Simplifying Email for New Domains With Mailproxy

Some of my friends know this, I have an addiction.

I buy domain names. A lot of them, enough that my registrar actually paginates the list on its dashboard for me.

Not just for fun, but because I’m always thinking of ideas I want to build. And like most builders, I mostly never fully launch these ideas or websites. But there’s one thing I almost always set up first: email.

Email is one of the costlier parts of owning a domain. Most domain owners pay someone else to host their mail, usually big providers like Gmail or Outlook and if you own more than one domain, the cost will add up very quickly.

Many moons ago, I realized I could save money by running my own mail server. So I did. I pointed all my domains to it and set it up to forward messages to a place I could access easily. Over ten years later, I’m still running our company’s mail servers the same way.

A while back, I wanted to make it even easier to get emails quickly for new domains, without having to configure a mail server every time. I set up a workflow where emails for any domain could be sent straight to a small system I built via a webhook (another post for another day), which then delivers them to wherever I need them, to Telegram, Slack, Discord, depending on what I’m working on.

Now, if you’ve been following me, you’ve probably seen me write about QuietNet, a family-focused DNS filter. While working on that, I also started hosting the authoritative side of DNS which is basically the “directory” of where domains point. Since I already had a network for QuietNet, it made sense to expand it to host my own domains as well.

And while I was at it, I realized I could tie my email setup directly into the DNS hosting. Just like how Cloudflare does it for their CDN and SSL. That’s how MailProxy came about: a small feature that lets you start receiving emails immediately, without signing up for a separate mail provider. You can even keep your existing provider, and it will still ensure that you get your email to your existing provider.

This helped me to reduce my domain on-boarding time as well as ensuring that I get to receive emails even before everything is ready.

It’s been a fun experiment, and one of those small tools that grew out of solving a problem for myself.

Screenshots