aws-lambda-ses-forwarder VS mCaptcha

If they cannot use cloudflare(since we need to use its nameserver), you can self hosted a tool like https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-ses-forwarder It's powered by AWS Lambda so work flawlessly.

> Could there be a serverless alternative where the service wakes up only to receive emails and will be charged only when emails are processed, filtered and served & rest of the time no charge - avoiding $3 to $5 charged by behemoths per inbox?

I love ideas as much as the next guy and serverless email is kind of floating out there:

https://medium.com/schibsted-engineering/building-a-serverle...

https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-ses-forwarder

https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email

It's possible to build it, but the problem is that you still have the same problem of deliverability. Obviously it works fine/great for receving emails though.

> Idea is how cheap can it go for personal inbox with all the features denied by the superlative pricing plans

It could get really cheap, but would people buy it? I always wonder if price is really the limiting factor for self hosted emails.

Zoho is already QUITE cheap: https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html

Maybe this would work as a business, but it's a bit questionable to me.

When using SES, you cannot set FROM header to anything. The FROM has to be either an whitelisted email address or a domain that you own and verified with SES.

When forwarding email, we are receiving email from unknow domains. If we rewrite the FROM headers then the DKIM will invalid, so service will have to rewrite the FROM and clear out DKIM.

This is a well-known SES issue and project has to work around https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-ses-forwarder

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If you are willing to mess around with code https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-ses-forwarder use this. It's essentially use AWS SES to process inbound email and lambda to forward email out.

It is unmaintained https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-ses-forwarder/issues/119 and written in godawful JS promise syntax. So while it may work, I didn't feel like trying it.

Thanks to Joe Turgeon for inspiration of the tutorial: https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-ses-forwarder

What about proof of work based CAPTCHA like https://github.com/mCaptcha/mCaptcha ? Since CAPTCHAs can be solved by bots, at least make it more costly for them.

That should only be an issue if the server is under attack.

According to the docs (https://github.com/mCaptcha/mCaptcha/blob/master/docs/CONFIG...), you can set three difficulty levels:

MCAPTCHA_CAPTCHA_AVG_TRAFFIC_DIFFICULTY

MCAPTCHA_CAPTCHA_PEAK_TRAFFIC_DIFFICULTY

MCAPTCHA_CAPTCHA_BROKE_MY_SITE_TRAFFIC_DIFFICULTY

It isn't proprietary [0]. There is a matrix channel [1] for the project to ask questions.

[0] https://github.com/mCaptcha/mCaptcha

[1] https://matrix.to/#/@realaravinth:matrix.batsense.net