Show HN: Postgres.email – Readable Mailing Lists

This is a small POC that I've been developing to transform the Postgres mailing lists[0] more readable

I've linked to a thread "COPY TO (FREEZE)?" in the Show HN link, and the equivalent on the Postgres mailing list site is here:

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20220802.133046.194197...

The idea of postgres.email is to make all responses threaded, like the comments here on HN or Reddit.

I created this by using an imap Foreign Data Wrapper to ingest the messages into a Postgres database. I have only ingested 1000 messages for the POC. It also doesn't display attachments.

The code can bew found here:

https://github.com/kiwicopple/postgres.email

The technologies used are:

- Gmail to receive the email

- Steampipe for the FDW: https://hub.steampipe.io/plugins/turbot/imap

- Supabase for the Postgres database / APIs: https://supabase.com

- Remix for the frontend: https://remix.run/

Given the size of the mailing lists, I doubt the current approach will scale much further than the POC, so I'll need to re-think the architecture. I'll probably keep the emails in gmail and and leverage the FDW for older messages.

Some things I'd like to do next:

  - explore alternative architectures
  - show attachments
  - add a REST API 
  - add search - the size of the mailing lists might make this difficult
  - allow readers to toggle on a "markdown" view. Often authors use markdown syntax in their emails 
  - add a light mode

[0] Mailing lists: https://www.postgresql.org/list/