Continuing the trend of ripping off other people's ideas for simple hosted services, I am hosting something inspired by Voidpop (github link), the hosted version of which appears to have gone offline is back online now. This does exactly the same thing, except it is written in go because I find hosting go binaries easier. 99% of the work is handled by the very handy POPgun library. Some small tweaks to the sample back end, and it's a functioning Voidpop clone.

Why?

AFAIK, there is no way to configure Thunderbird to send an email via an SMTP server without giving it a POP3 or IMAP server for incoming mail. I am told Outlook has the same problem. This makes sense for normal email client use; if you're setting up an email account you would expect to be able to receive email somehow. I needed to be able to format a district-wide announcement email to be sent to a bunch of parents via our mass-mailing SMTP server though, and it would have been really nice to be able to just compose/format that message in Thunderbird and send it to our SMTP server. Voidpop facilitated this (and still does if you want to self-host a copy), and now EmptyBox does as well. Just put in emptybox.jons.tools as the POP3 server with the default port of 110. It will accept any username and password and present an empty inbox.

Server: emptybox.jons.tools
Port: 110
Encryption: none
Username: anything
Password: anything