Who is Shai Truchman?
Shai Truchman is the founder of Brand My Inbox, an email sending service for small businesses, operated by Career and Content Ltd (company number 515523934) in Tel Aviv, Israel. He designs and builds the system himself — the SMTP relay that authenticates each customer separately, the domain-authentication pipeline, the delivery reporting, and the compliance work underneath all three.
The work is unusual in one specific way, and it is visible throughout the codebase: every decision is recorded with the reason it was made, and every production fault is written down with what it actually broke — not what it looked like. That habit is the subject of the last section on this page, because it is the part that transfers to any other engineering project.
What is Brand My Inbox?
Brand My Inbox provisions the infrastructure a business needs to send mail from its own domain: domain authentication, an authenticated SMTP relay, and delivery reporting. The customer receives credentials and enters them into whatever mail application they already use — Apple Mail, Outlook, the Gmail app, Thunderbird.
Why does this product exist now?
Because of a date. Google is removing Gmail's “Send mail as” feature for non-Google
addresses in January 2027. A large number of small businesses have spent years
sending from hello@theirdomain.com through a free Gmail account using exactly
that setting. When it is withdrawn, they lose the professional address or they pay for a full
mailbox suite per person.
Google confirmed that IMAP and SMTP access from third-party mail clients is unaffected. So the replacement is a mail client with a split configuration: incoming stays with the existing provider, outgoing goes through an authenticated relay. That is the product, and the deadline is why it is being built now rather than eventually.
How is it engineered?
The system runs on Amazon SES with per-tenant isolation, behind an SMTP relay written for the purpose. The relay exists for a reason worth stating plainly: SES credentials are not scoped per domain, so without a relay in front, nothing would stop one customer sending as another customer's verified domain. The relay is the security boundary the whole product depends on.
| Sending | Amazon SES with Tenants, region eu-central-1 (Frankfurt) |
|---|---|
| Relay | Own SMTP submission service on port 587, per-customer authentication, per-domain scoping |
| Authentication | SPF, DKIM, DMARC and a custom MAIL FROM domain per customer |
| Data | PostgreSQL; message bodies and attachments are never stored |
| Verification | ~1,385 automated tests across three suites, run on every push |
| Deployment | Automatic on a green test run, with a gate that walks real customer paths and fails the deploy if one broke |
Privacy is architectural, not a policy paragraph
Message content is not stored, not logged and not scanned. Abuse is detected from behaviour — bounce rates, complaint rates, sending volume — because content inspection would contradict the strongest claim the product makes. That decision is recorded in the project's architecture document as permanent rather than provisional: it is not revisited when it becomes inconvenient.
What is unusual about how it is built?
Most engineering write-ups describe what was built. This project's internal record describes what broke, and the pattern is consistent enough to be a method:
- A bug is not closed until the reason it was invisible is written down.
- Fixes are made at the level of the class of fault, not the instance — a test that fails whenever any declared event has no producer, rather than a fix for the one event that had none.
- A check that cannot fail is treated as an absent check, and removed or repaired.
- Automation is trusted only after it has been watched: a suspension job runs in dry-run and its decisions are read before it is allowed to act.
Frequently asked
Does it replace Google Workspace or Microsoft 365?
No. It is outbound-only. It provides the ability to send from a custom domain address using the inbox and mail app a business already has, rather than a full mailbox suite.
Does it work with any mail app?
Yes — anything that supports standard SMTP submission, which is every mainstream desktop, mobile and webmail client.
Is inbox placement guaranteed?
No, and no honest provider guarantees it. Correct authentication is the foundation for good delivery, not a promise about it. The product states this in its own interface rather than in a footnote.
Where is data processed?
In the EU (Frankfurt). Transfers outside the EEA are named individually in the privacy policy with the reason each one happens, rather than covered by a general clause.
Contact
Shai Truchman can be reached at shai@truchman.com. The product is at brandmyinbox.com.