How I built forlater.email

Ever since I began browsing sites like Hacker News and Lobsters, coming across new and exciting links to check out every day, I found it hard to keep up. On most days, I just didn’t. And that’s fine — good, even. But oftentimes, I’d come across a genuinely interesting link but no time to actually read it.

I began using Pocket. It was alright — the article view was very good; but it stopped there. I didn’t like nor use the other junk baked into the app: discover, following/friends thing, etc. It’s also proprietary, and that irked me — more so than the other “features”.

Thus, somewhat inspired by rss2email, I began building forlater.email — a bookmarking/read-later service that works via email. Email is the perfect tool for this use-case: works offline; you can organize it however you like; you own your data.

Mail containing links to be saved arrive here. OpenSMTPD is beautiful software, and its configuration is stupid simple (smtpd.conf(5):

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