How I Automated My Job Application Process. (Part 3)
Welcome to the final part of this series. In Part 1, I showed you the proof of concept. In Part 2, we dove into the actual application. Now it's time for the good stuff - all the ways everything went wrong before it went right.
Remember when I said the email system deserved its own article? Well, here it is. It's a story of hubris, AWS rejections, and what happens when you try to run your own email server. (Spoiler: Nothing good.)
I wanted something simple: a system that could send and receive emails programmatically and provide a decent ui to view sent emails and reply to incoming emails. Here's how that "simple" requirement turned into a two-week adventure.
The real kicker? This used to be dead simple. Back in the day, you just had to enable the "less secure apps" option in your account settings, and boom - you could fire off emails using your username and password with nodemailer. No OAuth dance, no security theater, just simple SMTP auth. But Google killed that flow, and now we're left with a more complex setup that takes way more time to get running.
...but I couldn't send any. And honestly? I never figured out why. The server was configured, the ports were open, everything looked right on paper - but no emails would go through. After countless attempts and configuration tweaks, I did what any sane developer would do: I shelved the entire project.
