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[devnoname120]

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[MurmeltierS]

as this would require pretty heavy backend lifting and mail-sending infrastrucutre my guess would be that this is pretty much out of scope for this project :|

[devnoname120]

Note that a service such as Mailgun or Sendgrid would solve the infrastructure part.

For example, Mailgun is free for 5000 emails a month and $1 for each extra 1000 emails.

I'm not sure how feasible it would be. You could probably reach out to them to ask for a special free plan or big discounts as an open-source non-commercial project.

[lucahammer]

As @MurmeltierS said, that would be a quite different project. I probably wouldn't use mail, but ActivityPub messages.

Fedifinder is designed to store as little user data as possible. To notify people, it would need to at least store access tokens of the Twitter and Fediverse account to retrieve follow lists and compare them to the results. But for a good experience that's not enough, because it would inform you about any found accounts that you don't follow already. And maybe there is a reason why you don't follow them. So it needs to store already identified accounts as well. When it uses mail instead of direct messages, it needs to store mail addresses. It needs a schedule to run, monitoring and more stability (users won't notice when it crashes and can try again with a simple reload). How to handle inactive users? Over time the database grows, accounts move, servers become unreachable. Those cases need to be handled. People probably want to be able to manage their settings: More data to store and at least some kind of settings page to build.

Sending mails would be the least of my concerns. Especially because I would use messages. But everything else is currently to much. If someone wants to build it, I would recommend to either fork fedifinder or just copy the parts that can be reused (twitter auth, nasty regex for handle identification and method to check if a domain is a fediverse instance).