Should You Build Your Own Inbound Email System?

I created an "order reader" that processed incoming emails with orders formatted in various ways. It required enforcing a standard format to avoid reloading failed orders, which meant I needed to keep track of errors. I wish I had written tests earlier on—it can make a huge difference!

I’m a big fan of Postal for handling inbound emails. The only downside is that there hasn’t been a recent release in over a year. Still, it’s a solid option! You can find more info on their documentation.

I built a robust email proxy that handled millions of emails daily. It turned out to be pretty straightforward since we used Mailgun for incoming emails, which provided webhooks for each received email. If you're looking for high volume, I’d recommend checking them out!

Recently, I stitched together some open-source tools to make email testing easier in a local environment. I used Maildev to capture all outgoing mail in one interface, Greenmail as my SMTP/IMAP server, and Roundcube as the email client. It created a complete email loop for testing, although I found that empty email bodies sometimes caused issues. If you're interested, I can share the Docker Compose setup I used for this!

I worked on an API that creates temporary email addresses to receive emails. It was super easy using AWS SES, and I loved the experience. It doesn’t handle attachments yet because I didn’t need that feature, but if I had to do it again, I’d definitely go this route—it’s almost free and really fun to build!

My last experience with email integration was quite a while ago—around 20 years back. Nowadays, I usually opt for a main webhook proxy or Azure Logic Apps for managing emails. It simplifies the process a lot!