04/28/2021 Livestream notes

Mantra

(a small idea to guide the day’s work)

Get back on the horse 🐎

Plan

(what do I plan to do)

• Amazon SES is working! So we should figure out how to
  • Send emails (done this before, not hard 💪)
  • Receive emails (uh …🤔)
• If we can figure out how to receive emails, then …
  • Take our parsing/DB saving code from yesterday and hook that up to email receiving flow

What I got done

(plan != reality)

• We can now send emails from Mail File! Which is great.
• We got most of the way towards receiving emails sent to Mail File as well:
  • We wrote an SES receipt rule which invokes an AWS Lambda function when an email is received
  • That AWS Lambda function sends a POST to the Mail File server which we’ve written to receive emails

Theoretically that would be enough: SES would send the subject and body of the email along in the data that it sends to Lambda, but evidently an intermediary step is required along the way: either invoking an SNS event or saving the email to S3 first. Seems like an unneccessary middle step to this guy, but that’s how it is 🤷‍♂️

For next time

• Set up either SNS or S3 as the middle step between SES and Lambda, and after that we will have our email contents and can parse/save them accordingly 🎉

Links

(things referenced mid-stream)

• How to Run Your Own Email Server (and all the reasons why you DON’T want to do this too)
• LocalTunnel, used to make a publicly available URL for my localhost app. Expose yourself to the world!
• RESTMan: a Postman-like browser extension for making REST calls, v. useful
• Wrap Node.JS https module in a promise

Stream Video