The missing POP3 server for Amazon Simple Email Service - written in golang. Tested with Apple Mail 16.0 on macOS 12.5.1, Apple Mail on iOS 15.6.1 and Microsoft Outlook for Mac 16.64.

AWS SES is powerful when it comes to sending emails but has only limited functionality to receive them. Officially, only storing them in Amazon S3 and triggering Amazon Lambda functions is supported (in certain regions such as eu-west-1).

This implementation serves a fully compliant RFC1939 POP3 server backed with an S3 bucket for SES.

markushinz/aws-ses-pop3-server

Hint: If you want to deploy aws-ses-pop3-server to Kubernetes check this tutorial on how to configure your NGINX Ingress Controller.

sudo curl -L "https://github.com/markushinz/aws-ses-pop3-server/releases/latest/download/aws-ses-pop3-server-$(uname -m)-$(uname -s)" -o /usr/local/bin/aws-ses-pop3-server
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/aws-ses-pop3-server
aws-ses-pop3-server

First, follow the official tutorial Receiving Email with Amazon SES to store emails in a S3 bucket.

Next, create an IAM user that has read and write permissions to the desired S3 bucket.

Create a config file using one of the supported authentication/authorization ways (listed below) and start the server.

Restrict access to your local machine or use TLS!

Finally, configure your favorite email client 🥳. Follow the official tutorial Using the Amazon SES SMTP Interface to Send Email to obtain SMTP credentials for sending emails.

Provide all required information the server needs to access an S3 bucket via a JWT. To ensure that a malicious user cannot trick the server into authenticating against AWS with arbitrary credentials, the server checks the signature and the exp property of JWTs. If exp is not specified tokens do not expire.

To use JWTs, provide a JWT secret via the config and provide jwt as user and the a signed JWT with the following content as password:

{
    "awsAccessKeyID": "AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE",
    "awsSecretAccessKey": "wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY",
    "awsSessionToken": "...",
    "region": "eu-central-1",
    "bucket": "aws-ses-pop3-server",
    "prefix": ""
}

awsSessionToken is only used for STS (short-term) credentials.

This does not work with Gmail! Gmail enforces a maximum character length for POP3 credentials that is smaller than the expected length of JWTs.

Perform a GET request to retrieve all required information the server needs to access an S3 bucket. The GET request transmits user and password via basic auth and expects the response to have status code 200 and a JSON body that follows the same format as the JWT content (see above).

Just accept one hardcoded pair or user and password. You have to provide all information required to access one (!) S3 bucket via the config. If no additional information is provided the server will behave like there are no emails.

Change the default values for user and password!

aws-ses-pop3-server can be configured using environment variables and / or a config file. aws-ses-pop3-server looks for config files at the following locations and in the depicted order:

• /etc/aws-ses-pop3-server/config.yaml
• $HOME/.aws-ses-pop3-server/config.yaml (~/.aws-ses-pop3-server/config.yaml)
• $(pwd)/config.yaml (present working directory)

Environment variables use the prefix POP3_ followed by the config key where - have to be replaced with _. Environment variables take precedence.

Check the following example config.yaml for possible keys:

# GENERAL SETTINGS
host: "localhost" # optional, defaults to "" (or 0.0.0.0; [::];  listening on all NICs)
port: 2110 # optional, defaults to 2110 (or 2995 if you specified tls-cert / tls-key or tls-cert-path / tls-key-path)
tls-cert: |- # optional, only valid in combination with tls-key, takes precedence over tls-cert-path / tls-key-path
  -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
  [ ... ]
  -----END CERTIFICATE-----
tls-key: |- # optional, only valid in combination with tls-cert, takes precedence over tls-cert-path / tls-key-path
  -----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----
  [ ... ]
  -----END PRIVATE KEY-----
tls-cert-path: "etc/aws-ses-pop3-server/tls.crt"  # optional, only valid in combination with tls-key-path
tls-key-path: "etc/aws-ses-pop3-server/tls"  # optional, only valid in combination with tls-cert-path
verbose: false # optional, defaults to false



# JWT PROVIDER SETTINGS
jwt-secret: "k2ya2iTNRdlsixVuTi00" # optional



# HTTP BASIC AUTH SETTINGS (only effictive if jwt-secret is not set)
http-basic-auth-url: "http://localhost" # optional
http-basic-auth-url-insecure: false # optional, defaults to false. If set to true non-localhost URLs using the insecure http protocol will not be rejected



# STATIC CREDENTIALS SETTINGS (only effictive if neither jwt-secret nor http-basic-auth-url are set)
user: "jane.doe@example.com" # optional, defaults to "user"
password: "6xRkiWA4mZBSaNmv" # optional, defaults to "changeit". DO CHANGE IT!

# The following aws-* keys are optional but required if you want to load emails
# These values have to be set here and are not inferred from other envrionment variables or ~/.aws/credentials
# aws-session-token is only used for STS-based keys
# You need read and write permissions to the desired S3 bucket
aws-access-key-id: "AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE"
aws-secret-access-key: "wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY"
aws-session-token: "..."

# The following aws-s3-* keys are required iff you set aws-access-key-id and aws-secret-access-key
aws-s3-region: "eu-central-1"
aws-s3-bucket: "aws-ses-pop3-server"
aws-s3-prefix: "" # optional, defaults to "" (set this if the emails are not stored in the root directory of the S3 bucket)