The idea
Every project needs to send email — password resets, receipts, notifications — and wiring that up from scratch each time is wasted work. MailDock is the piece we built once so we never have to again: a transactional email gateway that any of our apps can send through with a single API call.
What it does
You create a project, add a domain and verify it through AWS SES Easy DKIM, and mint scoped API keys. A public send endpoint takes a bearer token and an email payload — to, cc, bcc, subject, HTML, and text — and sends it. Daily and hourly rate limits keep any one project in check, bounces and complaints are tracked through SNS webhooks, and a delivery log shows the status of everything sent.
How we use it
MailDock is the email layer behind our own builds. Because it's multi-tenant from the ground up, each project gets its own isolated domains and keys, and the gateway handles the AWS SES details — verification, sending, reputation signals — so the apps don't have to.
Architecture
A Next.js app with a Drizzle-managed Neon Postgres database, session-based admin auth, and the AWS SDK v3 SES client at the core. A scheduled job re-checks domain verification so newly added domains come online without manual polling.