Today's a special newsletter and I think you'll find it interesting if you want to show your work in public / online.

I'm going to spend the next week "building in public" a tool I could really use. I'll be posting daily updates on the website and my Twitter (but I won't email these updates so as to not spam your inboxes so follow my Twitter if you'd like to be a part of the journey!)

🧮 The problem

The problem I'm trying to solve is that people often have email addresses that are too long to communicate easily on the phone. In my case, it includes my full name and it's a nightmare to spell out every time.

Email shorteners / alias providers aren't great either. In most cases you can get a random email alias that’s no easier (try saying 1u90-qro3-wuy2@anonaddy.com on the phone!) or an unusual domain name that's unintuitive because it doesn't contain "mail" in the name.

📧 The project - an Email forwarding service

Over the next week, I’ll be building an email forwarding service that would let you:

  1. Sign in with Google (since almost everyone has a Gmail)
  2. Create your own email alias for free (e.g. shortword@shortdomain.com) that's easy to say
  3. Receive emails on this alias. They would be forwarded to your Gmail, and you can reply back to them

The ideas is to have something you sign up to ONCE, then you don't have to revisit it (everything happens within your Gmail inbox).

✅ The game plan

In terms of my plan, I'm going to start by setting up a web server and connecting to the Mailgun API. I'm sure it's not the most efficient way to build this tool, but I just want a solution that works.

I've laid out my to-do list / backlog today and it looks something like this:

🚀 Follow for updates!

I'll be sharing daily updates on Twitter so follow there for updates and to tell me what you think along the way!