2025•Hackaton / Personal Project•2 Weeks (Hackathon period)
MailPlanet: Visualize Email Origins on a Globe
MailPlanet is a Next.js application that listens for inbound emails via Postmark webhooks, geolocates the email sender’s IP (or the email provider’s IP), persists the data using Drizzle ORM, and visualizes the results as markers on a 3D globe using Mapbox. As new emails arrive, they dynamically appear on the globe, allowing users to explore sender locations, subjects, and more.
Live Demo / Repository
Role: Full-stack Developer / Creator
Technology Stack
Next.jsTypeScriptMapbox GL JSDrizzle ORMPostmark Inbound WebhooksAbstract IP Geolocation APITailwind CSS
Challenges
- Processing incoming email data via webhooks reliably
- Extracting or inferring a valid IP address from email headers
- Geolocating IP addresses and handling missing/ambiguous cases
- Rendering interactive 3D globe with performant updates
- Managing persistence and avoiding duplicate entries or API overuse
Solutions
- Used Postmark inbound webhooks to reliably forward emails to API route
- Parsed email metadata / headers to determine candidate IPs
- Employed Abstract API for geolocation lookups
- Used Drizzle ORM to store IP + location data and increment counters for repeated origins
- Rendered markers dynamically onto Mapbox globe, with click popups for email metadata
Project Gallery
Results & Impact
Interactive live demo deployed (via Vercel) showing real-time email origin mapping
Demonstrated the feasibility of combining email webhooks + geolocation + visualization
Engaged community / challenge participants with novel email visualization
Served as a portfolio highlight integrating backend, mapping, real-time, UI