I'm genuinely surprised no one has mentioned mxroute[1]. Thier pricing normally is pretty decent, but they keep the BF deals going pretty much all year [2].
I've been using them for 6 years with no issues. I use it now with all my domains and never have any deliverability issues.
The owner (Jar - one person shop again) is passionate about their email reputation for deliverability and is active on both lowendtalk and the dedicated sub Reddit.
I ended up comparing purleymail and mxroute - tested mxroute and stayed with them.
Been using mxroute for years, have multiple domains (they let you use unlimited domains IIRC), never had any issues.
Great info on setting up stuff like SPF, DKIM. Easy to set quotas on accounts, set up catch-alls etc.
Never had an issue with deliverability or anything like that.
Probably sound like a shill, but I think it's such a good option, and really reasonably priced.
I have a perpetual black friday deal, and I pay like 15 USD a year!!
Purelymail's About page lists one person, and the product is in beta.
MXRoute has years of track record, more than 1 employee, and has good tools like IMAPSync to enable easy duplication of your emails for backup or migration to a different platform.
I also use this. Pros: super cheap. <$2/mo for all my custom email addresses and routing rules. Nothing else came close - everything else I found would make me pay per email address even if that address receives an average of 0 emails per month. The wildcard suffixes are really nice as well - they use _ instead of gmail's + (I've had issues with gmail's version as it sometimes is transparently removed, or sometimes the form doesn't consider + a valid character).
Cons: UI is bad, so you'll want to access through a client. 1 person shop. Not audited AFAIK.
Not a gmail invention perhaps, but also not per RFC. That some use it to mean something special is not in the RFC. Actually, a significant number of SMTP servers don't even implement the required parts of the related RFCs, let alone fancy things like plus handling.
You're right. Originally the + sign in an email address was an indicator to the Andrew Message System's delivery agent to process the email in an extensible way. The syntax was +<keyword>+<args>. As an example. you could use
"user+dir-insert+misc" to route the message to the "misc" directory in the user's mailbox structure. An unknown keyword would just get ignored and the mail delivered as usual, giving the behavior as used today.
As stated by others, + addressing is not gmail specific. One thing that gmail does however is allowing you to add (or remove) arbitrary dots in your mail-address, and these are stripped out / all end up in the same mailbox.
I know online services or any service depends a lot on personal interaction experiences and personal expectations from those services and people involved in those services, but I can't leave mailbox.org sooner.
I have tried/explored couple of them like Mailbox.org (of course, current user), Fastmail, Proton, and Runbox etc. Given everything http://runbox.com seems to be the best among them - much better than Mailbox. In fact for Mailbox their less than 'less than ideal' support is enough for me to move elsewhere once my balance runs out (which I foolishly pumped in more than I should have had)
Runbox isn't w/o its challenges but they do certain things really nice and they are: prompt, not into disregard a request in its entirety, not un-kind, not-jerk, not-flippant, not-entitled, not-costly, not into offering unusable shit that you don't need in an email suite to begin with, and basically open and engaging.
So while I am not a customer right now, once the mailbox.org balance is close to running out and I will leave mailbox (and leave them I will) Runbox is the first contender to replace them right now.
I tried runbox before mailbox.org but it didn't work for me.
They didn't support a server-side filter that copied emails from the inbox to another folder. And something was wrong with their DKIM support, but my notes don't say what.
mailbox.org has it's problems though and I'd be happy to find something better.
> didn't support a server-side filter that copied emails from the inbox to another folder
You mean a rule where you can say [mail:received-from="domain:xyz.com" > move to > "Saved" folder] - and it happens, something like this? Honestly I did not check it but I guess they might handle it.
During my trials I didn't find any issue with their DKIM support. https://help.runbox.com/dkim-signing/ seems fine to me. You might want to ask if you are interested, unlike mailbox.org they do reply, and they reply promptly, and they reply as if they mean it.
> I'd be happy to find something better
Please do share here on HN if you happen to find something better. Cheers.
Oh, maybe I didn't mean the same as you. I can create as many email addresses as I want, but they all go to the same inbox. Multiple inboxes would cost more.
In the pricing page it is listed in the "Individual" plan as "+ Extra email addresses for personal and work".
Edit: It is possible to create an extra email address and set it up so that all emails it receives are sent to a different external email address
Various shared hosting likely will always beat this price. Caveat is that many shared hosters don't know how to properly run mail servers within their shared hosting infra. Many do, however.
posteo has been great for me and also allows you to define aliases, thou each alias costs 10c per month. If you stay below 10 aliases, it is <2€ per month as well.
Customer for a few years now. I don't do anything fancy with it. It was the cheapest and most appealing option for a custom domain for personal email. I think it runs me ~$11 a year or something
I combine it with simplelogin to handle all my aliasing needs.
I have heard this a lot of times but self hosting email is one of the hardest things to do , sure if you are masochist then do it , but if you are a working functional part of society , not recommended.
On the one hand, it's just wrong. Self-hosting mail is not easy because you need to learn how things work. But it's far from being "one of the hardest things to do", even in the domain of hosting things. A properly set up mail server will seamlessly send mails to almost any other MTA. The only large exception is microsoft. The abuse their market power by black-list all new MTAs by default until you create a ticket to "mitigate" this and they tend to re-blacklist small MTAs from time to time.
On the other hand, it's that kind of statements that worsen the situation. People should be encouraged to set up their own MTAs and provided with help to do it in a good professional way. It's one important part of keeping the mail part internet free and not in the hand of few large companies.
Agreed , I don't know two things about mail (use proton mail) , but I don't own any servers .
But I still self host stuff using docker (shiori etc.)
I mean , see there is a difference in complexity.
Like if you want to self host supabase , its complex , but its still automatable by a docker compose.
About Mails?? I am just not sure! , Maybe I shouldn't have expressed this opinion on the internet. I was just regurtitating what I heard from r/selfhosted feeds about email where they constantly said this. They even provided some explaination (see the message to which I said "this!!" , because that's what I meant.
Maybe even what you said about microsoft. But still , I really really don't want to take any risks with the mail , like what if a critical message of email doesn't come? I don't even want to know!!
I personally just believe that due to these reasons , that mail is just an old wagon which is riding into the future. I personally would prefer mail alternatives like xmpp / (preferably matrix!!)
I know matrix self hosting can take quite some resources but I do believe that the protocol in my honest opinion could be much more better for self hosting.
Comcast also gives me no end of annoyance by repeatedly black-listing my server for no apparent reason. The process goes: get blocked, request reason, get a hand shrug and unblock, rinse and repeat.
> self hosting email is one of the hardest things to do
I spent an hour setting up postfix and some milters on a Digital Ocean droplet around 7 years ago and it's been working fine as my personal email server with no deliverability issues or maintenance since then. I ssh in every few years to try out a new spam filter or something and maybe upgrade some packages if I feel like it. These days there are even easier mail-in-a-box style turnkey deployments that work just as well but don't need as much knowledge or setup as bare postfix.
At this point, the biggest barrier to self-hosting email is the deafening cries of people who don't know what they're talking about parroting how impossible it is to do.
Setting up a mail server isn't hard. Making it trustworthy enough for Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook.com to accept your messages and not put them in the spam folder is the hard part. Especially if whoever had your IP address previously was sending spam.
In my experience, every large provider except Microsoft will default to delivering your emails to the destination inbox unless your mails actually look like spam, you incorrectly set up a verification mechanism like SPF or DKIM, or your IP has a bad reputation (which usually only comes with sketchy hosting providers, as good ones will quickly cut off spam coming from their network). Microsoft was well known at the time for having the extremely annoying policy of just automatically blackhole-ing any new mail server until you contacted them and got yourself whitelisted. I did that when I first set up my mail server and got a response the next day saying I was whitelisted. No idea if they still have that policy, and I've never had to do it for any other host.
But like I said, I've put very little effort into this and have no problem getting into my recipients' inboxes with all major mail providers.
I installed Mailinabox [1] four years ago. There was one annoying upgrade, whose process needs to improved, but outside of that haven't touched anything. Only a couple of random domains where email delivery has failed. Otherwise, it just delivers to all the big providers.
That annoying upgrade is the reason I’m planning on moving to Stalwart[1]. I’m still on the old MiaB version and I’ve always been interested in JMAP (which Stalwart supports)
As someone that's self-hosted email for years, I don't think it's that hard. There's plenty of great solutions that make it easy. Sure, there are footguns, but they are well known and easy to avoid.
RackNerd offers one for $10.99 a year [1]. I've used them before and they are a solid provider. Besides you can use the same server and same IPv4 address for hosting multiple email domains.
I still prefer to shield my domain and inboxes. Probably a silly exercise, but I like knowing that no one can spam my true inbox or domain as its never given out.
Like every last time it was posted. It’s not suitable for anything other than your hobby email domain. If you use your email with your bank, and other critical services I’d seriously not go with a one-person show.
Whenever I come across landing pages I always wonder, how many people are the "we" and "team" really. It feels disingenuous to use these terms under such circumstances, but he's definitely not a minority doing so. It's kinda the norm, wherever we (｡ ◕ ‿ ◕ ｡) like it or not
I did web dev for many one-off projects, and very often this is the case - that the people are non-existent. When having an altercation with a customer, one of my guys even fired the non-existing support person, and then another non-existing support person took over, apologized, and made amends with the client.
So yeah, at least this guys is somewhat transparent. And with services like my primary email address, I only trust longstanding, reliable services, nothing fresh, nothing beta, nothing with the bus factor of 1. But with the custom domain, at least migration is not super hard maybe? Just hope that it doesn't happen during a 2-week vacation or something.
Is it still a one-man operation? They used to have a blurb about that on their website, but I cannot find it anymore.
The bus-factor of one was probably the main reason I did not choose them when I de-googled myself during Google's fiasco with their "free forever" Legacy GSuite termination. I found out a year or two later that they had rescinded their termination, but it was too late. I had migrated out of Google, to my relief.
Don’t take this the wrong way — really, no hate — but I find it amusing that a cryptic comment from a green-text account on HN is the best business continuity planning documentation available :D
They have an optional writing assistant thing that uses their own in-house model. Sweden is mostly hydro and nuclear, so the environmental arguments against generative AI don't hold up very well.
Late night mixup. Switzerland is also substantially hydro, nuclear, and renewables and headed toward eliminating fossil fuels, so the point still stands. It doesn't contribute to the crisis in the way most generative AI does.
Their comparison of themselves to Proton is rather deceptive. If you're willing have only 1GB of storage, instead of 3GB, you can get proton for free. And at the price they list ($48/yr), you'd get 15GB storage, plus a lot more. And no, I was not paid by proton to say this. I only have the free plan.
This claim is also rather deceptive because the free proton mail does not allow custom domain. To get your own domain with proton you have to get 4usd/month plan.
I looked into Purelymail when searching around for good email solution. Google Workspace was getting a bit costly and there were too many things I did not need.
Zoho Mail provides another option - $1.95 per month I think for my use where I am (AU) and has all the features I need for my small indie business.
One other option I tried was to actually run mail myself with Linode VPS - https://mailinabox.email/
I know it sounds a little scary at the start running your own thing, but so far it's been working out great - zero issues so far. I may turn off Zoho one day and go fully into self-hosted option.
Came here to mention Zoho Mail. I use Zoho to provide IMAP and SMTP mail for a webapp that required a dedicated address. Would have been like $72/year to make a whole new user in Google Workspace.
I've been a Purelymail customer since July 2021. For the most part I have been very satisfied. However, in July 2024 I sent an email to Scott for support because I have been getting too much spam. He said that the spamassassin auto-learning filter was broken and he was working on a replacement. In the time since then, I think maybe it is doing a little better, but I still get quite a lot of spam.
But for $0.40/month I have not had any inclination to switch providers.
The pricing model is very well thought out and worth studying. Cheap but not free generous base layer, that falls back to prepaid credit resource based billing for high users. Even details like punitively increased pricing to discourage higher risk outbound email patterns.
This removes risks from both seller and buyer. The seller is not afraid of an avalanche of free trial users resulting in a big cloud bill. The user is not afraid of surprise overages (cough recent Vercel scandals cough) nor has to think about usage patterns that fit into arbitrary quotas, nor about surprises that catch up to you if you use the service at scale.
This is the way to do small utilities that have a cloud cost; services of the 'save you the trouble of self-hosting' type, or the 'tool somebody writes once, and people might use occasionally for years' pattern.
Maybe not the way to extract maximum value and growth for an ambitious startus, but a good choice for the many modest niche services out there.
An interesting service, and very competitively priced. But for me, my email is fairly mission-critical. It's not something I'm prepared to endow in a one-man shop. I don't mean to offend, but it looks like something that might be used as something of a novelty. Were I to use it, I'd be backing up my email locally.
I've been using purelymail for multiple domains (with low traffic granted) for about ten years. I've never experienced an outage so far. Support has never failed to respond in the under 5 times I needed it.
I don't agree with you. A key reason to host your email with a reliable cloud storage provider is to have backups handled for you. Fastmail is particularly good in that respect, since it takes periodic backups for you, allowing deleted items to be accessed.
To put things in perspective, I dare say that many large commercial organisations who rely on Office 365 are not backing up emails locally. They do likely have fancy retention holds preventing nefarious actors who compromise access to the account nuking things. I think Fastmail's backup is limited to 7 days. Outside that is a risk; it's one I'll take.
Maybe we have different perceptions of risk. But I think one can reasonably take the view it is unnecessary to have an independent copy in this scenario.
As miles pointed out, the risk is not that they lose your data. The risk is that you lose your account.
They don’t owe you a data download if they decide to terminate the business relationship which they can do at any time without notice or cause. You agree to this when you sign up.
Not having backups of important data in your own possession is just plain stupid. You’re paying them to be online 24/7 and speak IMAP/SMTP, not to archive your data in perpetuity.
This is such a remote possibility, at least with Fastmail, that I do not consider it reasonable to implement my own backup solution. If they are going to shut down, it isn't going to occur imminently and without any warning.
It's an easy statement to make: "just take a backup". But that requires me to dedicate time to implementing a secure and automated solution (and of course, routinely testing restoring it). I'm not doing that, because I pay the service to do that for me. If I'm going to that effort, I may as well self-host.
It's possible your definition of mission critical just doesn't match up to that of those responding to your comment.
If the loss of a set of data would threaten the existence of the company, that's mission critical. While having a sophisticated niche tech partner handle day to day operations of that data is one part of managing the risk of data loss, if one put all their eggs in only that one basket, that would possibly indicate one has a lack of experience with tech vendors and hasn't read anything about managing risk.
Every business should have at least one routinely tested, independent path for mission critical data recovery.
I think you're right. But I also do not think Purelymail falls in the same camp that Fastmail or Office 365 do, so far as expectations of reliability and business continuity are concerned.
The broader question of whether it is appropriate to independently back up your own data in large scale cloud services need not be answered. It is simply sufficient to recognise the risks are far greater when dealing with a one man operation.
Why would I lose access to my Fastmail account? That risk is a remote one. I have 2FA, they take backups and provide support, and they are a reliable company (at least, not a one-person operation).
Do you want free email for multiple addresses on multiple domains with all the features of a Gmail? Just setup Cloudflare to manage your email, create rules to forward to regular Gmail accounts, which you can configure to send email from your domains. 100% free.
just forwarding is great if you can afford losing mail. Gmail will drop your messages occasionally.
You can use gmail's own relay for sending but it won't DKIM sign which is a must even for Gmail itself.
for a more reliable solution use forwarding AND POP3 fetching with some provoder OR use https://gmailify.com which offers own relays too for ~$7 a year.
The usual ones like SendGrid or Mailgun are probably not great for personal email, but it could probably work. Personally, I’ve used Duocircle for a similar setup and it worked pretty well: https://www.duocircle.com/email/outbound-smtp
Delaware incorporation is the norm, but for anyone who cares about dragnet surveillance, the state of incorporation is important, as well as the country.
Proton also does end-to-end encrypted email and supposedly, your emails are never stored decrypted, they are decrypted in your browser and in ingress/egress out of their environment. They're also hosting in switzerland.
That said, like many, I also am looking for an alternative. I pay them too much to not care about their CEO's political commentary.
end-to-end encryption? yes, if both users are on Proton - but don't call it email then.
Storing encrypted makes only sense when keys are not in their hands. Plaintext password enters their system on each login which means they can have your decryption key at any point if needed.
if they use the email/smtp protocol then it's email.
plaintext password does not enter their system. For example I still have to enter a second password for the in-browser decryption (although these days they use the same password). Most of security feels like theatrics, but small measures that add difficulty for a potential threat actor add up.
I think you are misreading my comment: they are the threat actor themselves, tricking users in believing they are better off via Proton.
SMTP does not encrypt messages and they arrive at Proton's inbound relays unencrypted, are scanned in plaintext for spam etc. At this point they can Bcc anything to another relay/account and keep a copy of all inbound messages BEFORE anything gets encrypted.
Access to historical messages? One line of code for logging, and let's not forget GPG does not encrypt the metadata which is readily available. How about FTS indexes, are they also decrypted on the fly in the browser?
Email is complex and not many have the patience to understand the monster behind, but lying about it, as Proton does - I find it just insulting to our profession.
Also "Swiss neutral", this is even more offending. Swiss execute US orders regularly.
Crypto AG was also based in Switzerland - that by itself mattered very little because it was owned by the CIA and the West Germany Intelligence service.
they're very protective about giving foreign states/entities access to information stored by swizz companies. It's not just for banking. As an american,any country not part of the five-eyes coalition and also not a hostile country is great. Not that I have anything to hide, I just want to support a culture of privacy.
I have used this for several years and have had few issues. When I needed support for something (which was my fault) I received a response within a couple of hours.
How difficult is exporting from one provider into another (e.g. from gmail into proton or purely)? I guess normies like me are a bit hesitant due to the risk of messing it up (would be a disaster to lose years of emails, as some are important for record-keeping). Curious to hear from people who've done(/attempted) it and how it went? Was it hard? Were there risks? Any regrets?
I can't speak for Purely, but every one I've tried has had an "import from [previous provider]" feature because that's basically just "pull from imap".
Otherwise: for ~20 years now I've been able to just attach two imap accounts in thunderbird, and drag to move/copy everything from one to the other, and that'll just chug away until it's done. I've never had an issue doing that.
After trying to do this many times using scripting or even paid services… i came to conclusion that easiest and most reliable way is to add both accounts in Thunderbird and copy paste the emails.
If your provider supports IMAP, you can use imapsync https://imapsync.lamiral.info/ to sync emails between two mail boxes. I did it a few times and it was straightforward.
For libre options available from Linux distributions' repositories, see isync (aka mbsync) and offlineimap. And mail clients in general should be able to handle IMAP and standard formats (Maildir, mbox). If one cares about mail backups, it is also useful to archive and backup one's mail in one of those standard and portable formats, and/or to synchronize between multiple machines regularly.
Last year I migrated from my hosting providers email service to Proton Mail after 20 years. I too was worried about preserving mails.
I have used Thunderbird for everything, set to download everything and never delete, so had my primary backup there. I take regular backups of the profile directory as secondary measure, which are kept on my NAS and offsite.
What I did was to just decide to do a hard break. I renamed the old IMAP accounts, added the Proton Mail accounts using the IMAP bridge, and then configured my DNS to point to Proton.
DMARC and all that was easily set up as well thanks to Proton having nice guides and active verification.
Now I still have access to my old mail in my old account folder, and I can use the Proton Mail app on my phone for new stuff.
I also migrated a secondary mail, which was not using my domain and which I've had for almost three decades. There I had to do the laborious task of changing any accounts tied to it, and notify people still using it. I've been keeping it operational for a year and still get the occasional mail, but at a point where I'll be retiring it soon.
Overall been very happy. It showed me it was easier than I feared as long as I have Thunderbird and mail accounts under my own domain.
From one domain to another (gmail.com to custom), a bit of faffing about to get all the accounts moves over.
Moving the mails was as simple as ctrl+a and dragging my mouse in thunderbird.
Between providers with a custom domain (zoho to mxroute) was easy. Just updating the DNS records and moving the emails.
If you are technically able (really just buying a domain and setting the DNS records the provider tells you) I would recommend getting a custom domain. It gives you the ability to move providers at will pretty easily, even if you did want to stick with a gmail for now.
Pretty much every "normie" should download and setup an email client like Thunderbird. You can open it once a month or so to let all the emails download to your own computer. Possibly backed up by some cloud service.
Should be sufficient unless you lose your computer and your email account gets blocked at the same time.
I migrated from Fastmail to Proton last week. I found the whole process pretty painless. Proton has an IMAP migration. Took it a few days, maybe even three. But everything ended up working just fine.
They're a very nice service. I set it up with a custom domain a few years back and forgot about it and recently realized I had negative $9 in credits. I couldn't log into the webmail to access the emails there and it seems they stopped accepting emails. But as soon as I paid the $9 and topped up with a little more credit I was able to access everything.
This is unfair comparison to Proton as it is bundled with their VPN, Calendar, Drive, and Password manager. Given all it comes with, it's very competitively priced. Additionally, they've been at it a long time and built a strong brand around privacy.
But you can’t debundle those — you cannot get ProtonMail (which doesn’t have IMAP) without ProtonCalendar (which doesn’t have CalDAV), ProtonVPN, Proton Password Manager, and an expanding suite of services I already have solutions for that I like better. Being cheaper and only doing mail is a huge plus.
they offer a web client, so, they already have decryption keys for your email. They should just offer IMAPS like everybody else and stop pretending they couldn’t read your email if they wanted to.
They say[1] they only store subject line and to/from addresses accessible to them.
This should be sufficient to implement a web client which does client-side decryption of the content, in which case they indeed could not read the contents.
And they do have the IMAP bridge, I've been using it for a year with Thunderbird without any issues so far.
However I am also curious and in awe : how did this company survive and acquire paying customers with so many well established competitors and so many free alternatives?
AFAIK (and I have looked) no free options have all of the following features: support for custom domains, support for imap, a decent amount of storage.
Most users don't need all of those things, but there is a niche that does, and are willing to pay a little bit to get it.
There's plenty of reasons to drop Google thought. They barely improve old products.
They probably try to force us to use their products: I think you can't use your own assistant with a wakeword. On my pixel watch 1, using a calendar other than Google's sucks. There is almost no useful wearos apps (sure, it's the devs jobs but Google could bribe them or something). A lot of great wear os apps would benefit everyone.
I'm still pissed that they want a monthly subscription for the sleep tracking with the Google home thing... That you buy with your own money.
I care relatively little because I cut ads using browser plugins and suchlike.
Allowing anything shady, let alone incriminating in your email would be insane, whether it's a mailbox at Google or at Proton. Transactional emails from shady websites, like password reset, are best done with email services like mailinator, which offer zero access protection and destroy the received email in a few minutes automatically.
I use Purelymail to send emails from my personal domain (admin@domain.tld) from my self-hosted stuff and to forward emails to my personal domain to my gmail, and it works great for that. I only use it for hobby projects so I'm not too bothered by the lack of audits or a bus factor of 1.
This would be a nice transport/storage backend for DeltaChat, as it seems there are no limits for number of incoming and outgoing emails. In DeltaChat most messages are very short, but if you're chatting in a group it may incur a lot of emails in both directions.
> We're not trying to bamboozle you with glossy images, or sell you a lofty ideal.
Avoiding "lofty ideals" resonates with me. That kind of marketing reeks of weird self-hyping. Like, the company is over-valuing its service and under-thinking its shortcomings.
It’s been around for several years and the homepage still says it’s in beta. I understand that any platform may have undiscovered bugs and issues, but an update on the progress (any indication of improved stability) would be helpful.
> No arbitrary limits. Have as many users and store as much mail as you want.
There is absolutely a limit. If you don't think you have a limit, it's because you don't have your asshole building his too-clever, "mountable PurelyMailFS" project or whatever yet. So you have a limit, but you aren't telling us what it is, or you don't know what it is. And an unknown arbitrary limit is worse than an arbitrary limit.
EDIT: I WAS WRONG. They bill by storage size & queries if you use "significantly more than $10 in resources" -- which is still vague and arbitrary but probably not a lot of users in the murky grey area.
I found the limits are on the pricing and advanced pricing pages. It seems pretty straightforward. You get $10/year of resources. If you use a lot more than that, then you'll get upgraded to advanced pricing.
I get where your mentality is coming from, but I've been with my current mark provider who has "no limits" for twenty years without problems.
I've been with my unlimited backup provider for over a decade without any problems. They keep increasing their available fee but that's ok for how much I'm backing up (several terabytes).
I have an automated account that needs its own inbox but sends like two plain text emails a day... mostly just to me. I never moved it to Fastmail because the price was prohibitive but this would be a great option for it instead.
Just get something like SendGrid or Mailgun – services like this are usually free for a few thousand emails per month, and support SMTP (though are trying to push you to their proprietary API).
I've used Sendgrid quite a bit, it's great! But in this particular case, you may note I specified it needs it's own inbox: This particular tool of mine does presently use IMAP for inbound mail, and even though the volume for it is insignificant, it means I generally need a "real email account" for it.
Oh, right, sorry! I misread that as something along the lines of “sends to my own mailbox”. Perhaps replying on HN first thing in the morning wasn’t such a bright idea haha
According to their advanced pricing calculator at https://purelymail.com/advancedpricing you can get about 16GB for $10 per year. The price for 1000GB would be $376.65.
$210.40 for storage, $4.00 in account fees, $112.89 for received email, $2.77 for received email bandwidth (GB), $46.53 for sent emails, $0.00 for sent email bandwidth (GB), and $0.05 in username fees.
I have my own server for a few mailboxes as well but the spam detection isn't great. I still receive emails from Ukrainian billionaires who want to wire me all their money for safekeeping.
I use rspamd, which is supposed to be great. How are you dealing with spam?
you could use something like proton mail free for hosting if you want something free ?
Sure they have it for 500 mb , but there was a deal to get 5gb instead but I think (Okay so I don't have 5gb) but still 500mb is decent enough , like some others said , you could also export some emails locally and use syncthing but I don't know for me 500mb is decent
This has roughly the same pricing as Fastmail just that it offers much smaller plans. If you are really that tight about money, have your domain DNS on cloudflare and redirect mail to gmail and send from a Cloudflare worker. A bit of a hassle but completely free.
Fastmail is worth it though as it has a really good web client and can do other nice things (Calendar, rules, notes, store random files, etc..)
how about improvmx , it gives redirection for free , I have also discovered it right now in this thread though I think I had heard about it (I am not sure , I know of some email software where you pay one time and then you can self host or they host I am not sure)
That actually seems pretty good. Who's behind this?
If they had a minimal free tier which supports custom domain names I'd definitely give to a go. Gmail was great 20 years ago, but today it's disheartening to see many services restricting registration except from Gmail.com and Yahoo.com domain names.
I'm genuinely surprised no one has mentioned mxroute[1]. Thier pricing normally is pretty decent, but they keep the BF deals going pretty much all year [2].
I've been using them for 6 years with no issues. I use it now with all my domains and never have any deliverability issues.
The owner (Jar - one person shop again) is passionate about their email reputation for deliverability and is active on both lowendtalk and the dedicated sub Reddit.
I ended up comparing purleymail and mxroute - tested mxroute and stayed with them.
[1] https://mxroute.com/ [2] https://mxroute.blackfriday/
Been using mxroute for years, have multiple domains (they let you use unlimited domains IIRC), never had any issues.
Great info on setting up stuff like SPF, DKIM. Easy to set quotas on accounts, set up catch-alls etc.
Never had an issue with deliverability or anything like that.
Probably sound like a shill, but I think it's such a good option, and really reasonably priced. I have a perpetual black friday deal, and I pay like 15 USD a year!!
You're not concerned about the bus factor? What happens if the owner suddenly disappears?
Purelymail's About page lists one person, and the product is in beta.
MXRoute has years of track record, more than 1 employee, and has good tools like IMAPSync to enable easy duplication of your emails for backup or migration to a different platform.
Fair. I didn't phrase my question correctly.
It wasn't really about MXRoute specifically, but the bus factor in general when trusting your email to a tiny company.
+1 happy customer since 2020.
I also use this. Pros: super cheap. <$2/mo for all my custom email addresses and routing rules. Nothing else came close - everything else I found would make me pay per email address even if that address receives an average of 0 emails per month. The wildcard suffixes are really nice as well - they use _ instead of gmail's + (I've had issues with gmail's version as it sometimes is transparently removed, or sometimes the form doesn't consider + a valid character).
Cons: UI is bad, so you'll want to access through a client. 1 person shop. Not audited AFAIK.
+ is not gmail.
+ is industry standard, supported by almost all mail servers (if configured) since long before gmail existed.
The problem with "+" isn't the email side.
The problem with "+" is dumbass Javascript developers who use broken regexes to "validate" an email address.
right. that's very frustrating. just a few days ago i had to create another email alias because of it.
+ was always a legal character, right from the first SMTP RFC 822
My email for one of my CC accounts is like ...+banksucks@gmail.com because it allows plus-addressing, but doesn't like my domain.
In other words, don't worry, they'll find a way to block your email one way or another. :P
It's gmail in the sense that they deliver you+[whatever]@gmail.com to you@gmail.com
By default it's just a valid character.
nope, exactly this feature you describe is what i am referring to. it's not a gmail invention. not by a long shot.
Not a gmail invention perhaps, but also not per RFC. That some use it to mean something special is not in the RFC. Actually, a significant number of SMTP servers don't even implement the required parts of the related RFCs, let alone fancy things like plus handling.
it is not in the SMTP RFC because it is a purely local matter that does not affect email routing.
there are a number of servers that support it. wikipedia lists some if them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Sub-addressing
I think it originated with CMU's email system (the use of the "+" sign specifically).
You're right. Originally the + sign in an email address was an indicator to the Andrew Message System's delivery agent to process the email in an extensible way. The syntax was +<keyword>+<args>. As an example. you could use "user+dir-insert+misc" to route the message to the "misc" directory in the user's mailbox structure. An unknown keyword would just get ignored and the mail delivered as usual, giving the behavior as used today.
TIL! Thanks, was not aware of that.
As stated by others, + addressing is not gmail specific. One thing that gmail does however is allowing you to add (or remove) arbitrary dots in your mail-address, and these are stripped out / all end up in the same mailbox.
hmm, at that price you could try https://migadu.com
https://mailbox.org comes pretty close.
I know online services or any service depends a lot on personal interaction experiences and personal expectations from those services and people involved in those services, but I can't leave mailbox.org sooner.
I have tried/explored couple of them like Mailbox.org (of course, current user), Fastmail, Proton, and Runbox etc. Given everything http://runbox.com seems to be the best among them - much better than Mailbox. In fact for Mailbox their less than 'less than ideal' support is enough for me to move elsewhere once my balance runs out (which I foolishly pumped in more than I should have had)
Runbox isn't w/o its challenges but they do certain things really nice and they are: prompt, not into disregard a request in its entirety, not un-kind, not-jerk, not-flippant, not-entitled, not-costly, not into offering unusable shit that you don't need in an email suite to begin with, and basically open and engaging.
So while I am not a customer right now, once the mailbox.org balance is close to running out and I will leave mailbox (and leave them I will) Runbox is the first contender to replace them right now.
I tried runbox before mailbox.org but it didn't work for me.
They didn't support a server-side filter that copied emails from the inbox to another folder. And something was wrong with their DKIM support, but my notes don't say what.
mailbox.org has it's problems though and I'd be happy to find something better.
> didn't support a server-side filter that copied emails from the inbox to another folder
You mean a rule where you can say [mail:received-from="domain:xyz.com" > move to > "Saved" folder] - and it happens, something like this? Honestly I did not check it but I guess they might handle it.
During my trials I didn't find any issue with their DKIM support. https://help.runbox.com/dkim-signing/ seems fine to me. You might want to ask if you are interested, unlike mailbox.org they do reply, and they reply promptly, and they reply as if they mean it.
> I'd be happy to find something better
Please do share here on HN if you happen to find something better. Cheers.
Yup. Have been with them for a couple years now and it has been really stable.
That seems to have a limited number of addresses.
As far as I can tell Fastmail comes pretty close, I have as many email addresses as I want on multiple domains and a bunch of routing rules for €4/mo.
How do you do that on Fastmail? I only see per email address pricing with each email address cost close to what you pay.
Oh, maybe I didn't mean the same as you. I can create as many email addresses as I want, but they all go to the same inbox. Multiple inboxes would cost more.
In the pricing page it is listed in the "Individual" plan as "+ Extra email addresses for personal and work".
Edit: It is possible to create an extra email address and set it up so that all emails it receives are sent to a different external email address
[dead]
Various shared hosting likely will always beat this price. Caveat is that many shared hosters don't know how to properly run mail servers within their shared hosting infra. Many do, however.
did you compare with Zoho mail?
Zoho produces a lot of spam and regularly ends up on blocklists.
posteo has been great for me and also allows you to define aliases, thou each alias costs 10c per month. If you stay below 10 aliases, it is <2€ per month as well.
Doesn’t support custom domains
Customer for a few years now. I don't do anything fancy with it. It was the cheapest and most appealing option for a custom domain for personal email. I think it runs me ~$11 a year or something
I combine it with simplelogin to handle all my aliasing needs.
Thanks for the great service.
How is deliverability?
Because for $11/year you can get a simple kvm machine and run your own servers.
I have heard this a lot of times but self hosting email is one of the hardest things to do , sure if you are masochist then do it , but if you are a working functional part of society , not recommended.
I really have an issue with that.
On the one hand, it's just wrong. Self-hosting mail is not easy because you need to learn how things work. But it's far from being "one of the hardest things to do", even in the domain of hosting things. A properly set up mail server will seamlessly send mails to almost any other MTA. The only large exception is microsoft. The abuse their market power by black-list all new MTAs by default until you create a ticket to "mitigate" this and they tend to re-blacklist small MTAs from time to time.
On the other hand, it's that kind of statements that worsen the situation. People should be encouraged to set up their own MTAs and provided with help to do it in a good professional way. It's one important part of keeping the mail part internet free and not in the hand of few large companies.
Agreed , I don't know two things about mail (use proton mail) , but I don't own any servers .
But I still self host stuff using docker (shiori etc.)
I mean , see there is a difference in complexity.
Like if you want to self host supabase , its complex , but its still automatable by a docker compose.
About Mails?? I am just not sure! , Maybe I shouldn't have expressed this opinion on the internet. I was just regurtitating what I heard from r/selfhosted feeds about email where they constantly said this. They even provided some explaination (see the message to which I said "this!!" , because that's what I meant.
Maybe even what you said about microsoft. But still , I really really don't want to take any risks with the mail , like what if a critical message of email doesn't come? I don't even want to know!!
I personally just believe that due to these reasons , that mail is just an old wagon which is riding into the future. I personally would prefer mail alternatives like xmpp / (preferably matrix!!)
I know matrix self hosting can take quite some resources but I do believe that the protocol in my honest opinion could be much more better for self hosting.
Just my two cents.
> The only large exception is microsoft.
Comcast also gives me no end of annoyance by repeatedly black-listing my server for no apparent reason. The process goes: get blocked, request reason, get a hand shrug and unblock, rinse and repeat.
There should be a blocklist for MTAs that blocks others for no reason and all "free" MTA should use these to put a little pressure on those.
> self hosting email is one of the hardest things to do
I spent an hour setting up postfix and some milters on a Digital Ocean droplet around 7 years ago and it's been working fine as my personal email server with no deliverability issues or maintenance since then. I ssh in every few years to try out a new spam filter or something and maybe upgrade some packages if I feel like it. These days there are even easier mail-in-a-box style turnkey deployments that work just as well but don't need as much knowledge or setup as bare postfix.
At this point, the biggest barrier to self-hosting email is the deafening cries of people who don't know what they're talking about parroting how impossible it is to do.
Setting up a mail server isn't hard. Making it trustworthy enough for Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook.com to accept your messages and not put them in the spam folder is the hard part. Especially if whoever had your IP address previously was sending spam.
In my experience, every large provider except Microsoft will default to delivering your emails to the destination inbox unless your mails actually look like spam, you incorrectly set up a verification mechanism like SPF or DKIM, or your IP has a bad reputation (which usually only comes with sketchy hosting providers, as good ones will quickly cut off spam coming from their network). Microsoft was well known at the time for having the extremely annoying policy of just automatically blackhole-ing any new mail server until you contacted them and got yourself whitelisted. I did that when I first set up my mail server and got a response the next day saying I was whitelisted. No idea if they still have that policy, and I've never had to do it for any other host.
But like I said, I've put very little effort into this and have no problem getting into my recipients' inboxes with all major mail providers.
This!
I installed Mailinabox [1] four years ago. There was one annoying upgrade, whose process needs to improved, but outside of that haven't touched anything. Only a couple of random domains where email delivery has failed. Otherwise, it just delivers to all the big providers.
[1] https://mailinabox.email/
That annoying upgrade is the reason I’m planning on moving to Stalwart[1]. I’m still on the old MiaB version and I’ve always been interested in JMAP (which Stalwart supports)
[1]: https://stalw.art
As someone that's self-hosted email for years, I don't think it's that hard. There's plenty of great solutions that make it easy. Sure, there are footguns, but they are well known and easy to avoid.
your time worth a lot more.
there are not a lot of options to get a virtual server under $1 per month, especially with IPv4 address
RackNerd offers one for $10.99 a year [1]. I've used them before and they are a solid provider. Besides you can use the same server and same IPv4 address for hosting multiple email domains.
[1] https://vncoupon.com/black-friday-racknerd-huge-savings-spec...
15 USD or EUR a year is almost trivial.
It will have more than enough resources for SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, and even a personal VPN.
It's really not difficult.
The problem is that most IPs will be tainted and unless you are a major player, email deliverability sucks.
That's why I asked, because these guys were unknown to me.
Are you insinuating 11$/yr is too expensive for the service lmao.
It's so cheap people probably don't buy it because it will go bankrupt.
What do you need SimpleLogin for? Purelymail supports aliases on its own.
I still prefer to shield my domain and inboxes. Probably a silly exercise, but I like knowing that no one can spam my true inbox or domain as its never given out.
Like every last time it was posted. It’s not suitable for anything other than your hobby email domain. If you use your email with your bank, and other critical services I’d seriously not go with a one-person show.
> Also, we're in beta
https://purelymail.com/about
> We're a small company. So small, the "we" is royal.
I wish Scott best of luck and I hope one day it reaches there but until it is anything but confidence boosting.
Whenever I come across landing pages I always wonder, how many people are the "we" and "team" really. It feels disingenuous to use these terms under such circumstances, but he's definitely not a minority doing so. It's kinda the norm, wherever we (｡ ◕ ‿ ◕ ｡) like it or not
I think it sounds natural to say "we" in the context of a company even if it's a one-person company, but I just know english as a second language.
Me and my accountant...
He could get a cat and technically not be lying.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard
I did web dev for many one-off projects, and very often this is the case - that the people are non-existent. When having an altercation with a customer, one of my guys even fired the non-existing support person, and then another non-existing support person took over, apologized, and made amends with the client.
So yeah, at least this guys is somewhat transparent. And with services like my primary email address, I only trust longstanding, reliable services, nothing fresh, nothing beta, nothing with the bus factor of 1. But with the custom domain, at least migration is not super hard maybe? Just hope that it doesn't happen during a 2-week vacation or something.
> If you use your email with your bank, and other critical services I’d seriously not go with a one-person show.
OTOH using your own domain means you can easily migrate to a new email server in the event that Purelymail folds.
Is it still a one-man operation? They used to have a blurb about that on their website, but I cannot find it anymore.
The bus-factor of one was probably the main reason I did not choose them when I de-googled myself during Google's fiasco with their "free forever" Legacy GSuite termination. I found out a year or two later that they had rescinded their termination, but it was too late. I had migrated out of Google, to my relief.
Looks like it.
https://purelymail.com/about
It is, but he has someone ready if he gets hit by a bus.
Don’t take this the wrong way — really, no hate — but I find it amusing that a cryptic comment from a green-text account on HN is the best business continuity planning documentation available :D
It's the part about attempting to train someone as a backup that I remember reading on their website. I can no longer find that blurb..
[dead]
Another happy Purelymail customer here (5 years).
if anyone needs to move mail storage from one IMAP server to another (eg; Purelymail) I can highly recommend https://imapsync.lamiral.info/
Not for it's website graphic design, but as a CLI tool that works perfectly. "source server -->> target server" and let it run
+1 for Imapsync.
I use it to back up/sync all of my email accounts via IMAP to a different email provider account, and it works great!
Seems like a reasonable alternative to Proton for multiple domains: email that costs money instead of being haunted by AI.
That logo is creepy though, and implies exactly the opposite.
Haunted by AI? I haven’t heard of problems with Proton outside of their calendar implementation, which I’ve heard they’re fixing this year.
They have an optional writing assistant thing that uses their own in-house model. Sweden is mostly hydro and nuclear, so the environmental arguments against generative AI don't hold up very well.
Proton is Swiss, not Swedish
Late night mixup. Switzerland is also substantially hydro, nuclear, and renewables and headed toward eliminating fossil fuels, so the point still stands. It doesn't contribute to the crisis in the way most generative AI does.
They also ran their datacenters on 100% renewables as of 3 years ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/pa76za/is_proto...
oh lmao , I had just watched a video where people were confusing sweden and swiss (heck the swiss president missaid switzerland to sweden lmao)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oNX_BHgi3c
I was like , okay nobody confuses swiss and sweden but here you are!
It's the insidious sw
Fastmail seems to let me have unlimited domains for like $5/mo
Which is 6 times more than purelymail.
Their comparison of themselves to Proton is rather deceptive. If you're willing have only 1GB of storage, instead of 3GB, you can get proton for free. And at the price they list ($48/yr), you'd get 15GB storage, plus a lot more. And no, I was not paid by proton to say this. I only have the free plan.
This claim is also rather deceptive because the free proton mail does not allow custom domain. To get your own domain with proton you have to get 4usd/month plan.
Proton does not allow you to use standard protocols (IMAP/SMTP), which is a deal-breaker for me.
They have a bridge app for normal protocols, though I have had problems with it losing content IDs on attachments
Protonmail doesn’t support IMAP which is something wish I knew before migrating
might be a freemason thing
I looked into Purelymail when searching around for good email solution. Google Workspace was getting a bit costly and there were too many things I did not need.
Zoho Mail provides another option - $1.95 per month I think for my use where I am (AU) and has all the features I need for my small indie business.
One other option I tried was to actually run mail myself with Linode VPS - https://mailinabox.email/
I know it sounds a little scary at the start running your own thing, but so far it's been working out great - zero issues so far. I may turn off Zoho one day and go fully into self-hosted option.
Came here to mention Zoho Mail. I use Zoho to provide IMAP and SMTP mail for a webapp that required a dedicated address. Would have been like $72/year to make a whole new user in Google Workspace.
Purelymail has been great! I've used it for about a year, no issues, just works and extremely cheap.
Same here. It's wonderful. I moved over when Gandi started charging for its e-mail hosting.
I've been a Purelymail customer since July 2021. For the most part I have been very satisfied. However, in July 2024 I sent an email to Scott for support because I have been getting too much spam. He said that the spamassassin auto-learning filter was broken and he was working on a replacement. In the time since then, I think maybe it is doing a little better, but I still get quite a lot of spam.
But for $0.40/month I have not had any inclination to switch providers.
https://voussoir.net/spam
The pricing model is very well thought out and worth studying. Cheap but not free generous base layer, that falls back to prepaid credit resource based billing for high users. Even details like punitively increased pricing to discourage higher risk outbound email patterns.
This removes risks from both seller and buyer. The seller is not afraid of an avalanche of free trial users resulting in a big cloud bill. The user is not afraid of surprise overages (cough recent Vercel scandals cough) nor has to think about usage patterns that fit into arbitrary quotas, nor about surprises that catch up to you if you use the service at scale.
This is the way to do small utilities that have a cloud cost; services of the 'save you the trouble of self-hosting' type, or the 'tool somebody writes once, and people might use occasionally for years' pattern.
Maybe not the way to extract maximum value and growth for an ambitious startus, but a good choice for the many modest niche services out there.
Very honest Landing Page. If anyone is interested in self hosting their own emails, I have found mailinabox to be a useful start:
https://mailinabox.email/ https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox
An interesting service, and very competitively priced. But for me, my email is fairly mission-critical. It's not something I'm prepared to endow in a one-man shop. I don't mean to offend, but it looks like something that might be used as something of a novelty. Were I to use it, I'd be backing up my email locally.
I've been using purelymail for multiple domains (with low traffic granted) for about ten years. I've never experienced an outage so far. Support has never failed to respond in the under 5 times I needed it.
You should be backing up your email locally regardless, even if you use Google Workspace or Fastmail.
I don't agree with you. A key reason to host your email with a reliable cloud storage provider is to have backups handled for you. Fastmail is particularly good in that respect, since it takes periodic backups for you, allowing deleted items to be accessed.
To put things in perspective, I dare say that many large commercial organisations who rely on Office 365 are not backing up emails locally. They do likely have fancy retention holds preventing nefarious actors who compromise access to the account nuking things. I think Fastmail's backup is limited to 7 days. Outside that is a risk; it's one I'll take.
Maybe we have different perceptions of risk. But I think one can reasonably take the view it is unnecessary to have an independent copy in this scenario.
As miles pointed out, the risk is not that they lose your data. The risk is that you lose your account.
They don’t owe you a data download if they decide to terminate the business relationship which they can do at any time without notice or cause. You agree to this when you sign up.
Not having backups of important data in your own possession is just plain stupid. You’re paying them to be online 24/7 and speak IMAP/SMTP, not to archive your data in perpetuity.
Email hosting and backups are different services.
This is such a remote possibility, at least with Fastmail, that I do not consider it reasonable to implement my own backup solution. If they are going to shut down, it isn't going to occur imminently and without any warning.
It's an easy statement to make: "just take a backup". But that requires me to dedicate time to implementing a secure and automated solution (and of course, routinely testing restoring it). I'm not doing that, because I pay the service to do that for me. If I'm going to that effort, I may as well self-host.
It's possible your definition of mission critical just doesn't match up to that of those responding to your comment.
If the loss of a set of data would threaten the existence of the company, that's mission critical. While having a sophisticated niche tech partner handle day to day operations of that data is one part of managing the risk of data loss, if one put all their eggs in only that one basket, that would possibly indicate one has a lack of experience with tech vendors and hasn't read anything about managing risk.
Every business should have at least one routinely tested, independent path for mission critical data recovery.
I think you're right. But I also do not think Purelymail falls in the same camp that Fastmail or Office 365 do, so far as expectations of reliability and business continuity are concerned.
The broader question of whether it is appropriate to independently back up your own data in large scale cloud services need not be answered. It is simply sufficient to recognise the risks are far greater when dealing with a one man operation.
> dedicate time to implementing a secure and automated solution
Why not just use a mail retrieval agent[1][2] to download mail via IMAP?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_retrieval_agent
[2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications/Intern...
The risk is not that they shut down, the risk is that you lose your hosting account.
It happens all of the time.
Downloading your mailbox is trivial, comparing it to self-hosting is not accurate. (I do both.)
Why would I lose access to my Fastmail account? That risk is a remote one. I have 2FA, they take backups and provide support, and they are a reliable company (at least, not a one-person operation).
Frankly keeping your mailbox backed up is mind boggingly easy.
Essentially you just have to configure mutt on a *nix host to download your email once an hour. 10 minute set up time?
Miles different from managing your own email infrastructure.
> A key reason to host your email with a reliable cloud storage provider is to have backups handled for you
Is it only email you don't back up or do you not back up any of your data that's stored on companies' servers?
>> You should be backing up your email locally regardless, even if you use Google Workspace or Fastmail.
> I don't agree with you. A key reason to host your email with a reliable cloud storage provider is to have backups handled for you.
Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935
Google users locked out after 15 years' use https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965432
I got locked out of my Google account for a month https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989146
Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42350245
Android user locked out of Google after moving cities https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13004369
Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22705122
Ask HN: Locked out of Google services with no recourse or explanation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17428707
ASK HN: Google account disabled. Oh what to do? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350968
Ask HN: Google just kicked me out of my account, no option to verify https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24709282
Man locked out of Google Drive and loses 9 year old photos after SIM Swap attack https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41915523
Ask HN: Locked out of Google Aps email with no recourse - advice? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9768593
When you get locked out of your Google account, what do you do? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31070914
Parent said reliable, not google.
Isn't back-up longhand for POP in this context?
Discussed before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27707857 (2021)
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Purelymail: Cheap, No-Nonsense Email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33058691 - Oct 2022 (4 comments)
Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27707857 - July 2021 (307 comments)
Purelymail: Cheap email with custom domains, 2FA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23567456 - June 2020 (1 comment)
Show HN: Purelymail (Beta) – extremely cheap custom domain email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19134881 - Feb 2019 (1 comment)
Do you want free email for multiple addresses on multiple domains with all the features of a Gmail? Just setup Cloudflare to manage your email, create rules to forward to regular Gmail accounts, which you can configure to send email from your domains. 100% free.
You can't send outgoing mail to arbitrary email addresses. You can only reply, synchronously, to incoming emails.
I do want all the features of a Gmail, I just don’t want Google going through it.
just forwarding is great if you can afford losing mail. Gmail will drop your messages occasionally.
You can use gmail's own relay for sending but it won't DKIM sign which is a must even for Gmail itself.
for a more reliable solution use forwarding AND POP3 fetching with some provoder OR use https://gmailify.com which offers own relays too for ~$7 a year.
Could you say more? Is there a tutorial I could follow?
iirc with this setup, Google just changes the "reply-to" and someone can still figure out your actual Gmail address.
I think you can still add an SMTP server in Gmail, and it will use that (with a proper From header, DKIM and all).
In a Cloudflare+GMail setup, what SMTP server would I use for sending?
Any third-party one! There’s a bunch of options.
The usual ones like SendGrid or Mailgun are probably not great for personal email, but it could probably work. Personally, I’ve used Duocircle for a similar setup and it worked pretty well: https://www.duocircle.com/email/outbound-smtp
Delaware incorporation is the norm, but for anyone who cares about dragnet surveillance, the state of incorporation is important, as well as the country.
Proton also does end-to-end encrypted email and supposedly, your emails are never stored decrypted, they are decrypted in your browser and in ingress/egress out of their environment. They're also hosting in switzerland.
That said, like many, I also am looking for an alternative. I pay them too much to not care about their CEO's political commentary.
end-to-end encryption? yes, if both users are on Proton - but don't call it email then.
Storing encrypted makes only sense when keys are not in their hands. Plaintext password enters their system on each login which means they can have your decryption key at any point if needed.
smoke and mirrors marketing...
if they use the email/smtp protocol then it's email.
plaintext password does not enter their system. For example I still have to enter a second password for the in-browser decryption (although these days they use the same password). Most of security feels like theatrics, but small measures that add difficulty for a potential threat actor add up.
I think you are misreading my comment: they are the threat actor themselves, tricking users in believing they are better off via Proton.
SMTP does not encrypt messages and they arrive at Proton's inbound relays unencrypted, are scanned in plaintext for spam etc. At this point they can Bcc anything to another relay/account and keep a copy of all inbound messages BEFORE anything gets encrypted.
Access to historical messages? One line of code for logging, and let's not forget GPG does not encrypt the metadata which is readily available. How about FTS indexes, are they also decrypted on the fly in the browser?
Email is complex and not many have the patience to understand the monster behind, but lying about it, as Proton does - I find it just insulting to our profession.
Also "Swiss neutral", this is even more offending. Swiss execute US orders regularly.
Translated: https://daslamm-ch.translate.goog/ueberwachungsoase-statt-da...
Original: https://daslamm.ch/ueberwachungsoase-statt-datenschutzparadi...
What we really need instead of such shams is a new mail system that does not depend on trusting providers and especially not a SINGLE provider.
> They're also hosting in switzerland.
Crypto AG was also based in Switzerland - that by itself mattered very little because it was owned by the CIA and the West Germany Intelligence service.
What kind of commentary are you referring to?
see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42837181
>They're also hosting in switzerland.
....means nothing. Unless you know something the rest of us don't?
they're very protective about giving foreign states/entities access to information stored by swizz companies. It's not just for banking. As an american,any country not part of the five-eyes coalition and also not a hostile country is great. Not that I have anything to hide, I just want to support a culture of privacy.
*Swiss
[dead]
I have used this for several years and have had few issues. When I needed support for something (which was my fault) I received a response within a couple of hours.
How difficult is exporting from one provider into another (e.g. from gmail into proton or purely)? I guess normies like me are a bit hesitant due to the risk of messing it up (would be a disaster to lose years of emails, as some are important for record-keeping). Curious to hear from people who've done(/attempted) it and how it went? Was it hard? Were there risks? Any regrets?
I can't speak for Purely, but every one I've tried has had an "import from [previous provider]" feature because that's basically just "pull from imap".
Otherwise: for ~20 years now I've been able to just attach two imap accounts in thunderbird, and drag to move/copy everything from one to the other, and that'll just chug away until it's done. I've never had an issue doing that.
After trying to do this many times using scripting or even paid services… i came to conclusion that easiest and most reliable way is to add both accounts in Thunderbird and copy paste the emails.
If your provider supports IMAP, you can use imapsync https://imapsync.lamiral.info/ to sync emails between two mail boxes. I did it a few times and it was straightforward.
For libre options available from Linux distributions' repositories, see isync (aka mbsync) and offlineimap. And mail clients in general should be able to handle IMAP and standard formats (Maildir, mbox). If one cares about mail backups, it is also useful to archive and backup one's mail in one of those standard and portable formats, and/or to synchronize between multiple machines regularly.
Last year I migrated from my hosting providers email service to Proton Mail after 20 years. I too was worried about preserving mails.
I have used Thunderbird for everything, set to download everything and never delete, so had my primary backup there. I take regular backups of the profile directory as secondary measure, which are kept on my NAS and offsite.
What I did was to just decide to do a hard break. I renamed the old IMAP accounts, added the Proton Mail accounts using the IMAP bridge, and then configured my DNS to point to Proton.
DMARC and all that was easily set up as well thanks to Proton having nice guides and active verification.
Now I still have access to my old mail in my old account folder, and I can use the Proton Mail app on my phone for new stuff.
I also migrated a secondary mail, which was not using my domain and which I've had for almost three decades. There I had to do the laborious task of changing any accounts tied to it, and notify people still using it. I've been keeping it operational for a year and still get the occasional mail, but at a point where I'll be retiring it soon.
Overall been very happy. It showed me it was easier than I feared as long as I have Thunderbird and mail accounts under my own domain.
From one domain to another (gmail.com to custom), a bit of faffing about to get all the accounts moves over.
Moving the mails was as simple as ctrl+a and dragging my mouse in thunderbird.
Between providers with a custom domain (zoho to mxroute) was easy. Just updating the DNS records and moving the emails.
If you are technically able (really just buying a domain and setting the DNS records the provider tells you) I would recommend getting a custom domain. It gives you the ability to move providers at will pretty easily, even if you did want to stick with a gmail for now.
Pretty much every "normie" should download and setup an email client like Thunderbird. You can open it once a month or so to let all the emails download to your own computer. Possibly backed up by some cloud service.
Should be sufficient unless you lose your computer and your email account gets blocked at the same time.
I migrated from Fastmail to Proton last week. I found the whole process pretty painless. Proton has an IMAP migration. Took it a few days, maybe even three. But everything ended up working just fine.
They're a very nice service. I set it up with a custom domain a few years back and forgot about it and recently realized I had negative $9 in credits. I couldn't log into the webmail to access the emails there and it seems they stopped accepting emails. But as soon as I paid the $9 and topped up with a little more credit I was able to access everything.
This is unfair comparison to Proton as it is bundled with their VPN, Calendar, Drive, and Password manager. Given all it comes with, it's very competitively priced. Additionally, they've been at it a long time and built a strong brand around privacy.
But you can’t debundle those — you cannot get ProtonMail (which doesn’t have IMAP) without ProtonCalendar (which doesn’t have CalDAV), ProtonVPN, Proton Password Manager, and an expanding suite of services I already have solutions for that I like better. Being cheaper and only doing mail is a huge plus.
ProtonMail has IMAP via ProtonMail Bridge, which handles the decrypt/encrypt step locally - not sure how else it would be implemented. Ideas?
they offer a web client, so, they already have decryption keys for your email. They should just offer IMAPS like everybody else and stop pretending they couldn’t read your email if they wanted to.
They say[1] they only store subject line and to/from addresses accessible to them.
This should be sufficient to implement a web client which does client-side decryption of the content, in which case they indeed could not read the contents.
And they do have the IMAP bridge, I've been using it for a year with Thunderbird without any issues so far.
[1]: https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained
The client-side decryption works by using a key sent by protonmail. Proton has this key, because they sent it to you.
It looks like standalone Proton Mail might still be available:
https://proton.me/mail/pricing
Oh didn't know that. And at $10/month. So the same price as in this advertisement pretending to be a blog post.
They missed a good service, which I’ve recommended here often, in their comparison — Migadu (no affiliation).
https://www.migadu.com
For the use case presented, one user 3GB, Zoho is absolutely free. It's free for up to 5 users at 5GB each, in fact.
I've been using it for a few years now and love it. Will gladly pay if they kick me off the free plan.
Zoho free plan doesn't include IMAP or POP.
That's completely fair, but should have been included as criteria in the price comparison section.
Another happy customer here - for about 5 years I think. 0 issues. I think they had a small outage at some, but it was resolved super quick.
This is lovely.
However I am also curious and in awe : how did this company survive and acquire paying customers with so many well established competitors and so many free alternatives?
I am seeking inspiration!
AFAIK (and I have looked) no free options have all of the following features: support for custom domains, support for imap, a decent amount of storage.
Most users don't need all of those things, but there is a niche that does, and are willing to pay a little bit to get it.
Whats the reason for using this over free options like gmail?
For me it's the ability to use a custom domain. See https://lorendb.dev/posts/the-case-for-custom-email-domains/ for my reasoning why I do this.
Your emails aren't being anaylyzed to create a profile about for being used for targeted ads.
Doesn't Google claim they don't read your emails?
There's plenty of reasons to drop Google thought. They barely improve old products.
They probably try to force us to use their products: I think you can't use your own assistant with a wakeword. On my pixel watch 1, using a calendar other than Google's sucks. There is almost no useful wearos apps (sure, it's the devs jobs but Google could bribe them or something). A lot of great wear os apps would benefit everyone.
I'm still pissed that they want a monthly subscription for the sleep tracking with the Google home thing... That you buy with your own money.
Except for all the emails you send to all the other people still using Gmail.
Harder for Google to tie it to you though when you're not using a Google account
I care relatively little because I cut ads using browser plugins and suchlike.
Allowing anything shady, let alone incriminating in your email would be insane, whether it's a mailbox at Google or at Proton. Transactional emails from shady websites, like password reset, are best done with email services like mailinator, which offer zero access protection and destroy the received email in a few minutes automatically.
Mostly custom domain emails or API usage
I use Purelymail to send emails from my personal domain (admin@domain.tld) from my self-hosted stuff and to forward emails to my personal domain to my gmail, and it works great for that. I only use it for hobby projects so I'm not too bothered by the lack of audits or a bus factor of 1.
This would be a nice transport/storage backend for DeltaChat, as it seems there are no limits for number of incoming and outgoing emails. In DeltaChat most messages are very short, but if you're chatting in a group it may incur a lot of emails in both directions.
> We're not trying to bamboozle you with glossy images, or sell you a lofty ideal.
Avoiding "lofty ideals" resonates with me. That kind of marketing reeks of weird self-hyping. Like, the company is over-valuing its service and under-thinking its shortcomings.
Zoho have a free plan we have been using for years for business, 5 emails, each 5 GB.
Do you have a link? The nearest best I can find is https://www.zoho.com/de/mail/zohomail-pricing.html which is ~12 bucks a year
https://mail.zoho.eu/signup?type=org&plan=free
It’s been around for several years and the homepage still says it’s in beta. I understand that any platform may have undiscovered bugs and issues, but an update on the progress (any indication of improved stability) would be helpful.
> No arbitrary limits. Have as many users and store as much mail as you want.
There is absolutely a limit. If you don't think you have a limit, it's because you don't have your asshole building his too-clever, "mountable PurelyMailFS" project or whatever yet. So you have a limit, but you aren't telling us what it is, or you don't know what it is. And an unknown arbitrary limit is worse than an arbitrary limit.
EDIT: I WAS WRONG. They bill by storage size & queries if you use "significantly more than $10 in resources" -- which is still vague and arbitrary but probably not a lot of users in the murky grey area.
I found the limits are on the pricing and advanced pricing pages. It seems pretty straightforward. You get $10/year of resources. If you use a lot more than that, then you'll get upgraded to advanced pricing.
https://purelymail.com/advancedpricing
Oh! I read that much more pessimistically. This is great!
I get where your mentality is coming from, but I've been with my current mark provider who has "no limits" for twenty years without problems.
I've been with my unlimited backup provider for over a decade without any problems. They keep increasing their available fee but that's ok for how much I'm backing up (several terabytes).
It pays in life not to be too cynical.
What company?
Mark?
Sorry - typo. mail.
I have an automated account that needs its own inbox but sends like two plain text emails a day... mostly just to me. I never moved it to Fastmail because the price was prohibitive but this would be a great option for it instead.
Just get something like SendGrid or Mailgun – services like this are usually free for a few thousand emails per month, and support SMTP (though are trying to push you to their proprietary API).
I've used Sendgrid quite a bit, it's great! But in this particular case, you may note I specified it needs it's own inbox: This particular tool of mine does presently use IMAP for inbound mail, and even though the volume for it is insignificant, it means I generally need a "real email account" for it.
Oh, right, sorry! I misread that as something along the lines of “sends to my own mailbox”. Perhaps replying on HN first thing in the morning wasn’t such a bright idea haha
FWIW Mailgun also has a receiving API (proprietary, unfortunately): https://www.mailgun.com/products/send/inbound-routing/
>No arbitrary limits. Have as many users and store as much mail as you want.
New company policy, if you need to save large files like 3d renders, please use email for storage.
According to their advanced pricing calculator at https://purelymail.com/advancedpricing you can get about 16GB for $10 per year. The price for 1000GB would be $376.65.
"If you use significantly more than $10 a year in resources, you may need to switch to advanced pricing"
> Some features other providers have, such as calendar syncing, are not yet implemented.
What is the story with FOSS calendar sync tools on the server end? Standardized? Reliable? Easy enough?
I personally prefer to setup my own mail server. No troubles with receiving or sending, thus far (2 years)
But this is a pretty good option for non-technical folks.
I have my own server for a few mailboxes as well but the spam detection isn't great. I still receive emails from Ukrainian billionaires who want to wire me all their money for safekeeping.
I use rspamd, which is supposed to be great. How are you dealing with spam?
https://mailcast.io offers free email forwarding for one domain
https://improvmx.com/ is free for 1 email
It’s also just forwarding, not email hosting.
you could use something like proton mail free for hosting if you want something free ?
Sure they have it for 500 mb , but there was a deal to get 5gb instead but I think (Okay so I don't have 5gb) but still 500mb is decent enough , like some others said , you could also export some emails locally and use syncthing but I don't know for me 500mb is decent
I've been using this for a while now just to have mailboxes for various domains. Works well, no complaints.
It would be an interesting experiment ditch the Roundcube or any web UI to decrease the attack surface.
This has roughly the same pricing as Fastmail just that it offers much smaller plans. If you are really that tight about money, have your domain DNS on cloudflare and redirect mail to gmail and send from a Cloudflare worker. A bit of a hassle but completely free.
Fastmail is worth it though as it has a really good web client and can do other nice things (Calendar, rules, notes, store random files, etc..)
Have Fastmail moved their servers outside the US?
Why does the logo feature an eyeball?
Why not? People like to add eyeballs to random things to make them look like living creatures.
Use it for email redirection from my domain. Just a few bucks per year
https://improvmx.com/
how about improvmx , it gives redirection for free , I have also discovered it right now in this thread though I think I had heard about it (I am not sure , I know of some email software where you pay one time and then you can self host or they host I am not sure)
email & storage/backup are a few things i would want absolute resiliency.
imagine missing some important emails could cost you a lot.
Runbox is pretty good too.
that's great. are you planning to build a nicer client?
No JMAP huh.
Another very happy customer of this for the past 3 years.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
https://purelymail.com/advancedpricing
That actually seems pretty good. Who's behind this?
If they had a minimal free tier which supports custom domain names I'd definitely give to a go. Gmail was great 20 years ago, but today it's disheartening to see many services restricting registration except from Gmail.com and Yahoo.com domain names.
> It's disheartening to see services with limits
> If they had a free tier I'd give it a go
Maybe these two things are related.
Custom domains aren't worth $0.83 per month to you?