andris9

8 ms·

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Email is the hardest easy problem – I built a business in it(blog.emailengine.app)
3 points by andris9 3mo ago|0 comments
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Email is the hardest easy problem, and I built a business in it(blog.emailengine.app)
4 points by andris9 4mo ago|0 comments
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by andris9 8mo ago
For persistent, high-throughput traffic, Muti Metroo maintains long-lived connections and multiplexes multiple logical streams over a single peer link, each with independent flow control. This works well for token streaming, where low laten
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Show HN: Muti Metroo, my multi-hop VPN-like mesh tunnel with no root privileges(mutimetroo.com)
3 points by andris9 8mo ago|2 comments
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by andris9 8mo ago
At this point, almost all new EmailEngine customers are AI startups. These are teams that know how to use LLMs well, which makes it interesting that they still opt for EmailEngine despite the extremely expensive $83/month price tag.
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by andris9 8mo ago
Thanks, and best of luck with Rustmailer! I believe there’s plenty of room for multiple solutions in this space.
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by andris9 8mo ago
EmailEngine author here. The commenter tried the EmailEngine trial back in 2024 and appears to have had a negative experience. Since then, he’s repeatedly criticized EmailEngine and related components like the ImapFlow IMAP library, often w
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AI Makes Documenting Small Open Source Projects Viable(blog.emailengine.app)
3 points by andris9 9mo ago|0 comments
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by andris9 1y ago
I maintain the Nodemailer library. Several years ago I used my personal email in a few usage examples. Developers still copy that old snippet, add their SMTP credentials and send test emails - which land in my inbox.
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by andris9 1y ago
I once flew to the US for a week on ESTA to attend a few meetings (pre-COVID), but I mostly just did my regular developer work in the US office. By today’s standards, would I have been shackled for that?
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by andris9 1y ago
You can also get structured data out of mailboxes with my project EmailEngine. You can use an API request to fetch message contents, or you can configure EmailEngine to send a webhook for every new email in a structured JSON, for example, l
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by andris9 1y ago
I renew my essential domain names in 10‑year increments. As long as I control the domain, I can spin up new mail hosting if any provider boots me. I’d lose the old messages stored on their servers, but the address itself keeps working.
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Show HN: PostalMime, Email parsing library for browsers, web workers, serverless(github.com)
3 points by andris9 2y ago|0 comments
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by andris9 2y ago
For example, I once switched the license of Nodemailer from MIT to EUPL, with the option of still getting a MIT version if you paid for it. I had some paying customers, but it turned out they were all spammers using stolen credit cards (I g
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by andris9 2y ago
When I started with Nodemailer, my goal was to build a cool product—not to become an unpaid helpdesk employee for life. But here we are. So, I’ve been trying to monetize the project in various ways for the past ten years. I’ve tried everyth
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by andris9 2y ago
You have less control over formatting and ad placement in the README file, as rendered markdown offers only limited options. With a dedicated documentation website, it’s much easier. It’s also a question of sovereignty. If your documentatio
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by andris9 2y ago
I had the exact same experience with Nodemailer, a popular open-source project I started 14 years ago. My solution was to empty the README file and set up a dedicated documentation website. Since the project is popular, the documentation we
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by andris9 3y ago
Nodemailer author here. I now publish all my libraries/tools (like Nodemailer) under some permissive license (MIT, MIT-0, ISC). This gives the opportunity to use such a library without issues, and the end user never knows about these t
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by andris9 3y ago
The entire Nodemailer team is just 1 person, that’s me, so there is no one else for me to contact to.
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by andris9 3y ago
It was a typo/mixup. Correct is AGPL, not LGPL as in the article.
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by andris9 3y ago
I did not plan to make the project paid at first, I would have prefered the OS / Open Core model, but it did not work out. So what I meant about the feedback was that the feedback for a free product might not help much for a paid produ
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by andris9 3y ago
TBH, I get way better feedback from paying users than previously from free users. Free users like to tinker and think in terms of "what if," so they bring up all kinds of features the software should also have because it can or it
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by andris9 3y ago
You can't take the entire software commercial, as everything previously released under the open-source license will stay under that license. In the case of EmailEngine, all versions ever released under the AGPL license are still in Git
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by andris9 3y ago
I locked prices for existing customers. So someone who signed up 2 years ago is still paying 250€ per year, while customers signing up today will pay 895€ per year.
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by andris9 3y ago
Well, I guess you're right in a way. While there are no meaningful outside commits in EmailEngine, there are _some_ commits, even if these have minimal impact, by people who do not get paid for it, while I do.
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by andris9 3y ago
You mean I screwed over those 0.1% of commits in EmailEngine (because the other 0.1% is from the Github Actions bot writing the changelog)? Everything else is my own code. For over 14 years, I've been actively developing Nodemailer, a
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by andris9 3y ago
Thanks!
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by andris9 3y ago
I do support once a day for about an hour. I do monitor notifications for support emails during the day to react faster for urgent issues but there rarely is anything urgent. I guess the self-hosting side keeps support demand lower - if you
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by andris9 3y ago
I use a self-built web page (a simple Express.js app), that uses Stripe and Stripe’s customer portal for the subscription management.
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by andris9 3y ago
This was my initial business model and it did not really work. As soon as there was the license key requirement, previously free users opted to the paid subscription to get the license key and get the upgrades. In fact all the old and free

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