[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Migadu? Postale? Mxroute? Or any other mail ...
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Ask HN: Migadu? Postale? Mxroute? Or any other mail services using
this model?
I'm still looking round for an alternative to Google Workspace,
when they get rid of the free tier for custom domains, in a month
or so's time. My needs are pretty basic; I just want a reliable
email service that I can run on my own domain, with a couple of
addresses for family members. I'm not bothered about all the other
business-related stuff. Privacy and encryption would be preferable,
but not an absolute deal-breaker. Anything I want to discuss in
private goes by encrypted messenger anyway, not email. One must
have is IMAP support. I run a load of email addresses [not all via
Gmail or Google Workspaces] so I want to be able to keep them all
in the same place [Thunderbird] and not have to fire up different
apps for different accounts. So far, I've checked out most of the
oft-recommended options; Protonmail, Tutanota, Mailbox, Mailfence,
CTemplar, Runbox, Zoho, etc. and found that there were issues with
most of them --whether this was lack of IMAP support, lack of
Unicode support [Hello Runbox and Zoho. It's 2022!] or just general
uneasiness after reading customer reviews. But, by far the biggest
no-no with all of these services is that they charge for each
separate email address. I have emails set up on my domain for the
missus, and a couple of family members. So 4 in all. As each of
these services charges per user, that effectively means quadruple
the stated price for any of them. For amount of emails sent on the
accounts --a handful a week at most, that ends up being
prohibitively expensive, for the amount of usage. Which brings me
onto the 3 mentioned in the title. Migadu[0], Postale[1] and
MXroute[2] all charge by the amount of emails you send, not by the
number of actual addresses you set up on the domain. Which seems a
much fairer system. Especially for my use case. So, unless anyone
is aware of another option, I'm wavering between those three. I
still have some doubts though: MIGADU --Probably the best known of
this business model and the prices seem reasonable for what I want.
But a quick read through their T&Cs is pretty alarming. Their
Acceptable Use policy [3] pretty much says they can suspend your
account without warning for a huge range of subjective reasons.
Including: >Hate speech, racism, calls for
violence, Nazism as well any other immoral, unethical or socially
unacceptable activity will be denied service. If illegal, we will
report such to the authorities. Quite apart from the fact
that this implies that Migadu are scanning the content of every
email that their users send; what the actual fuck is a bloody email
server company doing, taking on the role of arbitrating what is
'Nazi', 'immoral' or 'socially unacceptable'? This virtue
signalling shite is really going too far these days. By all means
take down accounts that are indulging in illegal activity, but
otherwise just keep your noses the hell out of people's private
correspondence! So, thats's MIGADU ruled out. Next up... POSTALE
--I didn't actually find anything too egregious on the Postale
website. But that was part of the problem. I couldn't find any info
about the company at all. ie. where are they based?.. where are
their servers?.. etc? Even on the company 'About' page[4], all we
get is mention of an unnamed 'creator' and the only contact details
are an email address. I have absolutely no idea where this company
is based, or what size it is. For all I know, it could be some kid
in his bedroom. A bit dubious about entrusting my email to such an
unknown entity. MXROUTE --I hadn't heard of these, til I saw a few
recommendations on HN. On the face of it, it seems to be a good
fit. I'm not afraid of a bit of setup and configuration. However, I
have noticed people complaining about the company's 'attitude' and,
reading through their FAQs they do come across as pretty abrasive
--even down to making a point of not offering refunds to anyone who
signs up and doesn't like the service. CONT'D -->
Author : Normille
Score : 42 points
Date : 2022-04-24 13:36 UTC (9 hours ago)
| lukevp wrote:
| One potential option is using CloudFlare email routing. You can
| use it with a regular public provider (gmail for example).
| CloudFlare will handle the MX side of things for your custom
| domain and route your emails to the public provider without
| requiring it to use the custom domain. The issue I've found is
| that it's hard to set up a reply address to reply as the original
| email was received, so this may not work perfectly (emails look
| like they come from the gmail address for example). Does anyone
| know how to solve that part?
| rgrmrts wrote:
| Afaik that's not possible because cloudflare doesn't offer smtp
|
| (Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm currently using cloudflare email
| routing, would love to have reply as)
| deeesstoronto wrote:
| I've used migadu and worked really well. I also have some domains
| using lunanode - great deal if you have other vps with them but
| have subjectively experienced more downtime.
|
| Migadu just added master password support so can now dsync easily
| with another dovecot server (ie backups, move, etc). My next
| config will probably be migadu + selfhosted vps.
| Dr_ReD wrote:
| OVH's own "Personal Hosting" provides 10 emails (plus web and
| domain) for about EUR24 a year. (add VAT, if you live in a VAT
| state like me) https://www.ovhcloud.com/it/web-hosting/personal-
| offer/
|
| Disclaimers: I don't work for OVH; I use it consistently for my
| customers; Still, all my own/company stuff is _self-hosted_ on my
| own Colo /AS/LIR.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| > Quite apart from the fact that this implies that Migadu are
| scanning the content of every email that their users send; what
| the actual fuck is a bloody email server company doing, taking on
| the role of arbitrating what is 'Nazi', 'immoral' or 'socially
| unacceptable'?
|
| Do they mention anywhere that they are actually scanning the
| content and/or metadata? I'd assume this just means that if they
| get reports about using their platform for sending unacceptable
| content, they have the rights to deny the service, and, if
| needed, report you to the authorities.
| Normille wrote:
| >Do they mention anywhere that they are actually scanning the
| content and/or metadata?
|
| No. But they don't say they aren't either. I prefer not to rely
| on "I thought you meant..." "No, we actually meant..." when it
| comes to contracts.
| rosndo wrote:
| I bet that most of these terms also forbid sending malware or
| spam. How is that meaningfully different when it comes to
| scanning email content?
| monkin wrote:
| Most if not all email providers do that when they get
| phishing or spam alert (every user can send those) to check
| out if that message is actually a threat. Maybe the best
| option for you is to setup your own email server which is
| fairly simple this days.
| nativeit wrote:
| I have been using MXRoute continuously for the last 3-4 years as
| both my own personal email service, as well as reselling it to
| several of my clients for their business email services.
|
| The pricing is hard to beat, but the service is sort of no
| frills. It's been 100% reliable since I began using it, but the
| UI, documentation, and process for setting up domains with
| LetsEncrypt SSL and DKIM/SPF is... _unrefined_ is a good way of
| putting it. Once you find the appropriate documentation (it
| exists, it 's just not always where you'd first look for it)
| everything is straightforward.
|
| I pay for 40GB of storage (I think I pay ~$25/40GB, but it's low
| enough that I literally don't recall), and from there I can host
| as many domains, email accounts, aliases, and my choice of
| webmail services incl. Rainloop, Squirrelmail, Roundcube, and
| MXLogin. Recently they've even added an option for Horde along
| with a slew of other groupware products such as Nextcloud,
| OpenOffice, and MatterMost--any/all can be deployed under any of
| my registered domains with little more than a few clicks. As long
| as I don't exceed my storage quota, my annual bill is always the
| same.
|
| It's white label, so I can brand all of the relevant client-
| facing endpoints and products with logos, color themes, and
| custom URLs with LetsEncrypt SSL. Things like spam control are
| nothing to write home about, but my philosophy is to pay someone
| like MXRoute to handle the actual Dovecot/Postfix/DNS/security
| and then I can self-host or integrate the other features I
| want/need like spam control, sieve routing, and proxies. That's
| everything I can think of to define my experience with MXRoute.
| Mostly positive, albeit unrefined. I haven't had any cause to
| seek out their customer service, but I wouldn't expect anything
| too stellar, just given how their website's account management
| and documentation is setup, and the relatively little effort I
| have seen in maintaining communication for things like upcoming
| invoices. To be fair, I've not had any bad experiences with them,
| but the reports you mention don't strike me as surprising either.
|
| _Bottom line - MXRoute is a solid choice for flexibility and
| affordability, but only for a specific type of user._
|
| _It is suitable for:_
|
| - People who are typically self-sufficient, and are looking to
| strike a middle ground between total DIY/roll-your-own solution
| and a walled-garden hosted service like Microsoft or Google.
|
| - Someone who is comfortable managing things like domain
| registrations, DNS, and DKIM/SPF/DMARC records, and who can seek
| out and parse sometimes spotty documentation without requiring
| hand-holding from customer support.
|
| - Orgs that need/want the option to resell basic hosted
| email/groupware services to clients. Just bear in mind, _you_ are
| the customer support for anyone you are reselling services to.
|
| - Orgs that might need a lot of accounts/addresses, but don't
| consume excessive amounts of raw storage space for emails.
| fotad wrote:
| I'm using MXRoute ATM because it's cheap for multi domains, But
| its issue is that using alias will leak your real account -
| https://community.mxroute.com/t/disable-x-authuser-header/21...
| miedpo wrote:
| I'm not sure if this fits your needs or not, but have you
| considered self hosting with Cloudron? Free plan would work for
| you so you'd only be paying for the VPS.
|
| It makes administrating and backing up an email server a breeze.
| Only real requirement is that you have your own domain name, and
| know how to generate API keys for a few services (really easy).
| Helps ensure you have all the important mail settings (SPF,
| DMARC, etc) set up.
|
| I use BuyVM for the VPS because I can set up one of the mail
| settings, but you could easily use another provider (Hetzner
| might be good if you need a lot of space).
|
| Also... you could host Nextcloud and OnlyOffice on the Cloudron
| box under the free plan as well... which is pretty much like
| hosting One Drive and Microsoft 365. A little more complexity to
| manage, but still very easy.
|
| Now one thing to keep in mind... you still have a single point of
| failure in your domain name provider. It they don't act
| responsibly, there's not much you can do.
| nativeit wrote:
| Friends don't let friends self-host email servers.
| tmcz26 wrote:
| I've been using pobox.com (acquired by Fastmail) for the past 3
| months after doing a lot of research just like you. They have
| very decent pricing, support custom domains and multiple
| aliases/accounts, + addressing etc. So far looks pretty good
| albeit simple!
| lbotos wrote:
| I'd advise against MXRoute:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225685
|
| Maybe you will have a better time than I, but MXRoute is more
| _opinionated_ than I 'd like my mail provider to be. If you are
| ruling out Migadu, you might rule out MXRoute on the same
| grounds.
| uncensoredjrk wrote:
| I've been using MX Route after the recommendation by a trusted
| third party. It's been working well for me so far. No regrets and
| I like their simple annual pricing plan.
| AlfeG wrote:
| I have several emails on custom domain and one on gmail.com.
| Instead of searching for replacement of Google Workspaces I have
| setup Cloudflare Email Routing. It's free and with few clicks to
| setup all emails to my custom domain are now routed to gmail
| email account. This solves all my issues, since I'm almost never
| sent any emails from custom domains.
| Gorgo wrote:
| Just host your own mail server and you can have as many accounts
| you want - I have more than a thousand since I use special
| addresses when communicating with anyone who is not friend or
| family. If you worry over reliability - which in my experience is
| not a problem to be worried over given the tenacity of SMTP in
| attempting to deliver messages to temporarily off-lined hosts -
| you could arrange a reciprocal agreement with someone you trust
| to host a backup (MX) server for your domain(s). You won't have
| to deal with commercial plans, virtue signalling, filtering,
| bankruptcies (other than your own) or any of the other bothersome
| irritants which can be encountered when dealing with commercial
| entities. People will tell you it is impossible to host your own
| mail, that it takes enormous investments in time, that you'll be
| inundated in spam, that your outgoing mail will not be accepted
| by the likes of Google and Microsoft and more dire warnings of
| mayhem and misfortune for those who do not pay someone else to do
| this work for them. Nearly all of this is untrue, hosting a mail
| server is no black magic. Just make sure to configure the thing
| correctly, using a smart host to take care of outgoing mail -
| this is most likely mandated by your IAP - and DKIM/SPF/... to
| please those hosts which require it. Use Spamassassin and
| (optionally) greylistd for spam filtering, this will take care of
| the spam problem. All of this can be run on a SBC like a
| Raspberry Pi.
|
| Source: I've hosted my own mail for more than 25 years now,
| taking it with me from ISP to IAP, from country to country, even
| through a period where I only had dialup (the consequence of
| moving to the countryside - now I have gigabit fibre in the same
| location) by having an arrangement with a friend who ran backup
| MX for me. Linux + Exim + Spamassassin + greylistd + Dovecot +
| Sieve is all it takes, all of it is free, running a Raspberry Pi
| (or similar) costs a pittance. An additional advantage is that
| you'll be ready for the decentralised future of the 'net.
| the-anarchist wrote:
| dn3500 wrote:
| I've been using Migadu for about four years. My main complaint is
| that the support is not good. To be fair, they do not promise to
| hold your hand. And that's fine, I can usually diagnose my own
| mail problems.
|
| Here is an example. I have one family member who wants to keep
| her email address on the family domain but have all her mail
| forwarded to her address @gmail. So I have migadu forward her
| mail to google's gmail server. One day that forwarding stopped
| working. So I asked migadu to check why the forwarding was
| failing.
|
| They replied that they have no way to do this, and I shouldn't be
| forwarding to gmail. I've never heard of an email service that
| can't forward! They pointed me to this doc:
| https://www.migadu.com/guides/gmail/
| chmln wrote:
| I can vouch for purelymail (https://purelymail.com/), it's simply
| amazing. Their only rule is basically no marketing emails. It's
| also quite affordable compared to others.
| asdfqwertzxcv wrote:
| They look great!
| eirikurh wrote:
| I've used purelymail for two years and almost without problems.
| Normille wrote:
| Thanks for this. Purelymail looks to tick all the boxes for me
| and their T&Cs seem reasonable [at least compared to Migadu].
| I've never heard of the company though. And they seem to be a
| one man band, which is a bit of a concern --the old "walks
| under a bus" scenario.
|
| I shall have to investigate further.
| flypenguin wrote:
| hi normille, what is with zoho and utf-8? i am planning to go
| there and so far it seems to be really nice ... ?! appreciate any
| details here!
| maxique wrote:
| I'm using Purelymail at the moment, working perfectly for me and
| my few catch-all domains.
| garritfra wrote:
| +1 for purelymail. Pricing is just unbeatable.
| Normille wrote:
| <--CONT'D
|
| [Wow! --first time I've hit HN's post character limit!]
|
| Now, someone said they have this kind of attitude as a way of
| targeting their offering towards more tech-minded people and
| deterring the more needy users. And, at first, I thought; "OK.
| Fair enough". But, the more I thought about it the more it
| started sounding a bit like Steve Jobs. If I sign up and find
| it's not to my needs, I basically get told to fuck off because
| I'm obviously 'holding it wrong'.
|
| That attitude might be fine for someone offering a free product.
| But it's not acceptable for a paid service. As I've said on here
| before, I think there are far too many developers about these
| days, who've seen Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds and think that
| being an obnoxious arrogant arsehole makes you some kind of
| techie rock star. When, in fact, it just makes you an obnoxious
| arrogant arsehole.
|
| So there's where I'm up to at the minute. Anyone got any comments
| re the three mentioned above, or know any other email services
| which are using this kind of business model, as opposed to per
| email account charging?
|
| The way things are going at the moment, I can see myself ending
| up spinning up a Mail-in-a-Box[5] server. As nothing I've found
| out there so far seems worthy of giving my money to.
|
| [0] https://www.migadu.com
|
| [1] https://postale.io
|
| [2] https://mxroute.com
|
| [3] https://www.migadu.com/use
|
| [4] https://postale.io/about-us
|
| [5] https://mailinabox.email/
| Reitet00 wrote:
| FTR I've migrated from Google Apps to Migadu and I'm pretty
| happy with them but I must say the "acceptable use" clause also
| raised my suspicion. I guess they don't scan your email
| automatically but when someone brings to their attention that
| you're using the service for "unacceptable things" they will
| trigger the termination. Which, to be honest, happens with
| other providers even if that's not in the ToS (see Cloudflare
| case).
| Normille wrote:
| >I guess they don't scan your email automatically but when
| someone brings to their attention that you're using the
| service for "unacceptable things"
|
| Maybe they don't. But, as I said in another comment, I'd
| prefer not to depend on what I think they mean, when they
| might actually mean something else.
|
| Besides, as I said in the original post who decides what is
| 'socially acceptable'? It's not too long ago that being gay
| or trans might have been construed as 'socially
| unacceptable'.
|
| Who decides what's 'Nazi'? Vlad the Mad seems to think he's
| liberating Ukraine from Nazis. The west seems to think he's
| the goose-stepper. A sizeable number of commenters on HN have
| been accused of being Nazis, coz they disagreed with someone
| else.
|
| Who decides what's immoral? That's probably the vaguest one
| of the lot. Morality is an individual thing. I'm sure there
| are things I'd consider immoral that you wouldn't and vice
| versa.
|
| Nope. I don't care what the mechanics of the censuring
| process are. But I know I don't want to trust my
| correspondence to a company which sets itself up as an
| arbitrator of social acceptability and morality.
|
| Imagine if your snail mail postman opened your letters and
| refused to deliver any he didn't approve of.
| pcmaffey wrote:
| More like if you send hate mail to someone and they
| complain to the post office, then the post office will stop
| sending your mail.
| Reitet00 wrote:
| > I don't care what the mechanics of the censuring process
| are. But I know I don't want to trust my correspondence to
| a company which sets itself up as an arbitrator of social
| acceptability and morality.
|
| Then your only choice is self hosting because the provider
| can, and will, enforce any rules that they deem necessary
| even if they don't put it in the ToS explicitly (usually
| hidden behind "ToS can change at any time" clause). I've
| given the Cloudflare/Nazi case as an example.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| If you're going the mailinabox route, I recommend also looking
| at Mailcow. Mailinabox is a full Linux distribution, Mailcow
| puts a mail server in docker-compose. Both are fully featured,
| but last time I looked into it I found that Mailinabox is
| running on more outdated/near-EOL software than I'd like.
|
| As an added bonus, you have can pay the Mailcow devs for a
| hosted server so you don't need to deal with updates and such,
| whereas mailinabox seems exclusively aimed at running your own
| (which is a perfectly valid position to have as an open source
| dev!)
|
| Either way, you'll probably need to do some configuration on
| any self-hosted mail service because SMTPUTF support for mail
| addresses is surprisingly uncommon in default compilation
| settings on open source software. Notably, the Dovecot devs
| seem convinced that nobody needs UTF8 in their email addresses
| and sometimes even dismiss this feature as "silly". Sadly, most
| self-hosted email options use Dovecot in some way or another so
| you may be out of luck if you try to run this stuff yourself.
| zapu wrote:
| Hey, thanks for the post. I was going to migrate some of my
| mailboxes to Zoho (ones that mostly receive netflix receipts and
| junkmail), can you elaborate about lack of unicode support? I
| can't find anything with a cursory web search.
| Normille wrote:
| My name has an accented character in it. It also begins with a
| lower case letter. Zoho's sign up form force-capitalised the
| name and also told me to 'only use letters and underscores'
| when I entered my name. I should make clear this was when
| trying to fill in my real name on the sign-up form, not the
| email username [I know they can't have accented chars]
|
| Similarly with Runbox. It allowed me to enter my name properly
| when signing up. But in the name part of the 'from' field of
| the test emails I sent, it replaced the accented character with
| a as in my email 'from' line rendered as _Frstname Lastname
| <username@runbox.com>_ ---like something from the 1980s!
| hewbert007 wrote:
| I've used Migadu for several years after switching from Google
| Apps. Technologically, I've been pretty satisfied. I have a lot
| of custom domains that I may want to use different
| users/mailboxes on and Migadu's pricing model makes that pretty
| easy.
|
| In 2020, there was some turmoil with Migadu where they nearly (or
| completely) doubled their prices and didn't communicate it well.
| I was paying 45/yr then abruptly started paying 90/yr on the
| same/equivalent plan. They also took away a couple of features
| purported to be the cause behind some performance issues they
| had. During that time, their service was strained. Many users, me
| included, didn't realize there was an issue until no e-mail was
| received for days. Support just said "sorry" and that there was a
| post about it on their website. I think this situation soured a
| lot of users. You can read about it, including some of Migadu's
| response, if you search this site, reddit, and lowendtalk.
|
| I agree with you that their speech codes in the TOS are sketchy,
| ambiguous, and trite. I'm not sending or receiving any e-mail
| like that, but I don't trust contemporary definitions for those
| topics. I've been considering another provider when my
| subscription is due for renewal because of the price change.
| throwthere wrote:
| I left Migadu too after their pricing incident-- it was
| terribly communicated imo and with a large increase like that
| you'd think they'd make darn sure you knew about it. I mean,
| how do you know they won't do it again next year? Haven't had a
| single issue with mxroute across multiple domains. Can't
| recommend it strongly enough.
| asdfqwertzxcv wrote:
| I've used Migadu and MXRoute and found Migadu to be the easiest
| to use by a long shot. MXRoute's setup and configuration is full
| of friction and just odd ways of doing simple things like logging
| into your account or adding email addresses and the like.
|
| It sounds more like you have philosophical differences with these
| 2 companies, as they are very opinionated right out the gate, as
| you noted. I think, since they're small teams, they're trying to
| scare off users who are going to require a lot of time and effort
| on the customer service side.
|
| That said, my interactions with both companies has been pleasant
| and professional. But it really does sound like you're going to
| need to roll your own service based on your major complaints.
| xoa wrote:
| > _But it really does sound like you 're going to need to roll
| your own service based on your major complaints._
|
| Ideally that'd be more the norm, but unfortunately it's
| significantly more hassle than would be ideal. Uptime is an
| issue, though most senders should retry through brief outages.
| Management/security updates of course aren't negligible, though
| in principle fairly manageable. Probably the big issue is
| deliverability to the big players like Gmail. They're as bad at
| support and opaque there as everywhere else, if you don't know
| someone and/or aren't big enough regardless of what boxes you
| check you can have email just vanish into the ether which is
| generally unacceptable.
|
| One solution might be to use a decent commercial SMTP relay
| service to proxy that part (ie., Amazon
| SES/Mailgun/Postmark/SendGrid etc). Those tend to be aimed at
| commercial operations doing high volume but can start low
| enough to be worth considering. But all in all it's hard to do
| well despite email being so old and undemanding anything made
| in decades can run it fine. The foundations just aren't there
| to cheaply autoscale around abuse. Like, ideally we'd have
| secure DNS to depend on, that in turn would allow standards for
| just having a CA root cert for a domain put right into the
| domain's DNS records, in turn allowing distributed
| signing/encryption and making spoofing of email addresses non-
| trivial. No sending of any kind allowed without having it
| signed by something in the domain CA's trust chain. Remaining
| abuse after that could managed far more easily, reliably, and
| perhaps most important deterministically.
|
| No such luck though! Leaving us stuck paying ludicrous amounts
| and dealing with a lot of crap for a service that an RPi is
| already has orders of magnitude more power than it should need
| for :(.
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