Moving parts
TL;DR: I may be about to break my email - so if it seems like I’m not replying to you you might want to poke me via another channel (Facebook, Phone, Post, Elaborate Steganographic Cat Pictures and so forth).
Update: The switchover seems to have gone ok; the websites are all up and running just dandy, and the email’s still getting through to me. Looking good!
I’m currently in the throes of moving Paperstack over from Hurricane Electric to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Largely this is so that I’m maintaining Paperstack on the same set of tools that I use both for other personal sites (such as The Stockholm Rigamarole and in the day job (with Diabol AB.
Now if the website of Paperstack is down for a week or three (or a year or three) then nobody much will notice or care; this is pretty much a write-only blog. On the other hand, if I screw up my email then that will be super annoying for me personally.
It’s slightly surprising to me that there’s not a standard piece of Amazon infrastructure for doing email forwarding for domains. I get that it’s not something that’s core to their business, but I would have thought that it would have value as part of making entry to the AWS ecosystem as smooth as possible. But as it stands there are a bunch of solutions that entail tying Simple Email Service (SES) together with Lambdas, and those seem overcomplex for my needs. I guess Amazon do have their own Email accounts platform in Work Mail, but I don’t know anyone using that so I’m lairy of that solution too.
Instead, in the short term at least, I’m going to try ImprovMX for this. It’s very easy to set up (something I did to handle emails for the site I created for our wedding), but I haven’t trusted it for anything ‘real’ so far.
For now I’ll keep paying for the Hurricane Electric virtual hosting (and associated email) so that it’s easy to switch back, but at some point I’ll be committed. Even so, I tip my hat to Hurricane Electric for about 20 years of reliable service.