There’s this app I made, Origon. Back in July I wrote that I hadn’t touched the codebase in years and probably wouldn’t again. And I really had no intention to, except from maybe factoring out the replication framework that sits at its heart.

But then on a whim I decided to check the logs for any activity and noticed spurious errors when sending emails – in particular when sending out one-time passwords to new users.

It took me a few seconds to realise what had happened.

Origon’s backend runs on Google App Engine (GAE). Back when it launched, the only way to send email from GAE was to create a paid Gmail account with what was then known as Google Apps. So I acquiesced, created an account and got it all working.

Fast forward 3 years to earlier this year.

I was getting emails from all sorts of online services alerting me that I needed to update my payment information if I wanted to avoid service interruption, as my credit card was about to expire. One of the emails was from G Suite. I couldn’t for the life of me remember what I needed G Suite for, so I decided not to renew.

As it turns out, G Suite is what used to be Google Apps. I vaguely remembered getting an email to the effect. So since then no new users have received their one-time password for completing registration on Origon. They haven’t been many, but there’s been a steady trickle.

The easy thing would have been to just pull the plug.

But the thing is, I now have my own email server running on an Amazon EC2 instance that I set up to handle my contracting related emails. (Yup, I’m that level of DIY..)

And I’ve been needing a coding project outside of work.

So I decided to set up a lightweight REST API on my email server that would let me send emails from Origon’s GAE backend – under the radar, as it were, from GAE’s G Suite-only requirement.

So there it is, my Origon mailer. It’s a very simple Sinatra app with only 2 endpoints:

  • POST /oauth2/token for obtaining a JWT token using OAuth2 client_credentials grant;
  • POST /mailer for sending the actual email.

It uses Pony to talk to my Postfix MTA over SMTP, and I have configured it to be served up by Phusion Passenger running as a plugin in Nginx. For deployment I use Capistrano.

I had done very little Ruby programming before this, and all of Sinatra, Passenger and Capistrano were new to me, so there was a certain learning curve involved. Which sort of was the whole point.

As an added bonus, I got to bring both the iOS and backend Java codebases up to date with the latest versions of their respective libraries and frameworks (there’s an updated version of Origon in the App Store, who’da thunk), which in turn helped me refamiliarise myself with the code.

So there should be much less of a hurdle now, factoring out that replication framework. I should really just get started.