to host this yourself there’s <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;IdBloc.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;IdBloc.co</a>
johnebgdover 5 years ago
I’m confused. Why do you want this? You don’t trust a provider to forward your email?<p>Email isn’t a trusted method of communication anyway.
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zAy0LfpBZLC8mACover 5 years ago
&gt; With Heimdall, you completely own and manage your data and the service. No feature limitations or having to trust a third-party company with your data.<p>&gt; Pre-requisites: You need to own a domain and have an AWS account. For reasonable use cases, you should not exceed AWS&#x27;s free tier (which is very generous).<p>Erm ... wut?
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