self hosting blog mailing list

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+---
+title: >-
+    Self-Hosting a Blog Mailing List
+description: >-
+    For fun and no profit.
+---
+
+As of this week the Mediocre Blog has a new follow mechanism: email! [Sign up
+on the **Follow** page][follow] and you'll get an email everytime a new post
+is published to the blog. It's like RSS, except there's a slight chance you
+might actually use it.
+
+This post will detail my relatively simple setup for this, linking to points
+within my blog's server code which are relevant. While I didn't deliberately
+package my code up into a nice public package, if you know have some cursory
+knowledge of Go you could probably rip my code and make it work for you. Don't
+worry, it has a [permissive license](/assets/wtfpl.txt).
+
+[follow]: /follow.html
+
+## Email Server
+
+Self-hosting email is the hardest and most foreign part of this whole
+thing for most devs. The long and the short of it is that it's very unlikely you
+can do this without renting a VPS somewhere. Luckily there are VPSs out there
+which are cheap and which allow SMTP traffic, so it's really just a matter of
+biting the cost bullet and letting your definition of "self-hosted" be a bit
+flexible. At least you still control the code!
+
+I highly recommend [maddy][maddy] as an email server which has everything you
+need out of the box, no docker requirements, and a flexible-yet-simple
+configuration language.  I've discussed [in previous posts][maddypost] the
+general steps I've used to set up maddy on a remote VPS, and so I won't
+re-iterate here. Just know that I have a VPS on my private [nebula][nebula] VPN,
+with a maddy server listening for outgoing mail on port 587, with
+username/password authentication on that port.
+
+[maddy]: https://maddy.email
+[maddypost]: {% post_url 2021-07-06-maddy-vps %}
+[nebula]: https://github.com/slackhq/nebula
+
+## General API Design
+
+The rest of the system lies within the Go server which hosts my blog. There is
+only a single instance of the server, and it runs in my living room. With these
+as the baseline environmental requirements, the rest of the design follows
+easily:
+
+* The Go server provides [three REST API endpoints][restendpoints]:
+
+    - `POST /api/mailinglist/subscribe`: Accepts a POST form argument `email`, sends a
+      verification email to that email address.
+
+    - `POST /api/mailinglist/finalize`: Accepts a POST form argument `subToken`,
+      which is a random token sent to the user when they subscribe. Only by
+      finalizing their subscription can a user be considered actually
+      subscribed.
+
+    - `POST /api/mailinglist/unsubscribe`: Accepts a POST form argument
+      `unsubToken`, which is sent with each blog post notification to the user.
+
+* The static frontend code has [two pages][staticpages] related to the mailing
+  list:
+
+    - `/mailinglist/finalize.html`: The verification email which is sent to the
+      user links to this page, with the `subToken` as a GET argument. This page
+      then submits the `subToken` to the `POST /api/mailinglist/finalize`
+      endpoint.
+
+    - `/mailinglist/unsubscribe.html`: Each blog post notification email sent to
+      users contains a link to this page, with an `unsubToken` as a GET
+      argument. This page then submits the `unsubToken` to the `POST
+      /api/mailinglist/unsubscribe` endpoint.
+
+It's a pretty small API, but it covers all the important things, namely
+verification (because I don't want people signed up against their will, nor do I
+want to be sending emails to fake email addresses), and unsubscribing.
+
+[restendpoints]: https://github.com/mediocregopher/blog.mediocregopher.com/blob/5ca7dadd02fb49dd62ad448d12021359e41beec1/srv/cmd/mediocre-blog/main.go#L169
+[staticpages]: https://github.com/mediocregopher/blog.mediocregopher.com/tree/9c3ea8dd803d6f0df768e3ae37f8c4ab2efbcc5c/static/src/mailinglist
+
+## Proof-of-work
+
+It was important to me that someone couldn't just sit and submit random emails
+to the `POST /api/mailinglist/subscribe` endpoint in a loop, causing my email
+server to eventually get blacklisted. To prevent this I've implemented a simple
+proof-of-work (PoW) system, whereby the client must first obtain a PoW
+challenge, generate a solution for that challenge (which involves a lot of CPU
+time), and then submit that solution as part of the subscribe endpoint call.
+
+Both the [server-side][powserver] and [client-side][powclient] code can be found
+in the blog's git repo. You could theoretically view the Go documentation for
+the server code on pkg.go.dev, but apparently their bot doesn't like my WTFPL.
+
+When providing a challenge to the client, the server sends back two values: the
+seed and the target.
+
+The target is simply a number whose purpose will become apparent in a second.
+
+The seed is a byte-string which encodes:
+
+* Some random bytes.
+
+* An expiration timestamp.
+
+* A target (matching the one returned to the client alongside the seed).
+
+* An HMAC-MD5 which signs all of the above.
+
+When the client submits a valid solution the server checks the HMAC to ensure
+that the seed was generated by the server, it checks the expiration to make sure
+the client didn't take too long to solve it, and it checks in an [internal
+storage][powserverstore] whether that seed hasn't already been solved. Because
+the expiration is built into the seed the server doesn't have to store each
+solved seed forever, only until the seed has expired.
+
+To generate a solution to the challenge the client does the following:
+
+* Concatenate up to `len(seed)` random bytes onto the original seed given by the
+  server.
+
+* Calculate the SHA512 of that.
+
+* Parse the first 4 bytes of the resulting hash as a big-endian uint32.
+
+* If that uint32 is less than the target then the random bytes generated in the
+  first step are a valid solution. Otherwise the client loops back to the first
+  step.
+
+Finally, a new endpoint was added: `GET /api/pow/challenge`, which returns a PoW
+seed and target for the client to solve. Since seeds don't require storage in a
+database until _after_ they are solved there are essentially no consequences to
+someone spamming this in a loop.
+
+With all of that in place, the `POST /api/mailinglist/subscribe` endpoint
+described before now also requires a `powSeed` and a `powSolution` argument. The
+[Follow][follow] page, prior to submitting a subscribe request, first retrieves
+a PoW challenge, generates a solution, and only _then_ will it submit the
+subscribe request.
+
+[powserver]: https://github.com/mediocregopher/blog.mediocregopher.com/blob/9c3ea8dd803d6f0df768e3ae37f8c4ab2efbcc5c/srv/pow/pow.go
+[powserverstore]: https://github.com/mediocregopher/blog.mediocregopher.com/blob/5ca7dadd02fb49dd62ad448d12021359e41beec1/srv/pow/store.go
+[powclient]: https://github.com/mediocregopher/blog.mediocregopher.com/blob/9c3ea8dd803d6f0df768e3ae37f8c4ab2efbcc5c/static/src/assets/solvePow.js
+
+## Storage
+
+Storage of emails is fairly straightforward: since I'm not running this server
+on multiple hosts, I can just use [SQLite][sqlite]. My code for storage in
+SQLite can all be found [here][sqlitecode].
+
+My SQLite table has a single table:
+
+```
+CREATE TABLE emails (
+	id          TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
+	email       TEXT NOT NULL,
+	sub_token   TEXT NOT NULL,
+	created_at  INTEGER NOT NULL,
+
+	unsub_token TEXT,
+	verified_at INTEGER
+)
+```
+
+It will probably one day need an index on `sub_token` and `unsub_token`, but I'm
+not quite there yet.
+
+The `id` field is generated by first lowercasing the email (because emails are
+case-insensitive) and then hashing it. This way I can be sure to identify
+duplicates easily. It's still possible for someone to do the `+` trick to get
+their email in multiple times, but as long as they verify each one I don't
+really care.
+
+[sqlite]: https://sqlite.org/index.html
+[sqlitecode]: https://github.com/mediocregopher/blog.mediocregopher.com/blob/5ca7dadd02fb49dd62ad448d12021359e41beec1/srv/mailinglist/store.go
+
+## Publishing
+
+Publishing is quite easy: my [MailingList interface][mailinglistinterface] has a
+`Publish` method on it, which loops through all records in the SQLite table,
+discards those which aren't verified, and sends an email to the rest containing:
+
+* A pleasant greeting.
+
+* The new post's title and URL.
+
+* An unsubscribe link.
+
+I will then use a command-line interface to call this `Publish` method. I
+haven't actually made that interface yet, but no one is subscribed yet so it
+doesn't matter.
+
+[mailinglistinterface]: https://github.com/mediocregopher/blog.mediocregopher.com/blob/5ca7dadd02fb49dd62ad448d12021359e41beec1/srv/mailinglist/mailinglist.go#L23
+
+## Easy-Peasy
+
+The hardest part of the whole thing was probably getting maddy set up, with a
+close second being trying to decode a hex string to a byte string in javascript
+(I tried Crypto-JS, but it wasn't working without dragging in webpack or a bunch
+of other nonsense, and vanilla JS doesn't have any way to do it!).
+
+Hopefully reading this will make you consider self-hosting your own blog's
+mailing list as well. If we let these big companies keep taking over all
+internet functionality then eventually they'll finagle the standards so that
+no one can self-host anything, and we'll have to start all over.
+
+And really, do you _need_ tracking code on the emails you send out for your
+recipe blog? Just let your users ignore you in peace and quiet.