parsemail VS s6-overlay

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

FROM docker.io/grafana/grafana-oss:9.5.12-ubuntu # Set USER to root escalating priviliges to perform installation of litestream and s6-overlay USER root RUN apt-get -qq update && \ apt-get -qq install -y xz-utils \ && rm -rf /var/libs/apt/lists/* # https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream-s6-example/blob/main/Dockerfile # Download the static build of Litestream directly into the path & make it executable. ADD https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream/releases/download/v0.3.11/litestream-v0.3.11-linux-amd64.tar.gz /tmp/litestream.tar.gz RUN tar -C / -xvzf /tmp/litestream.tar.gz ARG S6_OVERLAY_VERSION="3.1.5.0" # Download the s6-overlay for process supervision. ADD https://github.com/just-containers/s6-overlay/releases/download/v${S6_OVERLAY_VERSION}/s6-overlay-noarch.tar.xz /tmp RUN tar -C / -Jxpf /tmp/s6-overlay-noarch.tar.xz ADD https://github.com/just-containers/s6-overlay/releases/download/v${S6_OVERLAY_VERSION}/s6-overlay-x86_64.tar.xz /tmp RUN tar -C / -Jxpf /tmp/s6-overlay-x86_64.tar.xz # Copy s6 init & service definitions. COPY etc/s6-overlay /etc/s6-overlay # Copy Litestream configuration file. COPY etc/litestream.yml /etc/litestream.yml # The kill grace time is set to zero because our app handles shutdown through SIGTERM. ENV S6_KILL_GRACETIME=0 # Sync disks is enabled so that data is properly flushed. ENV S6_SYNC_DISKS=1 # Reset USER to 472 to reset the escalated privileges USER 472 # # Run the s6 init process on entry. ENTRYPOINT [ "/init" ]

Learn S6-Overlay that allows to have one docker container for multiple processes... make immich docker compose not a two page 8 containers long? But just one clean container with healthcheck. Convince the devs to switch to it.

Custom base docker image with S6 overlay (for more details : just-containers/s6-overlay)

https://github.com/just-containers/s6-overlay can do what you need.

Used s6-overlay[1] to start a lot daemons in a docker-image for demo purposes - postgres, tomcat, mysql, php-fpm, apache (don't ask why ;) - s6 worked really well and was reliable and stable - I enjoyed it very much. It was also possible to reliable pass SIGTERM to the daemons in the image for clean shutdown and it was easily possible to configure logging to stdout with a prefix. Modelling dependencies (waiting on database before starting app etc.pp) is possible via shell-scripts. It's super flexible but out of the box it's more like a collection of powerful tools not a complete package - but that's good. It's in the tradition of djb daemontools and is very unix - as in doesn't talk a lot and you better know how each part works but - and that's really cool - it's modular and simple and once you get a grip on it you can easily reason about it. systemd takes a completely different approach and also solves a kind of differnt problem - this is like small pieces of lego that compose well instead of one big chunk of glib/dbus/glibc only c-code.

1: https://github.com/just-containers/s6-overlay

Every container has some entrypoint, whether it launches a single binary, runs a "process supervisor" like s6, or does some pre-setup before running a service, like a database.

If you *really* want to make your own containers with PUID/PGID support checkout "S6-overlay" and the linuxserver "baseimage". Somewhere in the startup they end up running:

FROM ubuntu:20.04 ARG S6_OVERLAY_VERSION=3.1.0.1 ARG DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive ENV TZ="America/New_York" RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y xz-utils ADD https://github.com/just-containers/s6-overlay/releases/download/v${S6_OVERLAY_VERSION}/s6-overlay-noarch.tar.xz /tmp RUN tar -C / -Jxpf /tmp/s6-overlay-noarch.tar.xz ADD https://github.com/just-containers/s6-overlay/releases/download/v${S6_OVERLAY_VERSION}/s6-overlay-x86_64.tar.xz /tmp RUN tar -C / -Jxpf /tmp/s6-overlay-x86_64.tar.xz RUN apt-get autoclean && rm -rf /tmp/* ENTRYPOINT ["/init"]

Not sure about unbound or what have inside the pihole base image, you may try to run the service in foreground or use some tiny init service for that container (I just learnt that s6 may work for that, but you must be aware how it should be used)