[HN Gopher] Purelymail - cheap, no-nonsense email
___________________________________________________________________
Purelymail - cheap, no-nonsense email
Author : pwrplus1
Score : 539 points
Date : 2021-07-02 04:40 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (purelymail.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (purelymail.com)
| Markoff wrote:
| well he lists there also Zoho for 12USD, so what exactly is
| benefit over Zoho which offers 5GB for 10.8EUR and 10GB for
| 13.5EUR?
| aembleton wrote:
| Unlimited user accounts for $10/year, whereas Zoho charges per
| account.
| calltrak wrote:
| This looks like a good deal. We could use this at
| https://fabform.io our web forms "google forms alternative"
| platform.
| zubspace wrote:
| Looks good. Fair pricing. I hope it works out for them.
|
| I started out with self-hosting mail-in-a-box [1]. If you really
| want to self-host, I can highly recommend it. Would be the
| cheapest option. At some point I decided to let go of it, because
| maintenance and configuration can still be a bit cumbersome.
| There was one thing (DMARC or DNSSEC?) which I never was able to
| set up properly for some unknown reason, even after long hours
| tinkering around with it...
|
| So I started to look at other mail hosting offerings with custom
| domain. One thing I like is that gandi offers free mail hosting
| for a domain you order through them. [2] That's quite unique for
| a domain registrar.
|
| Also, be aware that free 3rd-party mail hosting with a custom
| domain does not exist. I started out with the free plan at
| migadu, but they switched to a paid plan soon after. [3]
|
| The same happened to postale.io after a while. [4] At least I
| could keep my free plan there.
|
| Zoho is free [5], but their custom mail application and the
| countless other services they try to sell you completely put me
| off.
|
| [1] https://mailinabox.email/
|
| [2] https://www.gandi.net/en/domain/email
|
| [3] https://www.migadu.com/pricing/#what-happened-to-the-free-
| pl...
|
| [4]
| https://postale.io/faq#What%20happened%20to%20the%20free%20p...?
|
| [5] https://www.zoho.com/mail/
| BelenusMordred wrote:
| I'll throw my hat in the ring for postale, they are a good
| service for both individuals and business. Is $1 a month really
| going to put you in financial stress? Is your business going to
| die paying $5 a month?
|
| > Also, be aware that free 3rd-party mail hosting with a custom
| domain does not exist.
|
| You can set up a custom domain on a free gmail account, it's
| hidden away but certainly possible.
| Lex-2008 wrote:
| > Also, be aware that free 3rd-party mail hosting with a custom
| domain does not exist.
|
| I believe two of them still exist in Russia.
|
| * Yandex even has a page in English:
| https://360.yandex.com/business/tariff
|
| * Mail.Ru has a page only in Russian:
| https://biz.mail.ru/mail/#tariffs
| indigodaddy wrote:
| I've been using Yandex for probably the last 6-7 years. Never
| had any issues or problems with them.
| spindle wrote:
| +1 for gandi as a mail host.
| antihero wrote:
| Whether we wish to switch or not (I'd be inclined to consider it
| but I am quite happy with Fastmail and am not super worried about
| a saving a few bucks a month):
|
| Is there a generic solution for moving over IMAP inboxes from one
| provider to another?
| jobarion wrote:
| When using subaddressing (e.g. example+tag@purelymail.com), can I
| also send from that address?
|
| The holy grail for me would be an email service that lets me set
| up catch-all, with the ability to send/reply with any address I
| want.
| spindle wrote:
| I'm not the right person to answer but I happen to know that
| the answer is yes!
| deadbunny wrote:
| > The holy grail for me would be an email service that lets me
| set up catch-all, with the ability to send/reply with any
| address I want.
|
| I have this with fastmail. *@my.tld all gets shoved in my inbox
| and I can send from whatever@my.tld.
| jobarion wrote:
| Do you need to set up each *@my.tld address manually, or can
| you just seamlessly reply to emails send to
| neverusedbefore@my.tld?
| MandieD wrote:
| The latter, which often makes for an interesting
| conversation at medical offices and shops when I jot down
| their-business-name@mydomain.com. The FastMail mobile
| client makes replying to those emails without "breaking
| character" easy.
| [deleted]
| mvolfik wrote:
| With improvmx.com you can point a domain at them, and then
| set catch-all forwarding to e.g. Gmail. Sending is possible
| thanks to most providers (incl. Gmail) allowing sending from
| different address after verification, and if you set DKIM and
| SPF it shouldn't cause any issues.
| uiui1 wrote:
| purelymail is based
| cryptos wrote:
| I consider the usage of Roundcube for the UI a downside. I've
| tried Roundcube myself and was not really satisfied. It is
| difficult for to describe what exactly is wrong with the UI but
| somehow the usability is not really good. Outlook (web), GMail,
| or Yahoo Mail all feel better to me.
|
| What I'd really miss would the integration of an external adress
| book (Google), because I wouldn't want to duplicate all my
| addresses.
| dial8gue wrote:
| https://mailbox.org I pay 1 euro per month. With calendar,
| contacts, file storage and DAV. With aliases and your own domain.
| Plus it's a well-known company.
| newscracker wrote:
| But mailbox.org is also priced per mailbox by default. When I
| checked with Mailbox.org support a few years ago, there was no
| way to go beyond 25 aliases on a single mailbox (even when one
| is willing to pay).
| vince14 wrote:
| Custom domains and cloud storage are EUR3/month. Not included
| in EUR1/month.
| dial8gue wrote:
| Old users had the option to stay on the of 1 euro tariff with
| all included
| glasss wrote:
| This seems great, would be pretty popular through a tor service I
| imagine.
| toastal wrote:
| I recently switched to Posteo from a few years with ProtonMail.
| Reading from Purelymail's docs and with price being within $3
| annually of one another (Posteo is EUR12 annually)
|
| Posteo pros: comes with calendar and contacts via WebDAV, not
| registered in the US (Germany is part of 14 Eyes, but not 5 or 9,
| and the EU is better about privacy), cash payment option
|
| Purelymail pros: more storage @ $10, custom domain support,
| security key 2FA (though unclear according to docs if this is
| WebAuthn/FIDO2 or Yubikey vendor lock-in)
|
| Neither: cryptocurrency payment option
| Fnoord wrote:
| Another alternative to Posteo is Mailbox.org [1]. Personally, I
| use Soverin [2], but that's mostly cause I get it for free with
| Freedom Internet plus its hosted in The Netherlands. And I can
| always leave.
|
| [1] https://mailbox.org/en/
|
| [2] https://soverin.net/
| npteljes wrote:
| Posteo also runs on FOSS and is being endorsed by the FSF - if
| that matters. They also do 2FA, via TOTP (which many apps
| support). They offer a migration tool that downloads email from
| your other accounts.
| toastal wrote:
| Both of these email provider options support TOTP so I
| omitted it; and TOTP [?] U2F/WebAuthn with a USB token. I
| have an OnlyKey, but it's mostly full of TOTP keys already
| because applications are _not_ supporting WebAuthn. Posteo
| does not support this, and last I emailed them, they said
| they do not release information about future features.
| pwrplus1 wrote:
| The 2FA is just regular TOTP RFC 6238.
| srg0 wrote:
| Never heard about Posteo. Too bad it does not support custom
| domains.
| devwastaken wrote:
| This looks good for the price. I've been looking for a service I
| can throw up under my domain simply to receive email under that
| official domain, but the site doesn't make money so most other
| services are far too expensive.
|
| Tbh idunno why Cloudflare doesn't just do this. People will use
| domains under google because it provides domain email.
| pwrplus1 wrote:
| I've been using Purelymail as my sole mail provider for over a
| year now (previously with Fastmail) and it has been my best email
| experience.
|
| It's a one-man enterprise, which may frighten some people, but I
| prefer boutique internet companies to the faceless monoliths.
| (I'd like more of the internet to be made of these small corner
| bodegas.)
| brongondwana wrote:
| Fastmail isn't entirely faceless either :p But we're definitely
| not still the 3-man show that we were before the Opera years
| (up until 2010).
|
| Obviously, I think Fastmail is worth the extra for the multi-
| copy redundancy & backups, new features, contributions we're
| making to the standards world, and not being dependent on a
| single person - the past few years in particular we've been
| focusing on not only being able to survive any server dying,
| but also being able to survive the unavailability of any single
| person!
|
| Anyway - glad you're happy. Fastmail will still be here if you
| ever find that you want to move back.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I'm happy to pay whatever I'm paying for what you're
| offering. I had create two support tickets so far and both
| were dealt with very quickly and by an actual human which
| makes me trust you guys with my data even more.
| pwrplus1 wrote:
| Oh sorry I did not mean to suggest Fastmail was a faceless
| megacorp, I was thinking of Google, MS, Apple, etc.
|
| I fondly recall many years ago I had some WebDAV issue and
| got a reply directly from you saying you'd fixed the issue
| but you were just heading out to dinner and so you'd push to
| production when you got back. That convinced a few friends to
| join too.
|
| After about 10 years, Fastmail felt it was shifting to a more
| "enterprise" focus, which I can understand, and I just wanted
| to try something a little more "indie web".
| brongondwana wrote:
| Hah, yeah - fair enough. Glad I could fix your issue. Ahh,
| Webdav. I know the XML libraries a lot better these days
| and could make that code a lot tighter, but it's still
| chugging along just fine, pretty much untouched since :)
|
| As for enterprise focus - not so much enterprise, but we
| are focusing more on the non-technical user. All the power
| is still there under the hood and available, but it's not
| so much in your face if you don't want it to be!
| donmcronald wrote:
| Your custom domain pricing is weird. Is it really important
| to squeeze the extra $20/year out of the first user? It ends
| up being $50/year for the first user vs $12/year at Zoho. Why
| not just put custom domains in the basic tier?
|
| DMARC reporting could be a huge value add if you could build
| something in. That whole industry is a massive ripoff and too
| expensive for small businesses.
| brongondwana wrote:
| Over 1/3 of our staff are support agents, and support is
| one of our largest costs, so yes - custom domains do add
| additional support challenges, and we do need to cover that
| cost.
|
| Thanks for the suggestion with DMARC reporting. It's not
| something we're going to work on straight away, but I'll
| add it into the suggestions for the domain features.
| Definitely we'd only look at building something pretty
| basic and low-touch, but maybe that's enough for a lot of
| small businesses.
| donmcronald wrote:
| Minimal DMARC reports would be useful. The problem that I
| see for small businesses is the cost keeps them from even
| trying it, so they can have problems that never get
| surfaced.
|
| As an example of where I think the current value
| propositions are bad, DMARCian charges $240/year for the
| most basic plan that includes 100k _compliant_ messages
| in a month. Most small businesses won't do half that in a
| _year_. You probably have good stats to grok that.
|
| I get it on the support thing. I pretty much never use
| support, so I guess that's why I always feel like
| everything is too expensive. I'm always stunned to see
| how many employees at smaller tech companies are support.
| Sometimes I feel like I'm subsidizing users that are too
| lazy to learn.
| brongondwana wrote:
| Heh, yep - you are subsidising users that don't know how
| to do everything - and they are subsidising you by paying
| for the engineers to build robust and reliable systems
| with 24/7 operations support, and developers, and
| standards authors improving the system for the future...
| along with the support team.
|
| Anyway, I've already filed the DMARC request internally,
| and linked to this thread.
| newscracker wrote:
| Fastmail is not for me because
|
| a) it's expensive for multiple mailboxes (like even three
| or four mailboxes) and
|
| b) it's right in the Five Eyes jurisdictions (which I try
| to avoid as much as I can)
|
| but I do appreciate
|
| a) Fastmail's work on JMAP and can't wait for it to
| become more widely deployed and
|
| b) frank and straightforward responses (including for
| example in the threads on the Assistance and Access Bill
| in Australia)
| eganist wrote:
| > It's a one-man enterprise
|
| For this reason alone, I can't trust that they meet all the
| security considerations email providers now have as a
| consequence of all the services effectively delegating either
| secondary or primary authentication factors (or reset
| mechanisms) to email.
| jakecopp wrote:
| > It's a one-man enterprise, which may frighten some people
|
| Email is super critical for most people these days (eg. 2FA).
| That sounds like a really scary bus-factor [1] risk, especially
| considering data is encrypted at rest.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
| donmcronald wrote:
| I think my odds of getting banned by Google's shitty AI is
| just as much of a risk for me as the bus-factor for a one
| person show.
| lawl wrote:
| > Email is super critical for most people these days (eg.
| 2FA). That sounds like a really scary bus-factor [1] risk
|
| Not such a big deal if you have your own domain (you should).
| Update the MX record and point it elsewhere.
|
| I've switched from Gmail to a similar setup a year ago.
| Honestly, it's been way easier than I expected, in terms of
| updating everywhere. And I can just point my MX somewhere
| else should I ever be unhappy with the current provider.
|
| No delivery issues either so far. Seriously, the hardest part
| about this whole ordeal was getting imapsync to run, to
| transfer my mails over.
|
| Not using gmail or another big silo is really not that hard,
| as HN often makes it out to be.
| mfashby wrote:
| I _always_ use that particular phrase for highlighting the
| importance of information sharing, but I never knew this page
| existed, thanks!
| Felz wrote:
| I actually get asked about this semi-frequently. Probably
| nobody could replace me as a _developer_ on Purelymail, but
| I've been training my brother to handle extended maintenance
| and to have handover credentials if anything happens to me
| personally. (This might be in the FAQ?)
| mfashby wrote:
| Thanks! Have you looked into source code escrow for this
| situation?
| Felz wrote:
| No, but I will. Thanks for giving me a term to research!
| jakecopp wrote:
| That eliminates some of my worry! Thanks for replying.
| zerof1l wrote:
| From the FAQ > Occasionally, obscure email servers will block
| emails sent through us.
|
| Maybe it's good for personal use or as a throwaway email, but
| it is not good for main business email. Certainly not a
| replacement for Gmail or Fastmail kinds. Because you expect the
| email service to have 24/7 availability and near-perfect email
| delivery and receiving.
|
| > It's a one-man enterprise
|
| A person can get sick or just wish to take a holiday for a
| couple of weeks. What happens when service goes down or I need
| customer support urgently?
| EveYoung wrote:
| For me, this would be a major issue for personal emails as
| well. Even if an undelivered email wouldn't cause a monetary
| loss it still could have significant consequences, such as
| upsetting friends or family or missing the signup deadline
| for your kid's sports team. Personally, I don't mind paying
| the higher Fastmail prices to not have to worry about this.
| pwrplus1 wrote:
| > A person can get sick or just wish to take a holiday for a
| couple of weeks. What happens when service goes down or I
| need customer support urgently?
|
| I think the expectation of urgency should be put into
| perspective alongside the $10/year price tag, i.e. if you
| need someone to get out of bed in the middle of the night $10
| is probably not enough incentive.
|
| That said, any issues or questions I've had have been
| resolved _way_ faster than I experienced with Fastmail.
| webmobdev wrote:
| I was very interested until I learnt that you use AWS to host
| your services. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple etc. are
| parasitic tech companies that try their best to access and mine
| our personal data. Privacy conscious techie individuals try their
| best to avoid the services of these companies. Please consider
| hosting your email elsewhere.
| notRobot wrote:
| I have a question: if this is hosted on AWS, what (and I'm sure
| there's something, I just don't know _what_ ) is stopping Amazon
| from accessing my mail and using it for whatever?
| Felz wrote:
| I believe this is part of the AWS's explicit policy, possibly
| also in the terms of service:
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-privacy-faq/
|
| It would be crazy suicidal for their cloud business to break
| it, and possibly open them up to lawsuit.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| And of course it would be even more crazy for them to refuse
| a request e.g. by the FBI or NSA. I'm sure they respect SLAs
| as much as OnePlus, Huawei & co don't share data with Chinese
| government.
| Felz wrote:
| Yea, they say as much in the data privacy FAQ. I think my
| recommendation is that if you're worried about being
| explicitly targeted by state actors, don't use email. (Not
| even Protonmail.)
|
| If you're worried about general data hoovering, AWS would
| probably need to implement very sophisticated introspection
| into what your machines are doing to break the SSL on
| SMTPS, and courts might not be sympathetic to that. I
| expect state actors would find it easier and more
| convenient to just hoover from big providers like Gmail
| instead.
| piaste wrote:
| > Yea, they say as much in the data privacy FAQ. I think
| my recommendation is that if you're worried about being
| explicitly targeted by state actors, don't use email.
| (Not even Protonmail.)
|
| Protonmail (and Tutanota, which I went with) both offer
| E2E encrypted email via open-source client apps, so they
| should be fine even against state actors if you use their
| encryption. In the case of Tutanota, this has even been
| tested in court.
|
| Of course, if you use them to send or receive plain ol'
| unencrypted email, this largely goes out of the window
| regardless of the provider.
| Felz wrote:
| The E2E will help so long as you're sending email to
| other users of the same service, yeah. For most cases,
| it's probably not a huge upgrade from stored encrypted;
| the bulk of damage in email leaks would be from
| accumulated emails from the past.
|
| The reason I don't recommend using it if you're super
| paranoid is because it'd be easy to mess up, and it comes
| with quite significant holes- e.g. subjects aren't E2E in
| Protonmail. Best to use a protocol designed for E2E from
| the ground up.
|
| https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/does-
| protonmai...
| bigshell wrote:
| I personally feel that calling Proton Mail or Tutanota
| end-to-end encrypted is sort of misleading. Sure, they
| may have the contents of your mailbox encrypted but in
| transit they can see your email in plain text and so can
| the recipient's mail server. If you desire E2EE I highly
| recommend using GPG or Signal.
| mehs wrote:
| Encryption, if it is set up properly.
| upofadown wrote:
| They encrypt your email on the disk with your password. So a
| simple disk image will not get it if your password is
| reasonably good. AWS would have to be able to hunt for and then
| find your password in the memory image.
| chin123 wrote:
| Email is unencrypted by default anyway. Just encrypting your
| mailbox is not enough, because ultimately you are sending your
| email to someone else, and their mail server will have access
| to the email. For conversations where privacy is important, I
| would setup PGP or use another method of communication like
| Signal.
| baggachipz wrote:
| I've been using this service for the past year or so and it's
| perfect for my needs:
|
| - Just works
|
| - Minimal downtime
|
| - All features of email supported
|
| - No frills
|
| - Fast support response
|
| - Dirt-ass cheap. I use "advanced billing" and last month's fees
| were $0.58.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| can anyone explain what benefits are to a managed email service
| over rolling your own on a vps server with stuff like mailinabox?
| you use your custom domain anyways and it allows s3 or backblaze
| backups so data retention is not an issue. you use your custom
| domain so in case something stupid happens to your vps provider,
| you can just restore and be done with it? and its not like
| managing your own vps email server is much of a hassle, every few
| months you have to update the install script and thats it
| vzaliva wrote:
| because of spam many systems agessively block email delivery
| from IP addresses which do not known to belong to well
| established mail providers with millions of users. And it is
| very tedious to unblock it on case by case basis. This is the
| reason I've stopped running my personal mail server 10 years
| ago.
| ZWoz wrote:
| If you have new IP and that IP don't have bad history, then
| your main issue is hotmail and Office365. There is little bit
| rate limiting over next 24h period, but if you host yourself
| and don't send unsolicidated bulk messages, then you don't
| see those limits. Some anti-spam services graylist you, that
| causes usually 5 minute delay for delivery.
|
| 90% spam score comes from message, sending server isn't that
| relevant (if you base configuration is reasonable: PTR is
| right, server knows it's hostname and don't EHLO himself as
| localhost and so on). You can look at SpamAssassin default
| rulebase[1] for common rules.
|
| ---
|
| [1] - https://spamassassin.apache.org/old/tests_3_3_x.html
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| well there are checks to see if your ip address is blocked as
| spam. even then you can just ask your vps provider for giving
| you a fresh one.
| vzaliva wrote:
| yea, but it have to be done constantly. Somehow you never
| sure your messages are delivered or if people can reach
| you. At some point after running my onw mail infrastructure
| for 15 years I gave up and decided that I would like to
| oursource this to somebody else, a email provider who have
| a dedicated team of admins making sure my mail is
| delivered, so I do not have to worry and spend time on it
| myself.
| ZWoz wrote:
| People in HN are weirdly afraid running own mail server. Thats
| not that hard. If you are web developer, who is capable setting
| up linux+varnish+nginx+php-fpm+redis+mariadb stack, then I
| would say that functional mail server has less moving pieces. I
| think most horror stories are related to trying run own server
| in bad neighborhood, in some cheap VPS service. Now entire IP
| block has bad reputation and indeed there is hassle with
| delivery.
| npteljes wrote:
| Email is different from a website, in a way that if the
| website doesn't load, I can fix it, reload, and go on with
| the day. After fixing my email stack though, I can't exactly
| make the sender retry their email. If I miss it, then that's
| on me, it's a ship that sailed, and often I don't even know
| about this.
| cedilla wrote:
| It's not that weird.
|
| Mail is the only critical thing most people run for
| themselves, really; and if the proverbial excrement hits the
| fan, mail is useful in fixing the fallout.
|
| Sure, I would be able to acquire the skills to run a mail
| server, and I know how to monitor it all, and I know about
| what the moving parts are. But why go through all that hassle
| to save 10-40 dollars a year?
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| its not always about saving a buck. i spend more in hosting
| +domain than i would if i went with fastmail or zoho or
| whatever. what it feels like is going from google to zoho.
| when you own the server, you own the backup on s3, you know
| you can just switch servers if need be. your addresses and
| everything comes with you.
|
| i see this as a hobby if nothing else. maybe others have
| the same idea
| ZWoz wrote:
| There isn't much breaking usually, I really don't remember
| big issues in my 15+ years self-hosting time. I have
| changed colocation place several times, some places have
| been offices with average office internet (without
| redundant links or BGP peering).
|
| I can see issues, if you over-engineer and try build some
| microservice farm in some cloud provider, but simple
| physical server with DC grade disks in RAID and backup
| (tested and out of server) is pretty reliable.
|
| Of course, when you really don't want to do it, then paying
| for someone else is reasonable, no issue with that. But its
| not fair to make mail self-hosting look like something very
| complicated and dangerous, I would say that modern web
| service stacks are more complicated and fragile. Lots of
| guys here are writing own internet facing software,
| handling customer data. Compared to that, using pre-
| existing mail server software isn't that hard.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| i wrote how i used "mailinabox" https://mailinabox.email/
|
| this makes it stupid easy to set up your server. you have
| to do little config and you are up and running.
|
| I decided to do miab because i had a necessity of "email
| aliases" in hundreds. none of these low cost email
| providers allowed that, unless i went with google
| workspace or 365 if i remember correctly.
|
| rolling my own solved this issue and for the same price
| plus the "management headache" which i saw as a personal
| challenge more than a chore. so i am very happy with the
| results.
|
| gmail has given me headaches in the start but if i send
| more than a few emails with attachments to gmail, they
| still flag all emails as spam so that is a recurring
| problem but not something i cannot live without
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| These tiny services are cool. I have the cheapest account on
| Migadu[1] for all my random custom domain emails.
|
| 1. https://www.migadu.com
| nmlt wrote:
| How does Migadu compare to purelymail? I'm not using either and
| it looks like migadu has their own software stack instead of
| using something like roundcube, etc. And not just a single
| person behind it.
| marban wrote:
| Plus one. Great, small Swiss shop with decent support and
| response time. Never had any issues with them.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| Can only second migadu, only think I really miss is a
| Calendar support.
| nikodunk wrote:
| Thanks so much for sharing this! Just spent half an hour
| reading about this hidden gem and will switch all my projects
| to them!!
| dustymcp wrote:
| this is great, services that actually does what they where
| supposed to at a low cost instead of ad spamming/tracking/spying
| on me for additional cash i wish you luck my friend!
| Felz wrote:
| Oh cool, my project is on HackerNews! I was wondering about the
| sudden uptick in user signups, and then I checked HN...
|
| I'm Scott, feel free to ask me anything about the service.
| massung wrote:
| Scott, nice service! Two notes:
|
| 1. I don't know if it's the social media kiss of death at work,
| but I'm getting lots of SSL errors trying to load your site.
| It's a crap-shoot whether it works or not right now.
|
| 2. Seeing this post, I posted this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27711124. If you don't
| already (did I miss it?) it might be worth tossing up a page or
| an item in your FAQ teaching people about how they can go about
| migrating their email address to another/your service. I don't
| know how easy/hard it is (hence my AskHN post), but the
| perception is that it's nigh impossible to do.
| Felz wrote:
| > 1. I don't know if it's the social media kiss of death at
| work, but I'm getting lots of SSL errors trying to load your
| site. It's a crap-shoot whether it works or not right now.
|
| Hard to say for sure. None of the servers really went above
| 15% average CPU and I don't think they maxed out net, and the
| health checker for HTTPS didn't have any problems. I'll
| doublecheck.
|
| On the subject of migration, I'll make a note to add a FAQ
| for that, thanks.
| creeble wrote:
| I think you're typing purelyEmail.com, not purelymail.com.
| avipars wrote:
| How do you deal with spoofing?
| Felz wrote:
| Depends on what you mean. Inbound email is checked for
| authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc) as part of the spam
| filter. For outbound email, we ask you to set up at least one
| of SPF or DKIM before you can send.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| It seems you support TOTP as 2FA.
|
| Great job.
| eps wrote:
| What provisions are in place to prevent someone from opening an
| account, use it to spam and then putting your IP block on a
| shitlist with large email providers like Gmail?
| Felz wrote:
| Rate limits, feedback loops, and we scan outgoing mail
| through SpamAssassin. In practice we've only had password
| breaches causing spam, nothing intentional.
| Crazyontap wrote:
| How do you do spam blocking?
|
| I think Gmail really shines at this. It's one of the reason I
| was thinking of switching to Hey email also, though after
| reading Hey's reviews I've decided not to. So anyway, would
| love some comments from users or you about how good you are at
| separating the wheat from the chaff.
| Felz wrote:
| I think SpamAssassin (plus curated greylisting) does a decent
| job most of the time, although I'm starting to see weird
| issues with spurious DNSWL tests that pass through pretty
| spammy mail.
|
| In the long run I'm probably going to replace the Bayesian
| part of SpamAssassin with something custom, simply because
| operationally it's painful and I think neural nets are closer
| to state of the art.
| pkulak wrote:
| Hey has bad reviews now? Huh. I really enjoy it.
| stanislavb wrote:
| Good job, Scott! This is Stan from SaaSHub. I'll be featuring
| Purelymail on next week's newsletter of SaaSHub. It's a good
| moment to verify the listing and improve the details.
| Felz wrote:
| Cool! I'll make a note of it on my task list (I think I still
| have the old task on there too, which is nothing against
| SaaShub, I was preoccupied).
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| One thing is not very clear: how many custom domains can I
| have? Can I use 30 domains with 2 users each (random number,
| but i do need 3 domains).
|
| How is the mailbox on phone? My major problem with email
| hosting is the lack of a decent mailbox service that's
| available on. Windows, android, linux that's either. One-time-
| purchase or open source. A monthly fee is fine if for unlimited
| users (I have a family)
| Felz wrote:
| You can have as many domains/users as you want. (Unless it's
| like five billion and breaks the service or something.)
|
| Generally phone access is third party through IMAP. On
| Android I personally use K-9 mail, but you can use anything
| that supports IMAP anywhere, which is a pretty good number of
| options for any platform.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| Thanks for the response, suddenly this makes it very
| interesting!
|
| I wish K-9 had snooze-email, it's the one feature (non-
| standard) I use a lot
| progx wrote:
| If a plane crash into your house while you stop the service for
| maintenance, how will the service be back again and can we
| access our mails?
|
| Sure, i use IMAP and have local copy and backup. But Murphy's
| law, my Laptop die at the same time and my backups were stolen.
| Felz wrote:
| https://purelymail.com/docs/companyPolicy#bus
|
| Also, I generally don't stop the service for maintenance,
| unless I need to upgrade the database engine.
| antihero wrote:
| Do you support DKIM/SPF etc? Are these still useful?
| Felz wrote:
| They are still useful. One of DKIM or SPF is required to send
| emails on a custom domain. Both are recommended.
| postiecard wrote:
| Looks great!
|
| Supporting ManageSieve is a nice touch. Most sieve services
| only allow managing sieve through a web UI.
|
| I use Fastmail and like that they contribute to open source
| mail servers, and do standards work (JMAP).
|
| Does PurelyMail contribute to open source?
| Felz wrote:
| In general yes I do contribute to open source, although
| there's not too much to contribute back to open source _yet_,
| so the main contribution has just filing Roundcube bugs. (The
| main mailserver code has diverged too much from Apache James
| to really be useful.)
|
| Some of the libraries I wrote are open sourced and on my
| Github account, e.g. the web framework:
| https://github.com/ScottPeterJohnson/shade
| brongondwana wrote:
| Hey cool - glad to see James being used as well. Hopefully
| the JMAP support that Linagora have worked on will mean
| that you can bring JMAP eventually too.
|
| I hope you don't find the pain of diverging from the
| mainline to be too great. We kind of cheated there with
| Fastmail and Cyrus IMAP by merging all our changes back to
| the mainline, since there wasn't much other development
| happening.
| Felz wrote:
| Yea, I do plan on adding in JMAP. It's so much nicer than
| IMAP, I really do hope it can overcome the adoption hump.
| brongondwana wrote:
| Awesome - do keep in touch while you're doing it. We have
| some documentation up at jmap.io but of course seeing the
| challenges that people face as they try to implement is
| always good for improving the documentation for the next
| round.
|
| (We're also working on JMAP for calendars and for
| contacts over in the IETF working groups - hoping to
| publish Calendars by the end of this year)
| bovermyer wrote:
| What happens if you die, get frozen in carbonite, or some other
| circumstance that prevents you from maintaining the service?
| Felz wrote:
| Long run it'd probably get deprecated, short to medium run
| it'd be fine: https://purelymail.com/docs/companyPolicy#bus
| fastball wrote:
| Will sign up in a heartbeat as soon as you have CardDAV /
| CalDAV support!
| pwrplus1 wrote:
| If you don't mind separating your mail from your CalDAV there
| is https://fruux.com
|
| (I use a paper diary, YMMV.)
| fastball wrote:
| EUR4/u/m is pretty steep. I'm currently using fastmail
| which is $3-5/u/m for mail/cal/card.
| dddw wrote:
| It is free if you only use it on 2 devices
| fastball wrote:
| Yeah unfortunately the main cost I'm looking to reduce is
| a family domain which I have ~10 family members on.
| Felz wrote:
| We do have CardDAV support, and hope to develop CalDAV soon
| :)
| malinens wrote:
| I would recommend using some existing opensource tool for
| that and not roll your own implementation
| brongondwana wrote:
| Good luck with CalDAV - it's pretty hairy! I do recommend
| joining CalConnect if you have the budget for it - you get
| access to a lot of experts there. Or at least show up to
| the calsify mailing list at IETF, we're pretty friendly
| there too. The edge cases in Calendaring are a right pain.
| postiecard wrote:
| Consider etesync, which offers client side encrypted
| Card/CalDAV.
|
| You can still use Purelymail for mail, and have your mail
| client provide a cohesive mail/contacts/calendar UI.
| nanis wrote:
| When signing up for a trial, the page says:
|
| > To activate a trial account, you will need a reasonably
| modern browser and a phone number that can receive SMS texts.
|
| It makes no mention of the use of a "hashwall" ... It gives no
| indication of what the user's browser is going to do ... Just a
| progress meter with a note saying it will take about 3 minutes.
|
| This feels fishy. Especially if a user doesn't know how to get
| into the developer console, find out what's running etc.
|
| Just completed my signup. I am going to check if the domain
| that failed to work with forwardemail.net[1] will work with
| your service.
|
| If it does, then I'll say goodbye to my $36 and hello to your
| service.
|
| Update: While setting up, I noticed:
|
| - Ownership record content in `code.codebox` does not fit in
| the content area and extends entirely too far to the right. I
| had to inspect and copy out of developer tools.
|
| - In general, UI elements seem not properly aligned, contained.
|
| These are not deal breakers to me. The site might actually
| benefit from going more old school. Trying to fit everything in
| a narrow box with large font sizes and padding is hard.
|
| Update: I had already clicked on CloudFlare instructions. It's
| the friendly stuff that has the problems I mention above. The
| actual information at the bottom of the page is actually
| displayed the way I would have expected.
|
| Update: After creating the DNS records, I noticed the checks
| were still failing. So, I replaced the actual IDN in the
| textbox with punycode and the DNS checks worked. It would be a
| better user experience if the punycode conversion step was
| handled by the UI.
|
| Update: Created a new user on the custom domain. Login box does
| not accept IDN either but the email composer does show the from
| address using IDN instead of punycode.
|
| Update: I was able to exchange email with a Gmail user. Did not
| go to SPAM. But, in my reply, Gmail did give a scary warning
| about the IDN. To be clear, there is nothing the email provider
| can do about that :-)
|
| I'll try out a few more custom domains and very, very likely
| switch. Thank you and good luck.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27523038
| Felz wrote:
| For the trial hashwall, the browser just does some heavy
| computations. I guess I should add a warning there, it's
| probably does have battery impact if you're using a phone for
| whatever reason.
|
| I'll make a note on the UI elements. Honestly hadn't thought
| about the punycode usecase, good catch.
| nanis wrote:
| > For the trial hashwall, the browser just does some heavy
| computations.
|
| Yeah, I figured that out, but someone else might think you
| are trying mine some *coin or something. I am not sure if I
| would mind it if you did, but it would be good to tell up
| front what you are doing. It does seem to be a much better
| than recaptcha.
|
| The fact that it works is good enough for me. I am going
| fiddle a little more before I sign up, but it looks like
| this is fills my needs.
| 725686 wrote:
| I clicked for a trial... after a while I entered my phone,
| received an SMS, and no indication of what to do with the
| code I received. No place to enter the code in the web page,
| nothing.
|
| Second attempt, and I got a place to put the code. Then,
| while I was filling up the registration data, the page
| refreshed and started all over.
|
| Third attempt finally worked...
|
| Not the best on-boarding experience, but hey it really is
| cheap!
| Felz wrote:
| Hm, no idea what would've gone wrong in your case. It
| sounds like something kept closing the websocket used to
| provide page interactivity or something?
| [deleted]
| f1refly wrote:
| I'm sorry if I missed it, but do you do catchall email service
| for custom domains? My current email provider
| (https://mailbox.org) limits email aliases per price plan, the
| most basic that I currently use allows for 3 + a free root@ and
| webmaster@. I'd probably be convinced to go through the hassle
| and switch providers if your service provides an improvement
| over this limit.
| merlinscholz wrote:
| IIRC, mailbox supports catchall if you sacrifice one alias
| for it. You'd have to input ,,@domain.tld" at the alias
| config menu.
| ashkulz wrote:
| Yeah, that works for me as well.
| f1refly wrote:
| I had no idea, thanks a bunch! I'll set it up right away!
| [deleted]
| detaro wrote:
| mailbox.org supports catchall aliases.
| pwrplus1 wrote:
| Yes you can have unlimited domains/aliases with catchalls and
| RFC 5233 subaddressing.
| Felz wrote:
| Yes, we have catchalls. We don't restrict how you route
| anything under your domain, and you can send from any email
| address you own.
| f1refly wrote:
| Thats good to know. Apparently my current provider allows
| for those as well, but honestly the proposal "just email,
| nothing else" might be attractive enough to try your
| service anyways.
| piaste wrote:
| I use Tutanota and it supports catchall aliases.
|
| 12EUR/yr for 1GB + custom domain + 5 aliases (plus catchall).
| lytefm wrote:
| Same price for 2GB + Custom Domain + 3 sending Aliases +
| Catchall + Contacts and Calender Sync + Web Client +
| hosting in Germany for the old Mailbox.org plan is still
| the better offfering for me privately as I regularily clean
| up my Mail + like having calender and contacts integrated.
|
| But 10EUR/ month for unlimited storage and users is
| definitely a good offer, too.
| n_ary wrote:
| You can use x3 domains with catch-all. Just add each one as
| "@domain.tld" and setup mx/spf/dkim/dmarc as usual. Then the
| domain will receive with catch-all. However, prepare to be
| spammed, as many spammers figure that "mail@domain.tld" are
| always available, so that one will frequently receive spams.
|
| If you need more than three domains, try Migadu(not
| affiliated, just happy customer), they have no formal limits
| to their "micro" plan and is cheaper than FastMail. Migadu
| also allows adding alias domains(something I haven't seen
| anywhere), basically if you have a mailbox like
| "merlinscholz@domain.tld" you can attach some more domains as
| alias, like "@domain2.tld" "@domainx.tld" and those will all
| receive/send/operate as the same "merlinscholz@domain.tld".
| Neat feature I haven't found yet on other services.
| rolleiflex wrote:
| Great work, and as somebody who self hosted my own email from
| 2013 to 2021, I don't envy you. What broke me down was Google
| starting to spam my emails that were replies to conversations
| that I did not start -- even with a stellar domain reputation
| and DKIM, SPF, reverse DNS, greylisting, everything set up
| right.
|
| I hope you have personal contacts on the Gmail team at Google,
| much as I'd like for this to be a joke.
| c0l0 wrote:
| FTR, directed at those who valiantly continue to self-host
| mail/SMTP: Greylisting is not sound any more in this day and
| age, because the largest mail services will rarely, if ever,
| use the same MTA instance to retry delivery upon a soft
| bounce.
|
| The good news is that if you have postfix, using postscreen
| with an informed choice of blocklists is enough to deal with
| 99%+ of inbound spam. You can strap in rspamd or
| spamassassin/amavis behind that, but it's mostly not needed.
|
| The inbound-mail-problems are largely solved, but surefire
| delivery to other parties is a matter of IPaddr/domain
| reputation, properly implementing relevant standards, and
| luck.
|
| If you're interested in learning more about (including, but
| not limited to, self-hosting) email, the #email channel on
| the libera.chat IRC network is a great resource to ask
| questions.
| e12e wrote:
| I haven't used DCC, but it looks like an interesting anti-
| spam toolkit:
|
| https://www.dcc-servers.net/dcc/
|
| It appears to support "weak" IP matching:
|
| > All or part of the IP address of the SMTP client can be
| optionally ignored by DCC clients as far as the greylist
| triple is concerned. This feature may be useful for
| legitimate mail systems that shuffle messages among SMTP
| clients between retransmissions. See the dccm and dccd man
| pages.
|
| https://www.dcc-servers.net/dcc/greylist.shtml
|
| It doesn't _quite_ sound like it does a job of 100% "same
| email, same sender, different mx in same domain" -but I
| suspect it works well enough in practice?
|
| > Usually the DCC greylist system requires that an almost
| identical copy of the message be retransmitted during the
| embargo. If weak-body is present, any message with the same
| triple of sender IP address, sender mail address, and
| target mail address ends the em-bargo, even if the body of
| the message differs.
|
| > If weak-IP is present, all mail from an SMTP client at an
| IP address is accept after any message from the same IP
| address has been ac-cepted.
|
| https://www.dcc-servers.net/dcc/dcc-tree/dccd.html#OPTION-G
|
| I can't recall what I used for greylisting last -possibly
| greylistd.
|
| Anyway, the smart play these days might be to
| whitelist/greylist via SPF - I'm not sure if spammers (of
| the variant caught by greylists) generally have SPF?
|
| See: https://poolp.org/posts/2019-12-01/spf-aware-
| greylisting-and...
|
| https://github.com/poolpOrg/filter-greylist
|
| Ed: although if service providers like mailgun simply
| ignore rfc and only "sometimes" retries... wwell that's a
| problem.
| arp242 wrote:
| > FTR, directed at those who valiantly continue to self-
| host mail/SMTP: Greylisting is not sound any more in this
| day and age, because the largest mail services will rarely,
| if ever, use the same MTA instance to retry delivery upon a
| soft bounce.
|
| I had this issue with SendGrid years ago: long story short,
| after discussing with support and eventually an engineer it
| turns out they weren't just looking at the status codes,
| but at the status _messages_. I don 't recall the exact
| patterns they used, but they will retry if the message
| matches a fixed set patterns, and otherwise it would just
| discard it.
|
| There was some back-and-forth over this, because our
| customer just had greylisting with the "wrong" error
| message. To be fair, they did turn it off for a few hours
| and took the conversation serious (none of this "we have
| passed it along", never to be heard from again) but they
| got back to us they turned it back on again "because the
| queues got too large". I mean .... okay.... Seems rather
| curious to break a fundamental aspect of email because "muh
| queues". Not having to worry about this sort of stuff is
| exactly why we're using SendGrid in the first place :-/
|
| My experiences with MailGun were also not exactly stellar.
| At the time at least, these people literally did not
| understand how encodings worked and would mangle e.g. Greek
| or Hebrew emails in ISO-8869-7 or -8. Why? Well, turns out
| that "emails should be in ASCII or UTF-8 and there is no
| way for us to know which encoding is used". Ehh ... there
| is literally a header telling you... I sent a nice detailed
| email explaining this: no reply. Some follow-ups over the
| course of a few weeks: no reply. A not-so-nice snarky email
| inquiring whether the entire MailGun team was suffering
| from a horrible debilitating disease and if there was
| anything I could do to help: "well, we just didn't know
| what else to do as there is no way to solve this"...
|
| I'm hardly an "email purist"; I understand there are
| practical concerns and the RFC isn't a stone tablet from
| the mountain. But this was just ridiculous. There are a
| bunch of other cases both SendGrid and MailGun are actually
| quite bad at.
|
| Dealing with email providers is always a frustrating
| experience.
| Felz wrote:
| I actually haven't had huge problems with Google (yet). I'm
| not sure why.
| rolleiflex wrote:
| My experience has been cyclical, as long as you stick to
| IPv4 with good SPF and your reverse DNS works it will work
| 95% of the time. The remaining 5% appears to be completely
| random however.
|
| It's possible that my issue was too low a traffic to 'hold
| onto' my score with Gmail, since it was one domain and one
| email address. With some luck you should be able to have
| enough traffic to avoid that. Best of luck.
| techsupporter wrote:
| I had this exact same problem. When I finally got hold of
| someone who worked for Google (via a friend of a friend on a
| mailing list) and with the ability to check whatever their
| logs were claiming, I was informed that my domain's
| reputation was "too recent" or something like that.
|
| My domain is a year older than Google itself and has been in
| continuous use for e-mail that whole time. The IP addresses
| it is on haven't changed in a decade. But that didn't matter.
| DKIM, SPF, DMARC, forward and reverse matching DNS, exactly
| four users who do not send spam under penalty of being buried
| under legal solicitations for green cards, and all the rest
| didn't help. Randomly getting sent to /dev/null for no good
| reason. And not enough traffic to qualify me to use their
| Postmaster utilities.
|
| Three years ago I gave up and ported to Fastmail with a tear
| in my eye for the days when even the smallest net on the
| Internet could be a full participant.
| vogon_laureate wrote:
| I really enjoyed the whole process of running my own mail
| setups, configuring Postfix or OpenSMTPd to do clever
| aliases and transports, setting up CARP failover relays,
| managing DNS records, experimenting with different SPAM-
| filtering techniques, SSL, IMAP, mailing lists, the works.
| It taught me a lot about networking and security and
| everything a good sysadmin should know.
|
| I find it sad that that's pretty much a waste of time now
| for most use cases.
| detritus wrote:
| Same here - I HAD to move over to Fastmail because like GP
| I'd respond to email enquiries from GMail addresses and
| then never hear back. After weeks of this, someone finally
| phoned up to complain about my poor customer service. This
| despite also having an old and apparently well set-up
| domain.
|
| I lost a lot of business back then. Thanks, Google.
| donmcronald wrote:
| I have a legacy GSuite account. Google filters email from
| Facebook and Microsoft sometimes. Hell, I think I might
| have even seen them filter their own mail once.
|
| It's a clown show. The opaque filters are just an excuse to
| engage in anti-competitive behavior IMO.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| To be fair Facebook used to send an enormous amount of
| spam emails, at least to me. Years ago when I used it
| somewhat regularly they used to constantly shuffle their
| contact preferences and the effect was that I was
| constantly opted back in to an insane amount of emails.
| Eventually I just started marking them as spam until
| Gmail blocked everything they send. I've seen family
| Email addresses fairly recently full of Facebook junk too
| so I assume they still default to sending a lot.
| sersi wrote:
| I ended up doing the same for the exact same reason. And
| even when using fastmail, my email still sometimes gets
| blocked.
| newscracker wrote:
| I looked at your About, Security and Privacy pages. I see that
| you're using AWS, but which region/country/jurisdiction is that
| located in? Is it safe to presume that since the company is an
| LLC, the company as well as the AWS country are the U.S.?
| Felz wrote:
| Yes.
| homero wrote:
| How are you doing that trial proof of work?
| Felz wrote:
| Hash-based proof of work:
| https://github.com/ScottPeterJohnson/hashwall
|
| Same idea as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
|
| Similar idea to cryptocurrencies.
| bambax wrote:
| Slightly OT, but what is the best practice to store (archive)
| email locally after they have been read from a remote imap
| server?
|
| 3 Gb is plenty for a few months of "live" email but after that
| what should we do to keep those emails -- and still have them
| searchable if need be?
| liotier wrote:
| I keep everything remote, so that every client gets the whole
| corpus. For now, that means that indexing is done with
| notmuch whose command line I use for search... Not as good as
| a webmail's UI but it puts search results as a maildir so I
| can open them from any IMAP client as a special folder.
| f1refly wrote:
| Thunderbird has "local" accounts, you can move emails there
| and have them removed from your imap server. You can also
| export emails to .eml files, throw them wherever you like and
| grep for contents if you like.
| bluedino wrote:
| Are there any open-source projects similar to Barracuda's
| Archiver product?
| desdiv wrote:
| Hey there, cool service. I signed up immediately.
|
| >You cannot have more than $50 in credit at any time.
|
| Just curious, why a $50 limit? I'm the weird kind of guy who
| likes to pay years in advance. If possible, please consider
| raising this limit to $100 or even $200.
| mv4 wrote:
| Risk. To the provider, prepaid fees are a liability.
| Felz wrote:
| Yea, this to an extent. Honestly I thought people wouldn't
| need more than $50 too, maybe I was wrong there.
| a012 wrote:
| I just want to thanks for the service, I just need email for my
| personal stuffs and after hassles with self-hosted solution I
| gave up. The pricing is on point, I'm relying on the free
| Protonmail and their asking price is too high to me so I signed
| up for purelymail.
| maxk42 wrote:
| Hey Scott - tell me how you got the word out about Purelymail?
|
| Obviously you reached the right audience and they liked what
| they saw to post it here and generate so much interest.
| Consider me another subscriber!
| Felz wrote:
| Sum total of my marketing efforts: One time I mentioned it in
| HN comments on a post about Fastmail, mostly because I was
| going to make a comment about owning your own email domain
| anyway.
|
| I am usually the classic "engineer who neglects marketing"
| archetype. Maybe at some point I'll overcome that.
| chaz6 wrote:
| Two questions from me:- Usernames on shared
| domains: 1 to 6 letters: $1.00 per user per year
| 7 to 12 letters: $0.25 per user per year 13+ letters:
| $0.10 per user per year
|
| 1. Why does the length of a mailbox name make a difference?
|
| 2. Do you support IPv6?
| pjc50 wrote:
| This is the best pricing scheme for email I've ever seen.
| Felz wrote:
| 1. Basically what nine_k said. It's kind of a trivial point
| most of the time- honestly might be a bit overpriced right
| now.
|
| 2. Not at the moment- IPV6 support is a little dicier for
| mailservers because the scarcer IPV4 address is often used as
| a antispam signal.
| chaz6 wrote:
| But if I am using my own domain, what difference does it
| make if it is more "valuable"?
|
| Sadly the lack of IPv6 is a deal breaker for me.
| koselig wrote:
| Oh I think there's some confusion here: for your own
| domains it doesn't cost anything extra, so go nuts with
| addresses.
|
| Purelymail also has some domains you can use like I can
| get "koselig@purelymail.com" and then I'm charged in the
| 7 letters tier for it.
|
| At least that's how it's been for me as a happy user of
| PM for the past year and a half.
| nine_k wrote:
| Shorter emails are more catchy, and their total possible
| number is smaller. So they can be more valuable.
|
| boss@example.com is cooler for some than
| john.n.johnson.2@example.com, and they will pay.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I think there is also another reason: Shorter addresses
| receive more spam and spam attempts from guessers.
| ibdf wrote:
| This might be just what I need. I used to run my own email server
| but don't have time for that anymore. I run small sites with low
| budgets and finding a simple email server that costs next to
| nothing has been pretty hard, specially if I have more than one
| user. I use AWS SES free tier for sending emails from these sites
| but unfortunately forwarding email received at SES is not as
| straight forward.
| thirdplace_ wrote:
| I am using migadu after recommendation from drew devault. It's
| nice if you have a couple domains you want mail for.
| frank1234 wrote:
| "We host our servers through Amazon Web Services"
|
| As long as you outsource the hosting to another company -- an
| American company in particular -- then you're not really in the
| business of secure e-mail.
|
| Secure from other users? Sure. Secure from the hosting company
| and the government it answers to? Never.
| eclectric wrote:
| Where is this hosted?
| Gaelan wrote:
| AWS us-east-1, it looks like: $ dig mx
| purelymail.com ;; ANSWER SECTION:
| purelymail.com. 86400 IN MX 50 mailserver.purelymail.com.
| $ dig mailserver.purelymail.com ;; ANSWER SECTION:
| mailserver.purelymail.com. 60 IN A 18.204.123.63
| $ whois 18.204.123.63 OrgName: Amazon
| Technologies Inc.
|
| https://awsips.co for the region information
| bigshell wrote:
| For some stupid reason I can't bare to see that done in 3
| lines. whois $(dig +short A $(dig +short MX
| purelymail.com | head -n 1) | head -n 1)
| indigodaddy wrote:
| I stopped using -n X for head/tail in favor of just -X (eg
| -1 or -10 or whatever). Save a few keystrokes, plus certain
| unixes (eg Solaris) only work with -X and don't the support
| -n switch.
| neogodless wrote:
| > bear
| sebmellen wrote:
| From the website:
|
| > _our infrastructure runs on the highly reliable AWS cloud,_
| rplnt wrote:
| Isn't Google free? Perhaps with certain limitations... I know I
| never paid for email.
| chin123 wrote:
| GMail has ads. It's free because you are the product, not the
| customer. Google's customers are the advertisers. The money has
| to come from somewhere.
| rplnt wrote:
| I'm not talking about gmail. This post is about hosting an
| email with your own domain.
| ripdog wrote:
| Google workspace isn't free.
| rplnt wrote:
| Can't find any free plan either now. I guess they just
| discontinued them and are not upgrading existing
| accounts.
| neogodless wrote:
| Early editions of Google Apps for Business (aka G Suite aka
| Google Workspace) included a free version which included
| support for custom domains and catch-all email. Those accounts
| got grandfathered (i.e. stayed free) when Google discontinued
| them. The cheapest plan seems to be $72/year per user.
|
| https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html
| [deleted]
| edwinyzh wrote:
| Well Well, I've just gone through the setup with fastmail and
| currently trialing their platform, for a new domain of mine,
| otherwise if I know this earlier, I should have tried it first...
| boba7 wrote:
| Switching emails every N years would really piss off my cutomers.
| I need one email for as long as the company exists, you see.
| gostsamo wrote:
| Use your own domain and your customers will notice nothing.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Then you really should be using your own domain, at which point
| you can replace the service at will.
| fredsted wrote:
| I'm not sure _price_ is the parameter to compete on for email
| services, at least for me. Email is extremely important to most
| businesses, and if I 'm already paying for a domain, and running
| a business, even the $70 for a Workspace solution is a drop in
| the bucket. What I need, however, is deliverability, strong
| privacy and security, good spam filtering, and support when I
| need it.
|
| I'd encourage you to try doubling or tripling the price so you
| can afford to hire more people and grow the business :) I suspect
| the rate of signups will stay the same.
| maxk42 wrote:
| Perhaps you're not the target customer?
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I would _love_ to have more options in this space but email is to
| foundational to leave to a beta service that doesn 't have 24/7
| support, may have black-hole delivery issues and doesnt' have a
| calendar solution. Charge more and address these drawbacks, or
| get out of the business. You're offerring 1/2 the required
| features instead of focusing on the core requirements.
| cyborgx7 wrote:
| >Charge more and address these drawbacks, or get out of the
| business.
|
| Why? It seems like this is meeting plenty of people's needs
| just fine. Not everything has to meet your needs.
| Wronnay wrote:
| Some other possibilities which offer more features and are
| cheaper: https://blog.m5e.de/post/comparison-of-email-hosting-
| possibi...
| neogodless wrote:
| > Support for custom domains at no additional charge. You may
| have as many users on as many custom domains as you like. Custom
| routing rules are supported, including catchalls to capture any
| email sent to your domain.
|
| This is huge. This is one of those features that just gets
| omitted by many email hosts (especially inexpensive ones) and has
| been holding me back from switching away from a very old,
| grandfathered, free Google Apps for Business plan.
| mullsork wrote:
| This looks great! Sign up for the free trial was pretty slick.
| I'm not sure how well known Klarna is outside of Europe (I know
| they launched in the US), but that would be my preferred method
| of payment. Or.. anything but Paypal (and giving my CC
| information)
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| At least according to their marketing Klarna make their money
| by charging retailers, so it's probably not viable for this
| sort of business.
| shadowoflight wrote:
| FYI, the credit card checkout option allows for using Apple
| Pay, so I went that route to obfuscate my CC info (and get cash
| back, because hey, why not).
| landemva wrote:
| Founder could add "officer" to his titles. Much like USA school
| admins inflate their egos ... Chief Learning Officer.
|
| As far as the service goes, grow and grow fast.
| subhro wrote:
| You are charging additional for shorter email addresses? Why?
| neogodless wrote:
| Note that it's only for shared domain names, not your own
| (custom) domain. There's a good chance people want and reserve
| shorter email addresses on shared domains. e.g. subhro @
| domain.tld vs subhro7783 @ domain.tld (or in this case @
| purelymail.com)
| _joel wrote:
| Speaking personally, it's not worth the hastle to save a little
| bit of money per year. I'll stick with Fastmail as it never gets
| in the way and always works.
| mikelward wrote:
| Spam filtering is by SpamAssassin. How is it these days?
| mikelward wrote:
| Still memory hungry, at least.
| https://news.purelymail.com/posts/status/2021-03-31-instance...
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| The price is right, but the polish isn't.
| Felz wrote:
| That's partly intentional! Hopefully it scares away the users
| who expect perfection, and they can be better handled by a
| glossier service.
|
| (Also I'm just genuinely mediocre at design, and kind of
| personally prefer less frills anyway.)
| fumar wrote:
| Grammarly will eliminate verbose and passive-voice copy, and
| that will increase its polish. I can take or leave the existing
| design aesthetic.
| 1-6 wrote:
| $10/year is not bad but I already have more email addresses than
| necessary.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Thank you for making this service available. For entrepreneurs
| who like to launch new ideas with custom domains, pricing models
| like the one here is a HUGE savings over pay-per-account (or
| domain) pricing found at most major email providers. Further,
| it's not easy making much money charging just $10/year, even if
| the business gets quite popular... so again, thanks for making it
| available.
| faraaz98 wrote:
| I'm curious, what are your thoughts on Zoho mail. You can use
| your custom domains even in their free tier
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I've used Zoho for a while and you can add on domains. It's
| pretty cool and the online mail is a pretty decent UI.
| commoner wrote:
| Zoho Mail's free tier doesn't include IMAP (for new accounts
| since about 3 years ago), so you wouldn't be able to use
| Thunderbird, FairEmail, K-9 Mail, or other third-party apps.
| Offline access on the free tier is restricted to Zoho Mail's
| desktop and mobile apps. Zoho's Mail Lite plan
| ($1/user/month) does include IMAP access, and you'll need to
| do some calculations to see whether Purelymail or Zoho Mail
| is cheaper.
|
| https://purelymail.com/advancedpricing
|
| https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html
| jdauriemma wrote:
| I have a custom domain email address on Zoho and suffer
| constantly from delivery issues. Sometimes my emails go into
| spam filters, sometimes they go into a black hole. It's a
| huge PITA and I am tempted to either move providers (maybe
| it's Zoho's fault) or just stop using my custom domain (maybe
| it's not Zoho's fault).
| bartvk wrote:
| I've tried Zoho mail and the "problem" is that it's so much
| more than mail. It's a huge suite of online apps, really.
| That means if you purely need mail, it'll take a bit of time
| to find the setting you need.
|
| (It's been three years since I tried it, and looking at my
| notes, I couldn't get Zoho to sync contacts for me, and
| somehow didn't get calendar notifications.)
| donmcronald wrote:
| It's only 1 domain I think and they stripped out things like
| ActiveSync and IMAP a couple years ago IIRC. I use the
| $1/user/month plan and it's decent. I don't use calendars or
| contacts, so I'm not sure how that stacks up, but the email
| stuff is good.
|
| The biggest annoyance is that someone used mx, mx2, mx3 for
| their MX instead of mx1, mx2, mx3, so the dns record
| indentation doesn't line up. Lmao.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Well, I'm no expert and I'm not in any position to say
| anything negative about Zoho Mail... but the free tier you
| mention seems to allow for one domain. So it likely won't
| work if you have, say, 5 active domains you want to receive
| and send email.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| I'm quite happy with Migadu for own domain use. I have a dozen
| that are unlikely to receive email but good to be able to
| receive them nonethelrss - migadu is great for that as you can
| add as many domains as you want.
|
| Calendar feature is sorely missing though it seems this service
| also doesn't have it. I guess calendar is a pain to set
| up/troubleshoot timezone issues, etc
| mouldysammich wrote:
| I think they have calendar the show how to set it up here,
| they just dont have a GUI for it
| https://www.migadu.com/guides/thunderbird/
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| I've also been happy with mxroute.com which has super low
| cost promos every November (black friday) so I'm on a
| $15/year plan. Regular pricing starts at $45/year for
| unlimited domains and mailboxes, 10GB storage.
| donmcronald wrote:
| MXroute is super awesome for device based email. If you
| have firewalls, copiers, system notifications, backup
| alerts, etc. it's a great fit.
|
| The killer features are unlimited mailboxes and per-mailbox
| quotas. I make a new mailbox for every device and give them
| a quota that makes sense; 10 messages per day for most. If
| a device goes haywire, gets compromised, or gets stolen,
| it's one mailbox to fix and maxes out at a super low quota,
| so it's useless for spamming.
|
| That's 100x better than the options on Office 365 which
| absolutely sucks ($$$) for low volume email coming from
| devices.
| nezgar wrote:
| You can setup a receive connector on exchange online to
| trust mail from specified souce IP(s) (ie your onprem
| mailserver) with no need for additional mailbox
| licenses... good for alerting/reporting/MFP's etc
| eirikurh wrote:
| I have used purelymail for about a year, moved almost all of my
| correspondance to it (custom domain) and am very happy with it.
| Good and speedy support when needed. I recommend it.
| Jakob1337 wrote:
| I like the idea but you should consider offering something more
| than just the Roundcube. If I pay for an email service I expect a
| better webmail and Android/iOS apps. MXroute offers all of this
| and I don't see a reason why I should migrate. Best of luck
| anyway!
| supermatt wrote:
| FYI: your pricing calculator is incorrect. If you choose more
| than 1 year, it multiplies the "price per year".
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Screenshots of the mail UI would be awesome.
|
| On the drawbacks blurb, it mentions potential deliverability
| issues and says they're usually resolved in a day or two. Through
| blog entries by mailchimp, I've read this is an extremely hard
| problem to solve and like playing whack-a-mole. How true is that?
| For example, I've read that trying to host your own email on
| digital ocean is pointless, which is understandable because of
| the amount of spam likely coming out of their subnets. Is this
| service downplaying the issue?
| pwrplus1 wrote:
| The webmail is RoundCube with Classic, Larry or Elastic skins.
|
| I have had a handful of deliverability issues, but every one of
| these has been due to one of those awful "enterprise network
| solutions" that does everything wrong.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| It's worth keeping in mind that MailChimp is primarily a spam
| delivery service, of course they're going to have issues where
| they get stuck in spam filters.
| [deleted]
| 0x073 wrote:
| I guess purelymail is used for contact@purelymail.com itself. But
| I see only one my record, does this service has mx backup servers
| for the customers?
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > An honest list of drawbacks
|
| I appreciate putting up a list like this. That said, I want to
| comment on one of the listed drawbacks:
|
| > Occasionally, obscure email servers will block emails sent
| through us
|
| I have a few years of experience running my own email server and
| I can tell you this is a major pain in the ass. When you send
| your email via a small email server (a server that sends a low
| volume of email), you will have constant issues getting mail
| delivered. Also, most of the issues will not be with obscure
| email servers, they will be with Outlook and Gmail. When you send
| email, you will never know if your email will be delivered to
| inbox, delivered to spam folder, or blackholed entirely.
|
| Related:
|
| > We're not a suitable platform for sending marketing emails
| (although you should use a dedicated marketing platform anyway).
|
| Please explicitly ban people from using your platform to send
| "marketing email". Clients like that are going to ruin
| deliverability for your other clients.
| toomanybeersies wrote:
| My personal email is on a .xyz domain and I used to use Gandi
| webmail as it was free with the domain name.
|
| When I was finding a new job last year, every time sent
| recruiters an email with my resume (attached as a pdf), I had
| to ring them afterwards to check if they had actually received
| it.
|
| I ended up switching to Google Workspace, just so that my
| emails actually had a chance of not landing in the recipients
| spam folder.
| black6 wrote:
| I've run into this same issue communicating with potential
| employers via GANDI mail--more often then not when I make a
| followup call my email is in their SPAM folder.
|
| My sister-in-law's employer's mail service (k-12 school
| district) ALWAYS bounces back email from myself and my wife,
| and their sysadmin always says "Nope. Not a problem on my
| end."
| kureikain wrote:
| This isn't actually Gandi fault.
|
| The amount of spam come from .xyz .top .cam etc are too hight
| and sysadmin usually factor domain tld into spam scoring.
|
| so using a .com may increase your chance hitting inbox
| actually.
| herbst wrote:
| I ran a kinda similar platform years ago I and I fully agree.
| It was a constant fight against blacklists, random spam
| filtering and weird attacks on my server looking for postfix
| missconfigurations.
|
| If I learned anything in that time is that email is not simple,
| and should be run by a qualified dedicated team, because there
| are so many pitfalls
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I moved my custom email domain from gmail to NameCheap's
| Private Email about a year ago. I wanted to free myself from
| the possibility that Google might arbitrarily ban me one day,
| as we've seen happen to people for various Google products for
| no reason and with no appeal.
|
| Biggest mistake of my life.
|
| Just as you say, I have no idea if my emails get through. The
| number of times I've had people tell me they found my email in
| a spam folder or just not at all is unacceptable. And you're
| right, this is most prominent on outlook and gmail users but
| not exclusive to them.
|
| How would you like your accountant or lawyer to miss your
| emails? It happens to me all the time now. These are not emails
| with cat pics.
|
| I'm scared to move back, fearing an IMAP migration will cause
| me to lose a year of emails sent and received.
|
| I don't know what to do.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I think all you really need is to own your domain.
|
| If you manage your domain and point your mx at google, and
| some ai decides your drive contents look bad or some non-
| official youtube app violates some api access rule and they
| kill your whole account, you just point your at any other
| service provider.
|
| That will be an annoying few days, but you don't lose
| anything too important. Maybe for a day or so you can't
| receive password emails, but you will, just after the switch
| shakes out.
|
| In the mean time, you're enjoying the convenience of a big
| mail service, and playing the odds that it's _probably_ not
| going to happen to you, and it 's ok to live with that risk
| because if it happens, it's just an inconvenience not a
| disaster.
|
| As for losing old emails, I use thunderbird on my laptop, and
| that ends up getting a copy of all my gmail even though I
| also read those same emails on my phone. If google kills my
| account, I still have all my old emails even without my own
| domain.
|
| I don't know if google even offers domain regisration to
| individuals, but if they do, I just wouldn't use them for the
| registrar. All other services can tolerate that risk as long
| as you use someone else as registrar (namecheap is good).
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Thanks for the reply. I thought IMAP servers keep the
| messages _on the server_ , not on the client. Is that
| incorrect?
| kureikain wrote:
| The client has download a copy already and wont sync back
| what it is already download. You can look into tools like
| imapsync https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync to copy
| data from two imap account
| generalizations wrote:
| IMAP synchronizes with the server, but keeps a local
| copy. Compare to POP, which moves the mail off the server
| entirely.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| > _IMAP synchronizes with the server, but keeps a local
| copy._
|
| The local copy is client dependent. Mail.app on your
| iPhone will not keep a local copy of all your emails if
| you have a large number of emails spanning a long period
| of time. Other clients may vary.
| pwned1 wrote:
| Don't go with namecheap, the biggest hive of scammers and
| spammers on the planet. Move your private domain to a
| reputable provider, like Fastmail.
|
| I've had my main personal domain with them for a decade and
| never had a problem.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Thanks for the reply. Fastmail is indeed nice (I've used
| them before but not hosting my own domain). But at this
| point, I'm not willing to risk moving to another player
| besides MS or Google.
| kyriakos wrote:
| Email deliverability is monopolised among the big players.
| Running your own email server and actually keeping your emails
| outside spam folders is more than one person's full time job.
| Partly this is not the big players fault but to say they don't
| benefit from it would be a lie.
| shaicoleman wrote:
| > Occasionally, obscure email servers will block emails sent
| through us
|
| The worst offender is Microsoft and their email services
| (hotmail.com/live.com/outlook.com/etc.).
|
| They reject all emails from my server, because it's on
| DigitalOcean. They are ignoring all requests to unblock my IP
| address.
|
| They don't mark it as spam, they just outright block emails, so
| you can't even workaround it by checking the spam folder.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| What's Microsoft's rationale ? Has an explanation ever been
| given ?
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| I've tried reaching Microsoft by phone, email, automated
| tools for email administrators, and their web forms for
| requesting whitelisting in email deliverability. Microsoft
| didn't provide any rational why they are filtering email
| from small email providers like this, nor did they provide
| any opportunity to mitigate their filtering.
| mk89 wrote:
| Probably it's more convenient for them to trust X big
| players rather than checking one by one. And somehow an
| empty spam folder looks better than a full one, as it
| gives the user the feeling that the service itself
| doesn't receive spam or does a very good job at
| preventing it.
| franga2000 wrote:
| That's just the thing: "doing a good job preventing spam"
| means throwing a lot of stuff in the spam folder. I think
| everyone would agree that silently dropping emails is
| bad, even if you're really sure it's spam.
| mk89 wrote:
| I agree, it's just that you're not the average user. I am
| also surprised to see the spam folder surprisingly empty
| all the time, almost as if my email addresses were
| unknown to the world (which I am pretty sure they are
| not).
|
| The average user probably sees this full spam folder as
| something he/she is doing bad, or the service itself is
| bad.
|
| It's not just google or microsoft. I think most email
| providers do this, I might be wrong though.
| stef25 wrote:
| You can create anonymous servers on DO with go-betweens
| like Bithost, allowing you to pay with cryptocurrency. This
| is a pretty easy solution for people with bad intentions
| (bots, scraping, black hat ...)
|
| I run my own VPN on DO and almost always get hit by
| ReCaptcha. Even Google.com will put up a "we've noticed
| some unusual traffic from" page. Some sites like Zalando
| completely block me with just a plaintext error page.
| daitangio wrote:
| I have the same problem, but they fixed it. I opened a issue
| and a kindly guy did some checks and then removed the ban.
| shaicoleman wrote:
| Was it recent? I've had no issues whitelisting my IP in the
| past, but all my requests in the last 6 months have been
| ignored.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > They don't mark it as spam, they just outright block
| emails, so you can't even workaround it by checking the spam
| folder.
|
| And there's no reason for them to do that IMO. They should
| dump it into the quarantine as high confidence spam. I wonder
| if the drop shows up in the mail flow logs.
|
| I deal with a lot of small businesses and more than once I've
| seen bad spam filtering or silent drops cost people money
| (upset customers). The spam filters I can understand. The
| silently dropped messages should get them a class action
| lawsuit.
| johnklos wrote:
| There is a reason - DigitalOcean. A more appropriate name
| would be DigitalCesspool. They allow anything, so long as
| you pay them. I'd block email from their networks, but
| there are already plenty of ways that spam servers on their
| networks screw up (bad EHLO name, broken reverse DNS, SPF
| for all IP addresses), so that email is not accepted
| anyway.
|
| Microsoft sucks for rejecting email without recourse, but
| you're on DigitalOcean, so can you really blame them?
| donmcronald wrote:
| I'm not on digital ocean and I don't know anyone who is.
| I'm on the receiving end using office 365. Problems I see
| are for mail coming from shared hosts and isps.
|
| IMHO there's _never_ a reason for Microsoft or Google to
| drop mail silently if it's deliverable. Let me decide if
| I _want_ to do that, but don't force it on me.
|
| Google is awful too. Accounts locked for "suspicious
| activity" stop accepting incoming mail. I've seen people
| lose a day of email over a weekend before noticing ta
| false positive account lock.
|
| What it really comes down to for me is that I don't think
| either of them could act that negligently in a fairer
| market with better competition.
| tzs wrote:
| My emails from my domains to my Outlook account were going
| straight to spam.
|
| I tried marking them as not spam, to see if it would learn. A
| dozen later--no change.
|
| I tried replying to them, to see if it could figure out that
| if I'm actually regularly corresponding with someone they
| should not be marked as spam. No change.
|
| I tried whitelisting the domain. No change.
| Avamander wrote:
| You think Microsoft blocking you is bad? They ACCEPT mail and
| drop it afterwards.
| carlosfvp wrote:
| Pretty close! They accept the mail returning a "250 OK"ish
| code, but they delay it for days (or even months) not
| respecting the SMTP protocol. I actually recevied the
| emails on Outlook after many many days I have sent them :/
|
| Gmail seems good, I never had issues with Gmail.
| Avamander wrote:
| No, not close, it's exactly what they do.
|
| Delays are fine by the protocol, it's not a violation,
| it's not IM.
| _jal wrote:
| > you will have constant issues getting mail delivered.
|
| I run my own obscure mail server and have not had an issue in
| years, except for ATT[1]. I'm super low volume - I run mail for
| about 20 humans, a few mailing lists, and some other automation
| that does things with email.
|
| I do things correctly - I mean, I run nearly the same
| stack/configuration (scaled way down) as I do professionally
| for my employer, which delivers 8 digits of messages a day all
| over.
|
| But that doesn't explain why I don't have problems and others
| do - lots of people get this right and still have problems. And
| I think that comes down to the fact that mine has been on the
| net since the mid-90s. So, unfortunately, I suspect the answer
| to a lot of these problems is 'exist for long time' - until
| your MX is associated with a bias towards "not spam" in
| everyone's filters.
|
| I can think of ways for existing mail servers to vouch for new
| ones, but I don't think there's any reason for established ones
| to want to do that, so it wouldn't work. I'm not sure what the
| answer is.
|
| [1] And after many, many years of attempting to resolve it,
| they can bite me. I got annoyed enough that they get a custom
| bounce from me now on the rare occasions someone tries to spam
| me through them.
| zahllos wrote:
| I've been operating my own mail server on the same IP for the
| last 10 years, so not as long as yours and I also don't have
| problems. I also disagree with one of the parent comments
| that you will never know what happens to email: Gmail
| supports DMARC, and will give you stats and tell you what
| happens. You can also sign up to various sender services and
| domain whitelist sites and so on. I've also seen mail
| providers do fun things like 'permanently defer' email as a
| means of blocking and this actually notifies you, albeit in a
| disruptive way, by leaving the email permanently in your
| outgoing queue.
|
| I do agree however IP reputation matters. If you share an IP
| with other hosters, or your IP has been recycled from a bad
| reputation IP, or you have a residential IP or have found
| your way onto any of the email spam lists recently, or been
| reported for abuse or marked as spam enough times by freemail
| service users, you may have trouble getting to 'inbox' and
| eventually even getting delivered. Reporting systems like
| DMARC should let you know, however, before it becomes
| serious.
|
| I don't think running your own email is a high maintenance
| activity that some suggest (especially for small servers) but
| it is definitely more effort than outsourcing it to someone
| else. I'm glad services like this exist, if only to prevent
| email becoming a Microsoft-Google walled garden.
| [deleted]
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > And I think that comes down to the fact that mine has been
| on the net since the mid-90s
|
| There are other factors like IP reputation of the email
| server sending the email. And if you're using a hosted
| service, there's no way to control those IP addresses.
| lazyweb wrote:
| > I have a few years of experience running my own email server
| and I can tell you this is a major pain in the ass. When you
| send your email via a small email server (a server that sends a
| low volume of email), you will have constant issues getting
| mail delivered. Also, most of the issues will not be with
| obscure email servers, they will be with Outlook and Gmail.
| When you send email, you will never know if your email will be
| delivered to inbox, delivered to spam folder, or blackholed
| entirely.
|
| I tend to disagree, due to my experiences with running a
| private mail server [1]. I've had one exactly one issue with
| Outlook/Hotmail servers over the years. My server is quite low
| traffic, but it's been delivering mail reliably. How do I know?
| When I send mails, there's usually follow-ups.
|
| [1] https://jschumacher.info/2021/05/running-a-private-mail-
| serv...
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > My server is quite low traffic, but it's been delivering
| mail reliably. How do I know? When I send mails, there's
| usually follow-ups.
|
| And when there's no follow-ups, you just assume your mail has
| been delivered? I recommend actually measuring your
| deliverability before making claims about it.
| lazyweb wrote:
| Well either there's a bounce, or some other indicator in
| the postfix logs (collected by filebeat, with alertings in
| kibana).
|
| If I'd still be getting blackholed with a "250 delivered"
| in my logs, then screw it.
|
| I would even argue people hosting their small selfmanaged
| mail servers helps preventing monopolization, eg. "only
| allow mail from google".
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > Well either there's a bounce, or some other indicator
| in the postfix logs (collected by filebeat, with
| alertings in kibana).
|
| The most common type of problem is that mail is delivered
| but placed into the spam folder. You will not be notified
| of this with a bounce or anything in your postfix logs.
|
| > If I'd still be getting blackholed with a "250
| delivered" in my logs, then screw it.
|
| This is another type of problem I've encountered. It's
| rarer than the spam folder, but it happens.
| mpol wrote:
| This is my experience too with a private server, but I did
| need SPF, DKIM and Dmarc. These 3 things do require some
| expertise, but running a mail server already requires that.
| So it just needs extra time :)
| zbuf wrote:
| More than just SPF, DKIM and DMARC; mails still get
| silently discarded if you come from an IP address with a
| poor reputation. For this reason most of the large VM
| hosting providers will work but not give great results.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Nope, setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC is not enough to get
| your email delivered. I wrote about my experience more
| here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-
| own-ser...
| zbuf wrote:
| The irony is that most of the spam I get these days comes
| from Amazon's AWS SMTP service.
| mike-cardwell wrote:
| /me looks at his work gmail account that regularly spam filters
| emails from github, and emails from his work google apps domain
| that pass DMARC, DKIM and SPF.
|
| _Nobody_ can send emails to Gmail with any certainty. Not even
| Google.
| kl4m wrote:
| It's bad enough that Google Drive/Docs notifications are
| treated as "external senders" so you have to open up your
| internal Google Groups to the world; then Google Groups flags
| them as spam anyway!
|
| I'm guessing spammers may use Google Docs comments as a
| platform, but have never seen actual unsolicited Docs
| comments.
| krapht wrote:
| In my experience, it is more they "share" spam documents
| with you.
| corobo wrote:
| Whenever I'm expecting YouTube emails (pass reset or
| whatever) I check gmail's spam first haha. At least they
| don't play favourites I guess.
| layer8 wrote:
| > When you send your email via a small email server (a server
| that sends a low volume of email), you will have constant
| issues getting mail delivered.
|
| That's hyperbole. I've been running my personal mail server on
| a VPS for the past 20 years and never had any delivery issues.
| It may depend on the hosting provider you use, and nowadays you
| probably need to have DKIM etc., but there are a lot of people
| running their own mail server without issues.
| tzs wrote:
| > I've been running my personal mail server on a VPS for the
| past 20 years and never had any delivery issues.
|
| Age may be a factor. I ran email for my domain on my own
| server for a long time too and generally had no delivery
| issues.
|
| When I got another domain a few years ago and ran it _on the
| same server_ it had a lot of delivery issues.
| layer8 wrote:
| > Age may be a factor.
|
| Probably. Although I switched both IP and domain a couple
| of years ago (not at the same time) without noticeable
| issues.
| vgeek wrote:
| https://www.mail-tester.com/ is a useful tool for testing.
|
| Gmail is hit or miss, even when dkim/spf/dmarc are setup
| correctly. It may work 70% of the time, but it becomes a
| constant guessing game if you inboxed or went to spam. If
| you're using DO/Vultr/Linode, there may be issues with noisy
| neighbor IPs, but it still sucks that you may get penalized
| for no fault of your own. It seems like there is no incentive
| for Gmail to play friendly with small mail servers.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > https://www.mail-tester.com/ is a useful tool for
| testing.
|
| This is great! Thank you!. I scored 2.7 out of 10. I'm
| using NameCheap's Private Email service. What a waste!
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > That's hyperbole. I've been running my personal mail server
| on a VPS for the past 20 years and never had any delivery
| issues.
|
| No email server in the world can deliver 100% (not even
| Gmail). Here you are claiming to have done that for 20 years
| straight. Well, it's not true. In fact, I'll venture as far
| as to guess that you've never even measured your
| deliverability.
| layer8 wrote:
| I'm saying that for all practical purposes I never had an
| issue. That is, I don't recollect any case where it turned
| out that someone didn't get my email. That's not to say
| that it didn't ever happen in cases that went unnoticed by
| me, but if so it was rare enough to be a non-issue.
| wolrah wrote:
| > Also, most of the issues will not be with obscure email
| servers, they will be with Outlook and Gmail. When you send
| email, you will never know if your email will be delivered to
| inbox, delivered to spam folder, or blackholed entirely.
|
| In my personal experience, over five years of running my own
| business and personal email entirely and another decade and
| counting since of running PBXes that directly send voicemail
| messages, Gmail has only explicitly blocked me once, and that
| was 100% legitimate because the site the PBX was located at had
| an infected PC. It occasionally will filter messages to the
| spam folder, but that almost always means one of the users
| actually flagged a message.
|
| I could send an email to myself from a bogus address via raw
| SMTP over Telnet to port 25 and I'd be willing to bet my week's
| pay that Gmail delivers it. They might mark it as spam, but
| they deliver reliably.
|
| Microsoft on the other hand is a massive pain in my ass. They
| usually work, but about 4-5 times a year they seem to randomly
| pick one of my systems to treat as suspicious and block emails
| from. The process listed in their block message always works,
| but it's annoying to have to deal with regularly, especially
| with no rhyme or reason.
|
| Yahoo is the worst, they straight up block everything I do with
| no recourse. I have one user who insists on using his Yahoo
| email and I basically had to tell him we don't care that Yahoo
| won't accept messages.
| creeble wrote:
| From 23 years of running my own email (and for about a dozen
| other domains), this is a pretty good summary.
|
| One domain has a small mailing list of about 200 users. The
| @yahoo.com addresses (and related, Yahoo-handled domains like
| old @att and @sbcglobal domains) are often just dropped.
|
| Gmail addresses frequently go to spam, especially newly-added
| domains. I have found that having multiple @gmail users mark
| them as "not spam" tends to help, but not always.
|
| My email server has had the same IP address for over 18 yrs,
| fwiw.
| berkes wrote:
| My emailserver runs at linode. It delivered fine for some
| 10 years, then I started getting blackholed (at Microsoft
| live, hotmail, 365, outlook). This IP does only mail.
| Server is secure, up to date and has all the DKIM/SPF
| nonsense.
|
| It's impossible to reach humans that can help. It's
| impossible to unlist. So I'm now on my third IP, my last
| one running mail for 4+ years, from Digital Ocean. Only
| now, occasionally, does an email get through.
|
| I'm almost 100% confident that Microsoft just blanket
| blackholes or punishes anything from Digital Ocean or
| Linode.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| I share your confidence that lots of providers blanket
| drop mail from IP ranges owned by cheap VPS providers.
|
| The cost of swtiching IPs within those providers is low,
| so spammers have already abused that, and made life worse
| for the rest of us as a result.
| kureikain wrote:
| I can totally echo this(running my email forwarding service
| [0]) so I deal with it at high email volume too.
|
| Outlook/Hotmail is kind of stupid in this sense: if the first
| time, a new domain send an email they are very likely to
| flagged as spam. But if the user simply reply or send to that
| email, the moving forward hotmail won't flagged it. In other
| word, hotmail rely stringly
|
| - is this domain new? - is this ip address start to send
| email new? - if I interact with this sender in the past
|
| Seems thing with icloud and their proofpoint spam filtering.
|
| gmail in other hand, has the best delivery rate, clear error
| message, great rate limiting and cool down period.
|
| gmail is very smart, if we accidently send spam(due to our
| failure to filter out spam), gmail won't blocklist the whole
| IP, but hotmail/icloud does.
|
| And the process to delist from them homail/icloud are just
| absurb. I'm unable to contact their team.
|
| ---
|
| [0] https://hanami.run
| dqv wrote:
| Do you/did you have feedback loop accounts setup for all of
| them? Yahoo, for example, sends a notification to sys@ (or
| whatever email you tell them to) when someone marks one of
| our emails as spam or when it thinks we're sending bulk
| email. They also have sender support. They did want me to set
| up something where we used the same connection to send email
| to them. I forgot
|
| My "blacklisted" email company is Zoho because they
| consistently greylisted and blocked our correspondence with
| clients and have no one to contact to resolve email issues
| for senders.
| jari_mustonen wrote:
| Hi Wolrah
|
| I'm starting a new company where email connection to my user
| base is essential. From time to time I also need to sen all
| users certain notifications which looks kinda like marketing
| email but isn't.
|
| Could you contact me as I would like to ask your opinion on
| the configuration that I'm trying to set up. I would also
| like to discuss your experiences.
|
| If isn't too much, you can reach me by email at
| jari@itsellesi.fi.
| tacon wrote:
| Rather than depend on a single person's experience about
| running email systems, you might check out the Mailop mail
| operator's list:
|
| https://www.mailop.org/
| Felz wrote:
| Marketing emails are actually against the terms of service,
| although there are grey areas- like a user personally reaches
| out to offer people a service, and some occasionally end up
| marked as spam. If the rate is low enough, it might be
| acceptable.
|
| I'll make a note to make that language stronger.
| cyborgx7 wrote:
| From the LLC I'm assuming this is based in the US. I'm not
| hosting my e-mail with a company based in the US. Other than
| that, I love everything about this.
| bdcravens wrote:
| My first thought was that this was a great advertisement for Zoho
| p5a0u9l wrote:
| > We're not trying to bamboozle you with glossy images, or sell
| you a lofty ideal.
|
| I appreciate the dig at psuedo-righteous slogan-eering like
| "Don't be evil.", "Bring the worked closer together". Just
| fucking email.
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