[avanttech]

Could there be a serverless alternative where the service wakes up only to receive emails and will be charged only when emails are processed, filtered and served & rest of the time no charge - avoiding $3 to $5 charged by behemoths per inbox? Idea is how cheap can it go for personal inbox with all the features denied by the superlative pricing plans

[hardwaresofton]

> Could there be a serverless alternative where the service wakes up only to receive emails and will be charged only when emails are processed, filtered and served & rest of the time no charge - avoiding $3 to $5 charged by behemoths per inbox?

I love ideas as much as the next guy and serverless email is kind of floating out there:

https://medium.com/schibsted-engineering/building-a-serverle...

https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-ses-forwarder

https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email

It's possible to build it, but the problem is that you still have the same problem of deliverability. Obviously it works fine/great for receving emails though.

> Idea is how cheap can it go for personal inbox with all the features denied by the superlative pricing plans

It could get really cheap, but would people buy it? I always wonder if price is really the limiting factor for self hosted emails.

Zoho is already QUITE cheap: https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html

Maybe this would work as a business, but it's a bit questionable to me.

[fakedcake]

The biggest roadblock to serverless email is that it doesn't use the http protocol. Afaik all serverless providers only process http(s) requests, usually specifically on port 80/443 only, so SMTP/POP3/IMAP don't simply work serverless. You'd need at least a proxy that wraps them in http, or convince all email services to support a new http based protocol.

Arguably, a http based email protocol would be a good thing. Not only would it enable serverless, it would also enable all the features of http/2&3, like compression, multiplexing and better pipelining. Someone would just need to define it. The downside would be that VPS providers can not limit mail spam from their servers by just blocking outbound traffic on certain ports, so you'd find all their IPs to quickly be blacklisted. So the protocol should ideally somehow also offer some form of spam detection/prevention that works better than simple IP blacklists to prevent that.

[neurostimulant]

Hmm, maybe you could create something usable by using transactional mails providers (e.g. mailgun) that supports webhooks. When you receive an email, it'll get forwarded into your endpoint via http webhook. Your endpoint could be hosted in some serverless services.