parsemail VS check-if-email-exists

It's a pain in the ass right now. Original I come up with the domain hanami.run because I explained here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1p2crPpFIc I feel like wind blow flowers where Hanami blow out emails.

I run an email forwarding services (https://hanami.run if you want to check it out) and I can share some info:

I found https://hanami.run (soon to be mailwip.com due to name conflict with hanamirb.org) to setup email forwarding and a simple blog platform by "email to post" and webhook.

Use it you can consolidate emails from multiple domains to forward to the same inbox. And you can add webhook/slack notification too.

You can look into mine (https://hanami.run) very fast to sign up and have a few cool features about webhook or smtp.

Also, improvmx.com is a great product as well.

If you like open source, https://maddy.email/ is a single binary deployment that can handle everything even IMAP.

https://mailcow.github.io/mailcow-dockerized-docs/ is a dockerize solution with super detail document as well.

If you want to compete with the big players, you have to solve the most important pain point and work upward from that small use base.

My case: I work on https://hanami.run (will soon move to https://mailwip.com due to hanamirb.org conflict) and email forwarding is very competitive. Big and old players are all over the place because at the end of day, setting up email forwarding isn't hard and many open source project did it, heck you can spin up AWS lambda for incoming email in no time.

The pain point is: email will drop sometime, time to time no matter how good an email forwarding service is because they have to scan spam, have false positive, or because of strict DMARC/SPF rule. And I have no tools available to help me out there. So I focus strongly on my maillog features with many level of privacy:

- no log at all

- docker-compose to spin up everything. It's super nice. Again, the deployment is done with a `rsync` then `docker-compose up -f docker-compose-prod.yml`

Eventually when deployment changes very frequent and need scale/ha I added in Kubernetes. K8S is way easiser to setup than you think and it handle all other suff(load balancer, environment variable etc).

And my deploy now become: `kubectl apply -f`

One trick I used is to use `sed` or `envsubst` to replace the image hash.

For backedup, I again, literally setup cronjob from an external server, `ssh` into database and run `pgdump`.

I also have a nice NFS server to centralize config and sync back to our git repo.

I used this whole setup to operate https://hanami.run an email forwarding service for the first 3 months before I added Kubernetes.

So I want to share a story about user asking for a feature then not using it.

I run an email forwarding services(https://hanami.run) basically you add your domains in and add some records.

We had this one heavy users who has like hundreds of domains. So our UI isn't design for that. Who has hundreds of domains? So they approach and asked us for a way to organize those domains into a hierarchy structure.

All good.

They are paid our highest tier ($30 per month) so we prioritize the requests and work on it.

2 days later that same user downgrade to the lowest plan and delete all of their hundred of domains...

That complicated features remain unused to nowadays...

I used hanami.run and they support that. A catch-all then an explicitly deny rule to disable certain address.

Wix doesn't have built-in email forwarding but you can use any email forwarding service. Look into hanami.run and simply follow their onboarding process to add your MX record. https://hanami.run/docs/configure_dns#mx

The point is not about ideological debates, making money from GPL software is purely a practical business decision. Many people are doing it, see e.g. https://reacher.email/ (written in Rust btw).

I started with open-source.

I initially created https://github.com/reacherhq/check-if-email-exists, after some years it got to ~50 stars and nice overall feedback, that's when I thought of a SaaS wrapper on top of it.

So a possible path is "idea -> open-source -> monetize". I find the first arrow to be easier to execute than a direct idea to monetization leap.

We forked (this repository)[https://github.com/reacherhq/check-if-email-exists] and made a few modifications.

I run an open-source [1] email verification API, called Reacher. I managed to hit 10k ARR this year (1st year).

It's written in Rust, self-hostable, and does not use a DB of emails (like some competitors do).

Landing page: https://reacher.email.

[1]: https://github.com/reacherhq/check-if-email-exists

Check If Email Exists\ (205 comments)

GitHub issues like this one warm my heart:

https://github.com/reacherhq/check-if-email-exists/issues/91

Identifying something that needs doing, especially when you have no idea how to do it, is a bold skill.

Too often have I seen engineers be reluctant to open an issue because they don’t know how to implement it, technically. I still do it, myself. If you need it then you’ll find a way.

The converse is also true: losing focus by filing tasks and procrastinating on features because you know how to build them, not because you actually need them to move your business / project forward.