email-forwarder

The entire documentation about this project is presented in my blog post.

Pricing

AWS offers a generous free tier for the services we use:

• Parameter Store: Standard parameters are free. The interaction (retrieve/update value) with the parameter costs $0.05 per 10,000 interactions.
• EventBridge Rule: Free for our use case.
• SNS: 1,000 notifications are free, after that $2 per 100,000 notifications.
• Lambda: This varies based on the memory and execution time of the Lambda. Using a Lambda of 512MB and 5s for each execution and running every 1 minute we will use around 110,000GB-s/month. The free tier is 1 million invocations per month and 400,000Gb-s of compute time. So for us, this will be free.

So this is very likely to be free for you!

Deployment

To make it more user-friendly I will do a step-by-step guide to help you setup all of this. Follow this in order!

Gmail settings

The first thing we need to do is to access your Gmail settings and make sure the IMAP is enabled (check the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab).

After that let's create a new App Password for us to use with the IMAP.

1. Access Google Settings

2. Search for App Passwords

3. Create a new app password and copy the password value after creation

Make sure to do all these steps in the email accounts you want to secure, in my case I have two (so I did this for both accounts).

Infrastructure deployment

To make the development live easier I set up DevBox in the project. So you only need to have DevBox installed and run devbox shell to install all the dependencies of the project (NodeJS, Yarn...).

1. Install the dependencies

devbox shell

2. Move to the infrastructure folder

cd infrastructure

3. Install NodeJS dependencies

yarn

4. Modify the config.ts file accordingly

5. Deploy the infrastructure

yarn cdk deploy

Make you have AWS credentials setup in place and that your account-region is already CDK bootstraped.

6. Check the receiver email and accept the subscribe email from Amazon SNS

6. Go to the AWS console and update the parameter(s) that contain your password (e.g. /email/gmail.com/<YOUR_EMAIL>/password) to used the app password you copied.

Final result

Finally! Now we are receiving our forwarded emails as expected!