maildog

🦴 Hosting your own email forwarding service on AWS
🐶 Managing with Github actions
🩺 Monitoring and failure recovery included
🍖 Almost free*

👋 Hey, why building this?

Since I bought my first domain, I am always tempted to use it as my email address. However, as I am not receiving many emails a day, hosting my mail server or paying for an email hosting service either make it too complicated or costs too much. All I want is simply a service forwarding emails to one single place.

I have been happily using mailgun for years. As they changed pricing last year, I started looking for a replacement but options are relatively limited.

After all, I open-sourced maildog and is looking for a community that shares the same needs as me. The project aims to offer an extensible email forwarding solution with minimal maintenance and operational cost.

☁️ How it works?

Hint: you can click on the diagram for higher resolution

💸 Pricing

Yes. While it is FREE to use maildog, you are still required to pay AWS for the infrastructure setup on the cloud. To give you a better idea, here is an estimated price breakdown based on the following assumption:

• 10k emails / month or 333 emails / day
• 100KB mail size in average
• Hosted in US West (Oregon), pricing may be slightly different based on the region
• Counted without any free quota

| Component | Service | Configuration summary | Monthly | Currency | | ----------- | ------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------- | -------- | | Bucket | S3 Standard | S3 Standard storage (1 GB per month, depends on the retention policy) | 0.080 | USD | | Mail Server | SES | Email messages received (10000), Average size of email received (100KB), Email messages sent from email client (10000), Data sent from email client (1 GB per month) | 2.120 | USD | | Mail Feed | Standard SNS topics | DT Inbound: Not selected (0 TB per month), DT Outbound: Not selected (0 TB per month), AWS Lambda (10000 per month), Requests (10000 per month) | 0.010 | USD | | Dispatcher | AWS Lambda | Number of requests (10000, with no retry attempt) | 0.100 | USD | | Scheduler | AWS Lambda | Number of requests (< 10000) | 0.100 | USD | | DLQ | SQS | Standard queue requests (< 10000 per month) | 0.004 | USD | | | | | 2.434 | USD |

As of 30 June 2021, estimated using AWS Pricing Calculator

🚨 Limitations

Amazon SES sandbox

SES restricts new users by placing them in the sandbox. Depends on your usage, if you would like to forward emails to non-verified addresses or with higher volume, you might want to move out of the sandbox

Maximum numbers of domains/alias allowed

maildog configures SES using a receipt ruleset with a hard limit of up to 200 rules and 100 recipients per rule. In general, domains that are configured with fallback emails could be set with only 1 rule using wildcard. But for domains without fallback emails, every 100 alias will be count as 1 rule. As a result, you can set up to 20,000 alias if you are configuring only 1 domain even with no fallback emails.

Regions support

Not every region supports receiving emails with AWS SES. As of 30 June 2021, only 3 regions you can deploy maildog on:

1. US East (N. Virginia)
2. US West (Oregon)
3. Europe (Ireland)

Please check the AWS documentation for the latest update.

📮 Give it a try?

You can find the installation guide here. The setup might take 10-20 minutes.