How I built a disposable email service with Haraka and Astro

I wanted a throwaway email service that wasn't slow, wasn't covered in ads, and worked in my language. Nothing I found checked all three boxes. So I built one. The stack is Haraka for SMTP, Redis for real-time message delivery, SQLite for storage, and Astro for the frontend deployed on Cloudflare Pages. The whole thing runs on a single VPS plus Cloudflare's edge network. Why Haraka Most guides for "build your own email server" point you at Postfix or something similar. I went with Haraka because it's Node.js, which meant I could write plugins in a language I already knew instead of learning Postfix configuration files, which feel like they were designed to punish you. Haraka handles inbound SMTP. When an email arrives, a custom plugin checks if the recipient address exists in the active session pool. If it does, the message gets parsed and pushed to Redis pub/sub. If it doesn't, the email gets rejected. The plugin is about 80 lines. It extracts the sender, subject, HTML body, and attac