Two months ago, I wrote a blog post using SendGrid's Inbound Parse to forward emails to Dovecot (IMAP). The reasons behind this decision were discussed in detail there, but to summarize:

• Auto-retry meant I would not have to worry about high availability on my end.
• Port 25 (for inbound emails) is blocked on many VPSs so unblocking it would be a challenge.
• I don't need to expose my backend IP as Inbound Parse can sit in front of my server.

I also briefly noted that this wasn't the intended use of Inbound Parse, but that it did open up the possibility of using it for its intended purpose (parsing the emails in code and routing them accordingly) in the future.

There's been a few annoyances with directly forwarding emails to Dovecot that I wanted to address, which has finally lead me to using Inbound Parse for its intended purpose. In the process, I've had to create a library to properly resolve these annoyances.

Many people who have their own domains will set up an email address for that domain. For me, I have [email protected] (though any @evanzhang.ca address also works).

For the longest time, I've had an unfavourable email situation for my domain. Recently, I completely revamped my email situation in an unusual way which may be a useful option to consider for anyone else setting up emails.