MVP ☝️

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:

To see if I can build/develop something useful.
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.