parsemail VS mailcheck

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

Not an "instead of" approach, but the best thing I'd implemented when running an ecom site was a typo detector that prompted people to fix their email if it looked wrong, like "[email protected]", "Did you mean [email protected]?".

At the time I used "mailcheck": https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck

There appears to be a more modern implementation here: https://github.com/ZooTools/email-spell-checker

It reduced the amount of badly entered emails more than any other approach I tried.

It misses the very common mistake of typing a comma instead of a dot.

Otherwise, yeah, most people would be better served by a library that detects domain typos like https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck than spending time on regexes.

The most helpful thing I've used in the real world is something that looks for common typographical errors, even if the email is technically valid.

Like, if the user types "[email protected]", it pops a dialogue asking "Did you mean "[email protected]". But lets them keep what they typed, or do a different fix if needed.

I found some JS called "mailcheck": https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck

There are updated clones that use react, vue, etc, instead of jquery.

With a working ecommerce site, this improved the percentage of correct emails more than anything else I tried, and I had tried many things. Because it's a bad situation when you've taken someone's money and have nothing other than a shipping address to contact them if something goes wrong (bad shipping address, out of stock situation, etc).

I somewhat lol'd when the demo allowed "[email protected]" just fine. Guess kickstarter isn't using mailcheck anymore. Looks like it's an open issue:

https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck/issues/179

I suppose it depends on what we mean by validate. Running an ecommerce site, I got a lot of mileage out of prompting the customer to fix emails that "looked wrong". We allowed them to proceed if they wanted. A really common one was "[email protected]" when "[email protected]" was wanted. We used a slightly modified version of https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck and found it to be really useful.

It does work well. I used a customized version of https://github.com/mailcheck/mailcheck on an ecomm website and the amount of bounces due to typos went way down.