Mailphantom

At the beginning of the project/experiment I thought about setting a target, and I will not stop working towards this either until I reach it or until this year ends. I will approach the service that I've created as a business.

If the year ends and I did not make my target, then I will probably come to one of two conclusions:

1. I will have learnt through the process and these learning opportunities prepared me to try again and do better.
2. It is not possible to achieve what I've set out to, and I've found a new appreciation for my office job.

If I do reach my target, then I know it is something that I can do and realistically I can start working towards my office job exit 💪

I realised that in order for me to create something that will become profitable, I needed to put some thought into it. I couldn't just hack something together again.

So, I set out to recreate Mailphantom. This time I wanted to make sure that it can scale and that I can add additional features. I spent some money on a logo design and on supporting services. I also made sure that the app could accept payments from day one, this is after all the most important point of the experiment at the end of the day; can I generate an income from a service that I've created.

I spent most of my December holiday on the rebuild, but it was worth it as I made some headway before work started again in January 2021, at which point I only had the evenings and weekends to work on this.

A couple of months went by and Mailphantom 2.0 was ready for release.

This is where I realised that the hard part of realising an idea is to get paying customers.

It's nearing the end of the year and like so many other people do, I reflect on 2020 and my life in general. It is also time to think about 2021 and the future.

"Is this it for me? Am I forever going to work an office job, work for someone else, 9-5, clock in every day? Is that it, is that what I am getting out of life?

Wow, I'm 33 and none of my dreams of doing my own thing have happened. Is it even possible or am I just not capable of that?"

So I set myself a goal. I will really try my a** off in 2021. I need to see if it is possible to make some money from a side gig, and if I can, it must mean that I can probably do my own thing in a few years' time. Even if it means having to produce a few ideas and/or products that each bring in some income, but by combining this I can make a comfortable living out of them.

But what can I create that will help me with this experiment? I thought, well, I already created something before, which actually works and that I believe in, so why not just improve on that and reuse it rather than coming up with a completely new idea? This should save me some time in the process.

Around late March a friend suggested that I Show Hacker News. Honestly, I did not expect much, also the landing page was terrible, so I am not even sure why I was going to do it.

I guess I just wanted to humour the idea and see if there was something more here with Mailphantom than I had thought at the time. Maybe I will be lucky and someone "important" would see it, and I will retire before the age of 40.

HAHA whatever, I am such a dreamer, that did not happen, my Show HN received hardly any interest. Reality check. ¯\ _ (ツ) _ /¯

I was (actually am 🤫 ) by no means a developer, but like I said before; I wanted to build something. In the past I have dabbled with coding and I followed a Laravel "Getting Started" video series which I turned to again with this project.

Side note ☝️: If you want to get started quickly with the PHP framework called Laravel, I would highly recommend checking out https://laracasts.com/ . Jeffrey Way does a great series called Laravel From Scratch; I find his teaching style very thorough and easy to follow.

Anyway, after completing the Laravel From Scratch series I had enough to get started on one part of my email forwarding service, the web application part. The other part was email, for this I had to learn how to work with mail servers, specifically Postfix.

The learning curve was steep as I had to learn two technologies/concepts to get this going.

After about 3 months I had a MVP, it was terrible, but it worked. A mail can be sent to a Phantom address, it gets forwarded to my "real" email address, and I can even reply to the original sender through Mailphantom. So this allows me to have an email thread without the original sender ever knowing my "real" email address. I told a few people about it and some started using it, but that was the end of it. I did not improve or work on it.

I was proud of the fact that I was able to do something like this, but exhausted. In the end I got what I wanted out of building Mailphantom which was:

1. To see if I can build/develop something useful.
2. To solve my problem of having a simple email forwarding service with the ability to reply to emails I receive via Mailphantom. Note: I have been using it ever since myself, so I guess if anything it has been battle tested. ;p

Side note ✌️ : I do not want it to sound like I am some self-taught dev god who learned how to develop, how email works and built something within 3 months. Like I said before, I had been introduced to Laravel before starting this project, so I knew the concepts of MVC. I have worked with SQL like technologies in the past and many many moons ago I once built a Postfix server. So I knew all the concepts, I just had to employ a Just-In-Time(JIT) learning strategy.

I decided that I wanted to build something of my own, but what...

Well, the email forwarding service that I used at the time was acquired by another company and got bloated with unwanted features and things. I longed for the simple service that I was used to. I toyed with the idea to just build my own service/app that will fit my needs.

This was probably my first mistake. I did not come up with a new idea, it was something that already existed, I just wanted it to be simple again.

So I spent some time thinking about how I wanted to solve this problem for myself.

When I first came across this concept it immediately made sense to me. I have a unique password for each website or online service that I use, so why not have a unique email address as well?

The reason behind using a unique password for every website or online service is that should an attacker compromise said site or service, they will only obtain the password for the compromised site/service. But to me that only solves half of the problem. A compromised site/service would still expose my email address which is one of the two pieces of information used on so many different sites/services to log in.

Now, having a unique email address as well means that if an attacker compromised a site or service they would obtain an email address that is unique to the compromised site or service, thus minimising your exposure in this way.