infra: email notifications might be a bit spotty
we’ve exceeded the usage tier for our email sending API today (and they kindly didn’t email me to tell me that was the case until we were 300% over), so email notifications might be a bit spotty/non-working for a little bit. I’m working on figuring out what we should migrate to — I’m leaning towards AWS SES as by far the cheapest option, though I’m no Amazon fan and I’m open to other options as long as they’ve got an option to send with SMTP
Wait, we had the option of e-mail notifications?
oh boy, I may have cursed us with even more email volume with this announcement
well, SES it is! it’s cheap as hell and email isn’t exactly mission critical outside of maybe password recovery
come on just run the mail yourself, we had all those posters a few weeks back tell us it was so easy~~~
I've used SMTP2go. It was adequate for the needs of the organisation I worked for.
that one’s in the running too!
I remember when I first signed up for awful.systems I never got an email that I was approved (because y'know it was a baby website at the time). So I forgot about it for a couple weeks and then was like "oh yeah maybe that went through".
so that seems to be a thing it doesn't in fact do! I mean, you'd think it would
nah, I wouldn't (think that). I've read some of the lemmy code.
so do you want to hear something terrible? if you give Lemmy SMTP credentials for notifications but it can’t auth against the server for any reason, it’ll just hang the entire lemmy backend forever
which makes switching email providers a bit nerve-wracking, you understand
okay uh don't hate me too much for this but: second service instance postfix, which just acts as a forwarder to whatever you pick? that can have static auth in it for lemmy and thus break as little as possible, and it'll just always queue flush
basically ye olde smarthost, SaaS nightmare edition
heck it can run on the same actual box, postfix is not heavy
yep, literally just a side service in the same flake definition. only downside is you'll need to feed logs to somewhere, and monitor queue depth. but those are both trivial (and you could even just trigger for queue depth over n for $time, because that's enough indication of work/fail)
huh, I kind of like it
we’ll see how the migration goes in staging — if it’s smooth, I’ll add postfix as a todo. if there’s a bunch of problems, postfix might be the most immediate way out