Antiwork

I’m not a service worker, but I work for myself and so far haven’t made a profit. I just finished the code for a task that’s taken about a month. Over the next couple weeks I’ll be running migrations and testing. Then maybe I’ll finally be happy.

Some backstory if you’re interested:

I run an email service called https://port87.com/

When I was young an naive (two years ago), I used an email parser that basically gives me the entire hierarchy of an email (emails are laid out hierarchically, if you didn’t know), and saved that into the database in a JSON structure. That’s bad for a few reasons:

• It’s not searchable, so I had to store a searchable text string as well, doubling the storage requirement.
• It’s complicated to parse, so displaying emails takes a lot of code.
• The parse I used doesn’t understand emails that aren’t text or HTML (like gmails DMARC reports are XML).
• The parser also only considers something an attachment if it’s transferred with base64 encoding, so anything transferred as quoted-printable is actually stored in the DB right now, instead of blob storage. In other words, I have PDFs wasting space in my Postgres DB.

So this task involved implementing a new, smarter email parser and rewriting the email body storage to be a more flat representation of just text, HTML, and attachments. I also store the original email message in blob storage (and I wrote a new blob storage system, because S3 sucks). I need to rebuild the original message for every email that’s currently stored, and then rewrite their body storage into this new format.

All this for no pay! (But hopefully this will make it easier to build the features that will eventually be paid features.)