"Email should be abolished," said one former colleague. "Email is antiquated" said another. This is what I have done regarding email for Timterests, followed by a rant of what email has put me through historically and the pitfalls that should be avoided. Setting up email for me has never been a simple task. Sure I could have gone and created timterests@gmail.com (if only it was available), but that's not what I wanted. I wanted my name (timscott/tim.scott) at gmail, or at least have the domain after the symbol. Initially, I wanted to have an email with my domain, and therefore put in any name that I wanted. I would be willing to check a new mailbox if I could have had that done. I also didn't want to pay money for it, or at least a one time fee, similar to how Gmail is free. AWS Simple Email Service (SES) I tried, I did. The receiving emails portion for this was weak. There was one page for receiving, and ten pages for sending emails. The sending out as a service would have been nice as I could have had automatic follow-up email when an email was received. I even got this working, but the juice was not worth the squeeze. There were only ways you can receive email through this. - The first is by storing in a S3 bucket as the entire email (metadata and all) which could then be managed and sent elsewhere. To send the email anywhere from that S3 bucket, a lambda function would have needed to be created. - Alternatively you can forward this to SNS (Simple Notification Service). I would not only not get the email, as an email but a text, but I would be paying for two services and not just one. Email Rerouting via Squarespace. Firstly I knew that some hosting providers added email with your domain in the address, Squarespace doesn't, but they do have email rerouting. Close enough. I got the email "address" I wanted: timscott@timterests.com. However if a bot starts spamming the email address, it's in Google's hands to move it to spam. Also on the note of spam, once it was set up, I immediately noticed all email going to that address was spam. It turns out. The plus side is now it's in an email account that can receive any message and in a place that I can read it. About me and my previous engagements with Email. Email for the work I have done has been a curse. I have dealt with the conflicts of trying to send email from LAMP stacks to Google and Yahoo addresses from Postfix. For those who don't know, Postfix is a mail transfer agent that is an alternative to sendmail. I historically and inherently used Postfix to relay localhost email to an Office365 mail server. The way I received the configuration was very rough and insecure since they sometimes didn't even use TLS and ran on port 25. Once updating the configuration with TLS, the system was set up as an authenticated email "no-reply" to send out as. Then the next problem to deal with, the systems sending email out sometimes were sent as fake emails that simulated email groups, not emails managed by the Office365 tenant. These emails would then begin to bounce since it could not be found by the email tenant. The next step would be to ensure that only emails that existed would be used for all outbound mail from our software and systems. Once that migration occurred, email was no longer "External" as well as Gmail and Yahoo played ball. However, the problems continued. Every email would have the system's email address, and a "on behalf of" followed by the email group you attempted to send as. Then there has been a more recent issue. Rate limits. Email providers have rate limits to ensure that you're not blasting out emails en masse. However, sometimes it's useful to send corporate wide emails to all employees. Email groups for all employees would be a quick and easy single send out, however if you want a personalized email per person, this will not work. As a result, I have also witnessed company wide email campaigns taking over an hour to reach all employees, being held up in the queue of the email server. Times email actually worked. Times that I have had to struggle the least with email was with SendGrid. I have had to migrate systems to SendGrid and it was always so seamless to me outside of proving that we were not a promotional campaign and not going to show up on a block list. This usually only takes 24 hours and a form filled out. Once verified, with just a host and key, emails would send out no problem. That is the end of the times I haven't fought with email. Conclusion Email sucks. The End.

Timterests started as a simple project to learn several new technologies. Going in, I really wanted to make something lightweight, easy to manage, and achieve the best price to performance. Features - Retrieving documents from S3 as templates to present Articles and Projects. - Dark mode: TailwindCSS is used to easily switch between light and dark mode. - Reactivity: Semi-reactive mobile design (could be better, cards particularly). - CD/CI: GitHub Actions is used to build and deploy the application. Planned Features - User authentication: AWS Cognito to manage administrator user authentication. - Reading List: Adding a reading list of what I have read. - Search: Search functionality for articles and projects. Tech Stack - Golang - HTMX - TailwindCSS - AWS - Docker