Hi Jacob, Ado here, from FounderMail. I'm really glad you ended up on-boarding with us, and I wanted to reach out to thank you for the review and feedback.
The manual approve to outbound sending helped a lot to keep spammers out of the platform.
We ensure that domain exists and you're the owner, the website is legit, etc, making impossible for a bot to operate throughout our channel.
And is working, almost 4 weeks in, no complaints, less than 0.1 bounce rate.
You know, having an high reputation is vital to ensure the emails we send on behalf of our customers are reaching the inbox not the spam folder.
Said that, you continue to be right: it's annoying. We're working to reduce the pain autoapproving it for cases like your.
Thank you again (I hope you'll never find a reason to leave us! :)
Thank you for creating such a great service! It’s always great using a product and getting to thank the developer directly. Your platform seems perfect so far and it was extremely quick to get approved for outbound sending (definitely less than 12 hours). Seems to be working perfectly so far, and I don’t think i’ll be switching anytime soon.
Building a website with Claude is literally "a bot operating on their channels". Whether these are morally equivalent is an unrelated axis - it's the literal claim that's being disputed
I went to your site to check this out, and I found the bright orange from the first slide was killing my eyes, and my coworkers. The other landing page slides were great, the first one made me want to leave.
Overall looks like a great tool that I'll look into for my next projects.
Jacob's blog links to https://foundermail.mx/, I'm guessing you were looking at foundermail.app. I have no idea if they're related, but the former does not burn your eyes, the latter is very bright
It looks fine in sRGB, but I can see how it would be bad with the horrid default profiles that monitors ship with. Graphic designers should really be aware of that at this point.
"I had to submit a special request before I could send emails to new addresses that had not previously messaged me."
sounds even more insane, completely unusable service, I mean if the client sends me automated emails from their system on behalf of the PMs, I would need to submit request to reply to each PM with their individual address? insanity unless they meant domain which would be a bit more sensible
Interesting that self-hosting isn't on his list. It hits every one of his checkboxes and only costs you an old Linux server collecting dust at home (or at most, a $5/mo VPS), which you can also use to host other things.
It's never been easier to self-host, but it feels like, in general, when faced with "I want to do X with a computer," people are more and more reaching for paid, hosted services rather than DIY anymore.
Isnt email blacklisting/actually getting mails to inbox infamously hard? I otherwise think the rest of the stack is indeed solved, but its probably cheaper to pay Amazon SES or whatever for getting your emails to an inbox reliably
Email receivers (be it Gmail or your local council) don't differentiate if you're self hosting or a business. So long as small businesses can manage (who have like one part-time sysadmin that also manages a ton of other IT stuff; email doesn't take much of their time), so can you. If you set up the usual suspects like SPF and DMARC, the domain is not a known spammer, and the IP not in a blocked address range, it's mostly hands-off (source: I self host my email)
If you need it to really be super reliable, yeah, you need to send through one of the big companies who have not just a dedicated sending IP address but entire ranges dedicated to email sending, as well as staff that will respond to delivery issues 24/7. Microsoft rejecting email from Google and vice versa isn't unheard of, so there aren't guarantees anywhere, but that would be your best bet. For my personal use, that extra nine of reliability isn't needed
I’ve actually tried before to self host on my VPS as well as my homelab that I use for various services. I honestly just didn’t trust the stability of my own services enough for something as important as email. As a project I definitely want to try again in the future.
Email is ridiculously resilient to downtime. Exam, for example, will retry by default for several days before giving up on delivering a message.
Even if you don't actively monitor your server and only notice there's a problem after three days of not getting any mail, odds are you'll still receive most of them after fixing the issue.
I haven't spent any real amount of time looking into this, but from the basic research I did perform, I found that well-written guides that aren't grossly out of date are hard to find.
Also, my understanding is that Google, Outlook and other major email services have been implementing as many roadblocks for self-hosted setups as possible to the point where it's a constant battle and difficult to keep up with.
It depends a lot on whether you need the account for reading email, sending email to your own accounts, or sending email to other people. The first two are very easy to self-host.
But agreed that mass-mailing (even account registration style emails) seems a lot less reliable because of those spam filters.
it's only "difficult" because google, microsoft, etc have conivenced the community that self-hosting e-mail is not possible and for some reason, further propetuated by IT influencers that have drank that koolaid.
all complete bullshit; they arbitrraly occasionally block to protect their moat raping privacy. e-mail is the most rewarding self-hosting capability. like anything, there is a learning curve but at the end of the day: it's easy, stable, a pleasure to host. there are solutions that ease the learning curve. after a while, all the e-mail do make it through.
i'm so happy that my communications are not indexed by these hyperscalers.
stop listening to these pussies claiming how difficult it is. they're projecting their limitations.
It didn't help that people are seemingly more offended about the possibility of spam on their inbox than on losing a valuable email due to misclassification.
There's little to no incentive for providers to ever de-escalate.
At my day job, we use Gsuite. I never used it for any non-work purpose, and it wasn't publically published, so any "spam" it got was false positives. Emails I actually needed were being buried below the fold in the spam folder. It turns out there is no obvious way to 100% disable spam filtering (at the time I got the first false-positive at least) so I had to try to just allowlist things that should be left alone.
I've tried this approach, but I found that most email providers aggressively filter out all incoming messages that don't come from validated sources. No matter what I tried deliverability of emails remained very spotty. I did configure DKIM, DMARC, SPIF, etc as suggested. But minimal improvements. Eventually ended up going with AWS SES.
I've had surprisingly good luck the few times I've tried it - but using VPSs that were a bit more spendy and not known to be spamhavens helped, I think.
The cost of something like AWS SES or Postmark is so low as to make it almost not worth it, but it worked; not that I'd trust "real" email to it - but I was surprised that Wordpress setup emails were getting through with little config.
So, there are two main reasons people avoid trying to self-host email, plus a third you only find once you start digging:
1. Deliverability: "the email mafia will flag your emails as spam"
2. Complexity: "configuring and maintaining a mail stack is a technical nightmare".
3. Network blocks: VPS providers and residential ISPs frequently block outbound mail ports (like port 25) entirely or in their terms of use.
I decided we should try self-hosting because some issues with their reliability cost us very expensive problems.
The experience was frustrating anyway, as the weird restrictions on providers caused our setup to be quite bad on some regards -- most notably being forced to use the provider UI to manage some things, which took time and is a non-transferable useless skill, not having users for things that should have had one, etc.
MailCow made the technical setup trivial, blowing objection #2 out.
For #3, we could not rely on stable electricity/internet, so we just spun it up on a reliable VPS provider after a small research.
As for the biggest fear, the IP reputation and deliverability mafia (#1), it is easily solved by routing outbound mail through a simple SMTP relay like SMTP2GO.
You pay based purely on sending volume rather than a flat service fee, and their free tier completely covers small setups.
And how much time did it take? Less than half a day, before AI could do everything for you.
Most paid services charge absurd per-user or per-domain fees for basic features that do not cost them anything.
After 2 years of bad service on paid providers followed by 2 years of flawless self-hosting, there is absolutely no going back.
I self-host email, and it's mostly working. However the problems others have outlined are real: The stack is complicated, even for an expert to set up and keep running. And deliverability can sometimes be a problem, especially to Google who are obviously plotting to monopolise email.
I've been self-hosting (using a server at home) using MailInABox ( https://mailinabox.email ) for around 5 years.
I've been very happy with it. I have a perfectly normal email service, over which I have full control. MailInABox handles all the necessary DKIM etc. I had minor hassles, when I first started, with sending to google and microsoft, but these were reasonably easily managed by following microsoft's advice. (And I have a good ISP.)
The only hassle is that, because MailInABox uses greylisting, initial account-validation emails are sometimes delayed. But because I have control of the service, I can whitelist anything important :)
I use Migadu(migadu.com), but Apple's iCloud email hosting is basically tailor fit to your expectations, so I don't have any idea why you don't use it.
But you can host your own email too. It's not the easiest option, but it can be done, and there has been some newer email server software written that tries to make it easier.
iCloud email has been part of some sketchy things in the past, supposedly they have been dropping emails with certain words in them with no notification to either side of the message. There isn’t an option to turn it off and it isn’t advertised anywhere https://forums.techsoup.org/t/icloud-email-system-blocks-ema...
Your link is from over 10 years ago. I can't find any newer information on it persisting. Perhaps they turned it off after they got caught? Or perhaps it was an outage or some thing and not actual filtering? I don't know.
All email providers have issues now and again.
I'm not saying they aren't doing it, but if they are, nobody seems to be complaining or upset about it except those few in that forum from over a decade ago.
Protonmail doesn't have unlimited addresses for sending, which is one of his requirements. It has catch-all , which means you can receive from an arbitary number, so it's okay for one -email-per-vendor, but if you ever need to send via one of those addresses then you have to use up one of your 10 or 20 allowed addresses.
This is because like most other vendors, they do price discrimination based on number of users. Which is no doubt why the other large vendors were also ruled out.
One vendor who doesn't do this is Migadu. I don't use them as they lack 2FA support, but they are one of a small number of businesses who make their proposition easy to evaluate quickly, as opposed to making you swipe through a pitch before you get to the facts. This is so unusual that I remember them despite evaluating them multiple years ago.
With Proton and SimpleLogin you can effectively reply through all the aliases. It’s not actually unlimited addresses but I’ve been using it for some time and I find it meets all my needs in a simple clean way. Very happy with the combo.
Simplelogin doesn't do SRS which is pretty bad for this time and age.
That makes emails forwarded from, say, PayPal or ebay marked as scam/phishing in Gmail, AND makes it impossible to report actual spam that comes through.
With a well set up SRS all these emails are recognised correctly. SimpleLogin does some naïve forwarding which messes it up.
I'm migrating out of them exactly for this reason - if I could do it on my hobby server for my personal domains, THEY should be able to do it as well.
> Protonmail doesn't have unlimited addresses for sending, which is one of his requirements.
I can't find that in his list of requirements. He said he wants unlimited addresses, but I'm not able to spot any mention that he wants to send from all those addresses. A catch-all will work just fine for receiving mail, so it may be an option for him.
Yea, Fastmail checks all the boxes, and is well-regarded around here as far as I know. I have used it for something like 7-8 years now and am very happy with it.
Same here. Fastmail is great. The only thing that bothers me is not having a family plan so I can cheaply give my kid his own inbox in due time.
Although to be fair, I welcome competition, and I like seeing people end up with other solutions. I would hate it if Protonmail and Fastmail were the only viable services offering this.
protonmail doesnt even work in 3rd party apps and you can't install their app on Android lower than 10 for some reason (while most of the other email providers have no such problem), wanted my kid to use their email (though kids dont really use email anyway) on heavily restricted old phone, but since protonmail is not interested...
Too bad the author didn't check Fastmail. It checks all the boxes and on top of that its, imho, the best finished product for mail / cal / contacts and by far.
It may even be my favorite tech product at all. Should I be able to pay for more storage space for the drive (options are very limited), it would approach the perfection.
The shared hosting package that I bought with my domain 20 years ago from a local hosting company comes with all of these, it cost I think €12/year originally. They got acquired some time ago by a large hosting company who charges more than €120/year for the same package. Then I switched to another local mail provider who charge €40/year (but with more storage). Aren't there many such providers?
There are, but I've seen several of those price increases in a row so you may be moving a lot. And mail deliverability to Outlook and Gmail from those hosts isn't always great.
Ditto. The cheapest iCloud subscription includes everything necessary. My partner and I both have emails through our respective personal domains, all on the same sub – I think the limit is 3 custom domains.
I'm not sure about unlimited addresses (probably not), but I've been using Zoho for this for free for years, and I'm pretty sure I set up accounts for my whole family, firstname@lastname.com (how many of them besides me actually used them, I don't know). Works pretty well. I'd guess it's probably limited to like 10 accounts or something, but that's been enough for me. If you (general) don't have quite the same need for unlimited accounts, I'd say it's a good sleeper pick.
MXRoute's lifetime plans (which they usually offer around black Friday) are a great option if you can get one. I paid $99 for mine five years ago. The service has only improved since then.
I just looked at their website. Even without the lifetime plan, their pricing makes much more sense to me. You basically pay for the management account and the storage, which is really the thing that cost money.
It never made sense to me that you need to pay for storage per email account, if you use a custom domain. It I use 10GB why should it matter than I have it split over two email accounts?
I've long wanted a service where every address is routed as a virtual folder as part of one shared domain level inbox for my personal domain. So I don't have to +alias so much or put up with the blocks some sites have on +aliases. E.g. if I shop at Safeway, I can give them <safeway@mydomain.example>, if I log in with Google, I can make the Google account <google@mydomain.example>, etc. Then I want the ability to create labels for actively used inboxes, for example if I have a Costco account, <costco@mydomain.example>, I could give it ans the Safeway email a shopping tag and have that is a secondary inbox, i.e. a hierarchy like <all mail>, then grouped boxes like <shopping>, then select individual inboxes, and finally a catchall inbox for any other inboxes.
I kind of have Google setup this way, but it's a friggin pain (and not really advised) to keep adding address aliases, or having to fight to +alias stuff. So it doesn't quite work.
## A catch all filter designed to automatically organise emails sent to a catch-all address into a folder based on the receiving address e.g amazon@example.com --> INBOX.Amazon
## If the folder doesn't exist it is automatically created
if exists "X-Delivered-To" {
if header :regex "X-Delivered-To" "([^@]+)" {
set :upperfirst "prefix" "${1}";
fileinto :create "INBOX.${prefix}";
stop;
}
}
With some tinkering you can also route arbitrary addresses to plus-aliases (@example.com -> inbox+@example.com, where "inbox@example.com" would be your "main" address). This correctly sorts incoming mail into folders just like normal plus-alias usage would (if those folders exist), but in your inbox, the mail will still show the original mail-to (*@example.com, not the plus-alias version), and when replying, it'll use the correct address (not the plus-alias).
Support helped a lot when I tried to set this up. They initially said it wasn't possible, then came back a while later with a correction.
So close but so far... The subdomain aliasing is neat, but it looks like you still have to create folders manually and also manually configure anything you use as a sending address at the point that you need it.
Just FYI - Any one starting can use - Zoho. They have free tier available and the paid is like $1 a month - if you grow, you can move or grow with them.
Protonmail has worked great for me. Never had any issues and I like the inclusion of docs + sheets (even though their apps are ridiculously slow to load)
I just dealt with this due to the impending termination of .name email. I use a combination of gmail as my mail agent, CloudFlare for the domain, and SMTP2Go for low volume outbound with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. I don't have any Apple usage or requirements.
Oh, I just remembered that I send mail received by my CloudFlare domain to both gmail and zohomail, and use Thunderbird as the mail agent for the latter.
I use it for outgoing SMTP from my gmail agent, identified as coming from me@mydomain.com ... I added this step because gmail doesn't do DKIM and DMARC, so my emails were being marked as spam by aggressive systems. mail-tester.com rates me at 9.3/10, and the missing points are mostly because my domain is less than 4 weeks old.
Gmail will drop support for sending from custom domains (at least those that aren’t hosted with them) next year btw. That’s why I’m looking for another smtp solution.
In the mean time I’ve checked them (smtp2go) a bit and apparently they do work on having a good reputation and allow you to add them as a smart host to your own smtp server so looks like I’ll give them a try.
I've always ran my own smtp for receiving, I just need something for sending because of the big uns being fully against independent smtp servers. And this being personal mail, i send less than 1000 mails per year.
I've got my domain at namecheap, and they just forward all mail to two different pre-existing mailboxes. I configure my mailreader to use my address at my own domain when sending mail, and that works perfectly fine. Sure, headers may show them going through different mail servers, but nobody ever looks at that anymore.
It's been about 99% fine. I do remember last year noticing that my parent's gmail flagged (an admittedly very short) email of mine as spam, but when she went into her spam folder and told gmail it wasn't spam, all was fine from then on. I think it probably goes a long way to have SPF/DKIM/DMARC correct and doesn't hurt that it's AWS' mail servers.
> At the limit. Once a month's received allowance is used, further mail is refused with a permanent error and the sender is told;
Consider that you may be losing email without knowing even on the cheapest paid plan for $44 a year limits incoming emails to 500 a month. Most people don’t get 500 emails a month, but there can be months when this happens and the emails aren’t even in a “hold” until you upgrade. They’re just completely lost.
I’d rather have unlimited incoming emails than 15 GB or whatever higher storage is offered.
> There was one annoying limitation. I had to submit a special request before I could send emails to new addresses that had not previously messaged me.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but this sounds absolutely wild. What?
The founder of foundermail actually left a comment here talking about this. I will likely update the article that it took less than 7 hours to be approved.
Fastmail! Checks almost all of your boxes for US$100/yr. Also supports Apple Mail push. I think that's a good price for premium email and calendar hosting with custom domains!
With Google sunsetting support for custom domain in Gmail (scheduled for Jan 2027) I am looking for solutions to sending email from custom domains. Amazon SES works well and is cheap for SMTP.
I want to continue to use Gmail for email storage--mainly because of the awesome search function, but also for longevity--while using a third-party app for pulling specific emails from Gmail and replying to them through my custom domain(s).
The solutions mentioned in this blog aren't that--they have their own storage.
You need to be able to reply to emails sent to your custom domain. So a web app (ideally one I can host myself) that pulls email from Gmail using IMAP and supports configuring SMTP servers for custom domains would be good. Not a fan of desktop apps such as Thunderbird.
Resend just kept getting stuck in spam folders for me when sending, maybe I set something up wrong. On their documentation it just says you have to pay for the extremely expensive certificate needed for gmail to trust your messages.
In my experience with emails, if you're not comming from big services like Google, Hotmail etc. The big services will still sometimes flag you as a spam even if you have everything set up properly. They use the monopoly position tohold the email hostage.
I think it's time to seriously consider developing and adopting a successor for email.
Unpopular opinion, but I've used Google Workspace for years and I really like having my email via gmail. SSO and spam filtering and Google Docs. I thought about switching to Amazon Workmail but the price I pay for Workspace is worth it.
> Unpopular opinion, but I've used Google Workspace for years ...
Not that unpopular. I've used it since way before it was called "Google Workspace" and it Just Works [TM]. Also once you pay for it, suddenly they pick up the phone if you ever need support.
A shitload of SMEs are using Google Workspace to get their own domain and all the Google suite.
I know it's cool to hate on Google on HN but for my part I'll forever be hating on Microsoft and Meta. I tolerate Google.
This and them sunsetting Exchange EWS (which enabled push) was the straw that forced me into looking at other options (the other being them forcing you to pay for Gemini even if you have it completely disabled in your Workspace)
Hi Jacob, Ado here, from FounderMail. I'm really glad you ended up on-boarding with us, and I wanted to reach out to thank you for the review and feedback.
The manual approve to outbound sending helped a lot to keep spammers out of the platform.
We ensure that domain exists and you're the owner, the website is legit, etc, making impossible for a bot to operate throughout our channel.
And is working, almost 4 weeks in, no complaints, less than 0.1 bounce rate.
You know, having an high reputation is vital to ensure the emails we send on behalf of our customers are reaching the inbox not the spam folder.
Said that, you continue to be right: it's annoying. We're working to reduce the pain autoapproving it for cases like your.
Thank you again (I hope you'll never find a reason to leave us! :)
Thank you for creating such a great service! It’s always great using a product and getting to thank the developer directly. Your platform seems perfect so far and it was extremely quick to get approved for outbound sending (definitely less than 12 hours). Seems to be working perfectly so far, and I don’t think i’ll be switching anytime soon.
> making impossible for a bot to operate throughout our channel.
Somewhat ironic, given your entire website is AI generated.
You're saying that building their own website using AI is equivalent to sending spam emails?
Building a website with Claude is literally "a bot operating on their channels". Whether these are morally equivalent is an unrelated axis - it's the literal claim that's being disputed
Seems you're... conflating the concepts of spamming people with using a language model to generate code
Is it actually free to use? i cant find the pricing page
I went to your site to check this out, and I found the bright orange from the first slide was killing my eyes, and my coworkers. The other landing page slides were great, the first one made me want to leave.
Overall looks like a great tool that I'll look into for my next projects.
> killing… my coworkers.
RIP
Jacob's blog links to https://foundermail.mx/, I'm guessing you were looking at foundermail.app. I have no idea if they're related, but the former does not burn your eyes, the latter is very bright
I found the egregious LLM generated text a bit of a turn off, too.
If you don't care about your website, why should I?
It looks fine in sRGB, but I can see how it would be bad with the horrid default profiles that monitors ship with. Graphic designers should really be aware of that at this point.
You can only RECEIVE 500 emails per month on either your free or $4/month plan?!? That's completely and utterly insane.
"I had to submit a special request before I could send emails to new addresses that had not previously messaged me."
sounds even more insane, completely unusable service, I mean if the client sends me automated emails from their system on behalf of the PMs, I would need to submit request to reply to each PM with their individual address? insanity unless they meant domain which would be a bit more sensible
Sorry if that was unclear. It is just to “unlock” email sending and is a one time thing for the domain.
Interesting that self-hosting isn't on his list. It hits every one of his checkboxes and only costs you an old Linux server collecting dust at home (or at most, a $5/mo VPS), which you can also use to host other things.
It's never been easier to self-host, but it feels like, in general, when faced with "I want to do X with a computer," people are more and more reaching for paid, hosted services rather than DIY anymore.
Isnt email blacklisting/actually getting mails to inbox infamously hard? I otherwise think the rest of the stack is indeed solved, but its probably cheaper to pay Amazon SES or whatever for getting your emails to an inbox reliably
Everyone has the same problem. For example, Apple recently blocked a service that notifies you of parliamentary documents (source in Dutch: https://chaos.social/@tkdocs@mastodon.nl/117370967171338864)
Email receivers (be it Gmail or your local council) don't differentiate if you're self hosting or a business. So long as small businesses can manage (who have like one part-time sysadmin that also manages a ton of other IT stuff; email doesn't take much of their time), so can you. If you set up the usual suspects like SPF and DMARC, the domain is not a known spammer, and the IP not in a blocked address range, it's mostly hands-off (source: I self host my email)
If you need it to really be super reliable, yeah, you need to send through one of the big companies who have not just a dedicated sending IP address but entire ranges dedicated to email sending, as well as staff that will respond to delivery issues 24/7. Microsoft rejecting email from Google and vice versa isn't unheard of, so there aren't guarantees anywhere, but that would be your best bet. For my personal use, that extra nine of reliability isn't needed
I’ve actually tried before to self host on my VPS as well as my homelab that I use for various services. I honestly just didn’t trust the stability of my own services enough for something as important as email. As a project I definitely want to try again in the future.
Email is ridiculously resilient to downtime. Exam, for example, will retry by default for several days before giving up on delivering a message.
Even if you don't actively monitor your server and only notice there's a problem after three days of not getting any mail, odds are you'll still receive most of them after fixing the issue.
*Exim
I haven't spent any real amount of time looking into this, but from the basic research I did perform, I found that well-written guides that aren't grossly out of date are hard to find.
Also, my understanding is that Google, Outlook and other major email services have been implementing as many roadblocks for self-hosted setups as possible to the point where it's a constant battle and difficult to keep up with.
The problem with self hosting is getting through google, microsoft, etc spam filters.
It depends a lot on whether you need the account for reading email, sending email to your own accounts, or sending email to other people. The first two are very easy to self-host.
But agreed that mass-mailing (even account registration style emails) seems a lot less reliable because of those spam filters.
it's only "difficult" because google, microsoft, etc have conivenced the community that self-hosting e-mail is not possible and for some reason, further propetuated by IT influencers that have drank that koolaid.
all complete bullshit; they arbitrraly occasionally block to protect their moat raping privacy. e-mail is the most rewarding self-hosting capability. like anything, there is a learning curve but at the end of the day: it's easy, stable, a pleasure to host. there are solutions that ease the learning curve. after a while, all the e-mail do make it through.
i'm so happy that my communications are not indexed by these hyperscalers.
stop listening to these pussies claiming how difficult it is. they're projecting their limitations.
It didn't help that people are seemingly more offended about the possibility of spam on their inbox than on losing a valuable email due to misclassification.
There's little to no incentive for providers to ever de-escalate.
At my day job, we use Gsuite. I never used it for any non-work purpose, and it wasn't publically published, so any "spam" it got was false positives. Emails I actually needed were being buried below the fold in the spam folder. It turns out there is no obvious way to 100% disable spam filtering (at the time I got the first false-positive at least) so I had to try to just allowlist things that should be left alone.
I've tried this approach, but I found that most email providers aggressively filter out all incoming messages that don't come from validated sources. No matter what I tried deliverability of emails remained very spotty. I did configure DKIM, DMARC, SPIF, etc as suggested. But minimal improvements. Eventually ended up going with AWS SES.
I've had surprisingly good luck the few times I've tried it - but using VPSs that were a bit more spendy and not known to be spamhavens helped, I think.
The cost of something like AWS SES or Postmark is so low as to make it almost not worth it, but it worked; not that I'd trust "real" email to it - but I was surprised that Wordpress setup emails were getting through with little config.
So, there are two main reasons people avoid trying to self-host email, plus a third you only find once you start digging:
1. Deliverability: "the email mafia will flag your emails as spam"
2. Complexity: "configuring and maintaining a mail stack is a technical nightmare".
3. Network blocks: VPS providers and residential ISPs frequently block outbound mail ports (like port 25) entirely or in their terms of use.
I decided we should try self-hosting because some issues with their reliability cost us very expensive problems. The experience was frustrating anyway, as the weird restrictions on providers caused our setup to be quite bad on some regards -- most notably being forced to use the provider UI to manage some things, which took time and is a non-transferable useless skill, not having users for things that should have had one, etc.
MailCow made the technical setup trivial, blowing objection #2 out. For #3, we could not rely on stable electricity/internet, so we just spun it up on a reliable VPS provider after a small research. As for the biggest fear, the IP reputation and deliverability mafia (#1), it is easily solved by routing outbound mail through a simple SMTP relay like SMTP2GO. You pay based purely on sending volume rather than a flat service fee, and their free tier completely covers small setups. And how much time did it take? Less than half a day, before AI could do everything for you.
Most paid services charge absurd per-user or per-domain fees for basic features that do not cost them anything. After 2 years of bad service on paid providers followed by 2 years of flawless self-hosting, there is absolutely no going back.
I self-host email, and it's mostly working. However the problems others have outlined are real: The stack is complicated, even for an expert to set up and keep running. And deliverability can sometimes be a problem, especially to Google who are obviously plotting to monopolise email.
I've been self-hosting (using a server at home) using MailInABox ( https://mailinabox.email ) for around 5 years.
I've been very happy with it. I have a perfectly normal email service, over which I have full control. MailInABox handles all the necessary DKIM etc. I had minor hassles, when I first started, with sending to google and microsoft, but these were reasonably easily managed by following microsoft's advice. (And I have a good ISP.)
The only hassle is that, because MailInABox uses greylisting, initial account-validation emails are sometimes delayed. But because I have control of the service, I can whitelist anything important :)
Self hosting is a massive PITA and time burner.
I self hosted my email domains for 15+ years. Finally got fed up with the constant trickle of the maintenance and got a service for everything.
Not quite happy with that as they don't even do SRS (implying they do), but i guess I'll just migrate elsewhere.
The upside is I've got more time for myself and have less CVEs to worry about.
Self hosted apps migration in progress; I guess I'll leave media, book and file server only, off the internet, and that's it.
self hosting email is a huge PITA. do not recommend.
other self hosting? sure.
I use Migadu(migadu.com), but Apple's iCloud email hosting is basically tailor fit to your expectations, so I don't have any idea why you don't use it.
But you can host your own email too. It's not the easiest option, but it can be done, and there has been some newer email server software written that tries to make it easier.
iCloud email has been part of some sketchy things in the past, supposedly they have been dropping emails with certain words in them with no notification to either side of the message. There isn’t an option to turn it off and it isn’t advertised anywhere https://forums.techsoup.org/t/icloud-email-system-blocks-ema...
Your link is from over 10 years ago. I can't find any newer information on it persisting. Perhaps they turned it off after they got caught? Or perhaps it was an outage or some thing and not actual filtering? I don't know.
All email providers have issues now and again.
I'm not saying they aren't doing it, but if they are, nobody seems to be complaining or upset about it except those few in that forum from over a decade ago.
Why does it say
> This post placed #4 on HackerNews
Did you want to talk about your custom email domain, or the meta game of the HN algorithm? It can't really be both
My uneducated guess: Bragging rights or portfolio plastering.
Feels weird to ignore the largest players, e.g. Fastmail or Protonmail
Or iCloud+. He specifically asked for Apple Mail integration ffs
I use the iCloud custom domain for my personal email and I can confidently say it's worth the cost.
I am definitely engrossed in the Apple Ecosystem™ though so I can't speak to how it would fit any other setup that isn't almost entirely Apple-based.
iCloud plus has had some issues in the past, they pretty aggressively filter emails to the point of just not sending/receiving messages with certain phrases. https://forums.techsoup.org/t/icloud-email-system-blocks-ema...
I’ve never had a problem with, but then I’ve never sent an email containing the phrase ‘barely legal teens’
Unlimited addresses is not something iCloud+ offers directly.
Is it not? https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/allow-all-incoming-em...
Protonmail doesn't have unlimited addresses for sending, which is one of his requirements. It has catch-all , which means you can receive from an arbitary number, so it's okay for one -email-per-vendor, but if you ever need to send via one of those addresses then you have to use up one of your 10 or 20 allowed addresses.
This is because like most other vendors, they do price discrimination based on number of users. Which is no doubt why the other large vendors were also ruled out.
One vendor who doesn't do this is Migadu. I don't use them as they lack 2FA support, but they are one of a small number of businesses who make their proposition easy to evaluate quickly, as opposed to making you swipe through a pitch before you get to the facts. This is so unusual that I remember them despite evaluating them multiple years ago.
Tuta has unlimited addresses for sending
And doesn't work in Apple Mail. Why are all the replies in this thread recommending things that don't meet the criteria in the article?
With Proton and SimpleLogin you can effectively reply through all the aliases. It’s not actually unlimited addresses but I’ve been using it for some time and I find it meets all my needs in a simple clean way. Very happy with the combo.
Simplelogin doesn't do SRS which is pretty bad for this time and age.
That makes emails forwarded from, say, PayPal or ebay marked as scam/phishing in Gmail, AND makes it impossible to report actual spam that comes through.
With a well set up SRS all these emails are recognised correctly. SimpleLogin does some naïve forwarding which messes it up.
I'm migrating out of them exactly for this reason - if I could do it on my hobby server for my personal domains, THEY should be able to do it as well.
> Protonmail doesn't have unlimited addresses for sending, which is one of his requirements.
I can't find that in his list of requirements. He said he wants unlimited addresses, but I'm not able to spot any mention that he wants to send from all those addresses. A catch-all will work just fine for receiving mail, so it may be an option for him.
Migadu support 2FA? At least through their webmail?
Migadu does support 2FA for both admin/management account and webmail logins.
Yea, Fastmail checks all the boxes, and is well-regarded around here as far as I know. I have used it for something like 7-8 years now and am very happy with it.
Same here. Fastmail is great. The only thing that bothers me is not having a family plan so I can cheaply give my kid his own inbox in due time.
Although to be fair, I welcome competition, and I like seeing people end up with other solutions. I would hate it if Protonmail and Fastmail were the only viable services offering this.
Wait, but Fastmail does have family plan, introduced 2 years ago. Just letting you know :)
Same -- fastmail is excellent and great value.
An example of a company that does exactly what I pay them to do and respects me as a customer.
It doesn't meet the criteria in the post. Obviously.
I don't think it's obvious. So, how does it not meet the criteria?
protonmail doesnt even work in 3rd party apps and you can't install their app on Android lower than 10 for some reason (while most of the other email providers have no such problem), wanted my kid to use their email (though kids dont really use email anyway) on heavily restricted old phone, but since protonmail is not interested...
Too bad the author didn't check Fastmail. It checks all the boxes and on top of that its, imho, the best finished product for mail / cal / contacts and by far.
It may even be my favorite tech product at all. Should I be able to pay for more storage space for the drive (options are very limited), it would approach the perfection.
Fastmail is expensive. The author mentions Purelymail at around $10/year compared to $60/year for Fastmail.
Happy Purelymail user here. $10/year is the default plan, on advanced pricing I end up paying less than $5/year which is absolutely crazy.
Sadly their website seems to break on older devices - https://ibb.co/album/99kr9z
Email is one service that should be accessible from any machine.
The shared hosting package that I bought with my domain 20 years ago from a local hosting company comes with all of these, it cost I think €12/year originally. They got acquired some time ago by a large hosting company who charges more than €120/year for the same package. Then I switched to another local mail provider who charge €40/year (but with more storage). Aren't there many such providers?
There are, but I've seen several of those price increases in a row so you may be moving a lot. And mail deliverability to Outlook and Gmail from those hosts isn't always great.
I was so happy with Google Domains. Rip.
Purelymail user for years now, failed me once for a few minutes in all the years I've used it. No complaints other than that. Recommended.
Seconded, been using PurelyMail for a few years now. Zero complaints, especially for the price.
Been with purely mail for a couple years now. Great customer service and easy to get going
Not sure why the cloudflare option to a personal gmail, and then setting up Send as in Gmail doesn't work for OP.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en
Fine for small needs.
And then when bigger pay $5 a month per email address to a decent provider. At that point, you're spending more energy to save money than it's worth.
With AWS SES for sending mail, this Cloudflare + Gmail setup would be ~free for a <1000 outgoing emails per month.
This is what i used for some domains. It works wonders for me.
Why not using iCloud custom domains? Is the simplest option if you want apple mail compatibility
I second this recommendation. My custom domain emails work wonderfully through Apple iCloud account.
Ditto. The cheapest iCloud subscription includes everything necessary. My partner and I both have emails through our respective personal domains, all on the same sub – I think the limit is 3 custom domains.
iCloud Mail will silently filter emails with certain words (including in attachments).
You aren’t told something has been filtered and it doesn’t go to spam. It’s just deleted with zero recourse. The sender isn’t notified either.
https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/icloud-mail-what-to-do-when...
I had this happen as recently as June 2026 when my current provider was up. It happens on @mac.com @me.com @icloud.com and custom domains.
I can recommend Fastmail. Reasonably priced, modern tech & features, good service. Never had any issues.
I'm not sure about unlimited addresses (probably not), but I've been using Zoho for this for free for years, and I'm pretty sure I set up accounts for my whole family, firstname@lastname.com (how many of them besides me actually used them, I don't know). Works pretty well. I'd guess it's probably limited to like 10 accounts or something, but that's been enough for me. If you (general) don't have quite the same need for unlimited accounts, I'd say it's a good sleeper pick.
You're forced to use their web UI when going the free Zoho route, right?
MXRoute's lifetime plans (which they usually offer around black Friday) are a great option if you can get one. I paid $99 for mine five years ago. The service has only improved since then.
Same and agreed. Absolutely great service for the cost
I just looked at their website. Even without the lifetime plan, their pricing makes much more sense to me. You basically pay for the management account and the storage, which is really the thing that cost money.
It never made sense to me that you need to pay for storage per email account, if you use a custom domain. It I use 10GB why should it matter than I have it split over two email accounts?
Looks really interesting, thank you.
“Integration with Apple Mail” shy not just use iCloud with a custom domain?
AFAIK it doesn’t allow you to have a direct IMAP/SMTP login for your own domain.
iCloud Mail silently filters emails (more info in my comment linked). The sender isn’t told, receiver can’t ever see the message.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958660
I've long wanted a service where every address is routed as a virtual folder as part of one shared domain level inbox for my personal domain. So I don't have to +alias so much or put up with the blocks some sites have on +aliases. E.g. if I shop at Safeway, I can give them <safeway@mydomain.example>, if I log in with Google, I can make the Google account <google@mydomain.example>, etc. Then I want the ability to create labels for actively used inboxes, for example if I have a Costco account, <costco@mydomain.example>, I could give it ans the Safeway email a shopping tag and have that is a secondary inbox, i.e. a hierarchy like <all mail>, then grouped boxes like <shopping>, then select individual inboxes, and finally a catchall inbox for any other inboxes.
I kind of have Google setup this way, but it's a friggin pain (and not really advised) to keep adding address aliases, or having to fight to +alias stuff. So it doesn't quite work.
I don't have the grouped boxes but I use a sieve filter on my ISPs mailserver to automatically create folders based on prefix@mydomain.example
Here is my script:
require ["fileinto","imap4flags","variables","regex","mailbox"];
## A catch all filter designed to automatically organise emails sent to a catch-all address into a folder based on the receiving address e.g amazon@example.com --> INBOX.Amazon ## If the folder doesn't exist it is automatically created
if exists "X-Delivered-To" { if header :regex "X-Delivered-To" "([^@]+)" { set :upperfirst "prefix" "${1}"; fileinto :create "INBOX.${prefix}"; stop; } }
Fastmail lets you do safeway@glyptodon.mydomain.example as an alternative to plus-aliases.
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591053-Plu...
With some tinkering you can also route arbitrary addresses to plus-aliases (@example.com -> inbox+@example.com, where "inbox@example.com" would be your "main" address). This correctly sorts incoming mail into folders just like normal plus-alias usage would (if those folders exist), but in your inbox, the mail will still show the original mail-to (*@example.com, not the plus-alias version), and when replying, it'll use the correct address (not the plus-alias).
Support helped a lot when I tried to set this up. They initially said it wasn't possible, then came back a while later with a correction.
So close but so far... The subdomain aliasing is neat, but it looks like you still have to create folders manually and also manually configure anything you use as a sending address at the point that you need it.
I use StartMail [1], which I believe ticks all of OP's boxes (I had similar boxes).
[1] https://www.startmail.com/
Just FYI - Any one starting can use - Zoho. They have free tier available and the paid is like $1 a month - if you grow, you can move or grow with them.
Protonmail has worked great for me. Never had any issues and I like the inclusion of docs + sheets (even though their apps are ridiculously slow to load)
Unless something had changed recently, they don't let you use third party email clients.
There's Proton Mail Bridge for paid accounts: https://proton.me/mail/bridge
Okay but now I need an always-on computer running an additional app.
Huh? You run it on the same computer you are checking your mail from.
What do you do on a phone?
I just dealt with this due to the impending termination of .name email. I use a combination of gmail as my mail agent, CloudFlare for the domain, and SMTP2Go for low volume outbound with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. I don't have any Apple usage or requirements.
Oh, I just remembered that I send mail received by my CloudFlare domain to both gmail and zohomail, and use Thunderbird as the mail agent for the latter.
Hmm interesting service this smtp2go, $0 for up to 1000 emails/month.
If you run your personal mail on this and not automated notifications it's basically free, but how many spam lists are this kind of services on?
I use it for outgoing SMTP from my gmail agent, identified as coming from me@mydomain.com ... I added this step because gmail doesn't do DKIM and DMARC, so my emails were being marked as spam by aggressive systems. mail-tester.com rates me at 9.3/10, and the missing points are mostly because my domain is less than 4 weeks old.
Gmail will drop support for sending from custom domains (at least those that aren’t hosted with them) next year btw. That’s why I’m looking for another smtp solution.
In the mean time I’ve checked them (smtp2go) a bit and apparently they do work on having a good reputation and allow you to add them as a smart host to your own smtp server so looks like I’ll give them a try.
Thanks for the info about gmail dropping support ... I was not aware. It looks like my options are Google Workspace or moving to fastmail.
I've always ran my own smtp for receiving, I just need something for sending because of the big uns being fully against independent smtp servers. And this being personal mail, i send less than 1000 mails per year.
I've got my domain at namecheap, and they just forward all mail to two different pre-existing mailboxes. I configure my mailreader to use my address at my own domain when sending mail, and that works perfectly fine. Sure, headers may show them going through different mail servers, but nobody ever looks at that anymore.
I wrote about a similar journey last year - with a different outcome. Always happy to share. Although some may wish I hadn't!
https://alexlance.blog/email.html
Have you had any issues with your outgoing emails being flagged as spam by gmail?
It's been about 99% fine. I do remember last year noticing that my parent's gmail flagged (an admittedly very short) email of mine as spam, but when she went into her spam folder and told gmail it wasn't spam, all was fine from then on. I think it probably goes a long way to have SPF/DKIM/DMARC correct and doesn't hurt that it's AWS' mail servers.
> At the limit. Once a month's received allowance is used, further mail is refused with a permanent error and the sender is told;
Consider that you may be losing email without knowing even on the cheapest paid plan for $44 a year limits incoming emails to 500 a month. Most people don’t get 500 emails a month, but there can be months when this happens and the emails aren’t even in a “hold” until you upgrade. They’re just completely lost.
I’d rather have unlimited incoming emails than 15 GB or whatever higher storage is offered.
> There was one annoying limitation. I had to submit a special request before I could send emails to new addresses that had not previously messaged me.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but this sounds absolutely wild. What?
The founder of foundermail actually left a comment here talking about this. I will likely update the article that it took less than 7 hours to be approved.
Fastmail! Checks almost all of your boxes for US$100/yr. Also supports Apple Mail push. I think that's a good price for premium email and calendar hosting with custom domains!
How about NameCrane? They have a lifetime plan for $75
https://namecrane.com/store/email-hosting-deals
With Google sunsetting support for custom domain in Gmail (scheduled for Jan 2027) I am looking for solutions to sending email from custom domains. Amazon SES works well and is cheap for SMTP.
I want to continue to use Gmail for email storage--mainly because of the awesome search function, but also for longevity--while using a third-party app for pulling specific emails from Gmail and replying to them through my custom domain(s).
The solutions mentioned in this blog aren't that--they have their own storage.
What about using cloudflare or whoever to forward emails to your gmail, and then user cloudflare or whoever's smtp to send emails from that address?
You need to be able to reply to emails sent to your custom domain. So a web app (ideally one I can host myself) that pulls email from Gmail using IMAP and supports configuring SMTP servers for custom domains would be good. Not a fan of desktop apps such as Thunderbird.
Just self-host on Cloudflare: https://github.com/wong2/cf-mailroom
I’d suggest cloudflare + resend + https://workspace.google.com/essentials/ (which is $0) + forwarding and alias to personal google account for gmail ui.
Big benefit of this combination is that you get "login with google", docs, drive, hangouts
Resend just kept getting stuck in spam folders for me when sending, maybe I set something up wrong. On their documentation it just says you have to pay for the extremely expensive certificate needed for gmail to trust your messages.
Fastmail w/ a few DNS changes works wonders. Takes maybe 5-10 minutes to get it all working.
Possibly the only free soltuion: setup email forwarding in gmail using https://improvmx.com/about/.
Can even send email, although recipient sees that it has been forwarded.
I added my custom domain to my provider email. Yes, those still exist in places
I use zoho mail, works well.
have a look at https://faivelo.com/ for unlimited addresses on custom domains and full email suite: meetings, contacts, drive and more
In my experience with emails, if you're not comming from big services like Google, Hotmail etc. The big services will still sometimes flag you as a spam even if you have everything set up properly. They use the monopoly position tohold the email hostage. I think it's time to seriously consider developing and adopting a successor for email.
cool, very useful. the easiest and cheapest I had found was Purelymail
I can recommend Lark. Free tier does everything.
iCloud+ mail was definitely a better choice. I'll send my feedback through email.
Would love to receive one :)
cloudflare routing in + zoho free out works fine for me. just remember spf is one record, so both includes go on the same line
I've been very happy with MXRoute
I like Fastmail a lot
Unpopular opinion, but I've used Google Workspace for years and I really like having my email via gmail. SSO and spam filtering and Google Docs. I thought about switching to Amazon Workmail but the price I pay for Workspace is worth it.
> Unpopular opinion, but I've used Google Workspace for years ...
Not that unpopular. I've used it since way before it was called "Google Workspace" and it Just Works [TM]. Also once you pay for it, suddenly they pick up the phone if you ever need support.
A shitload of SMEs are using Google Workspace to get their own domain and all the Google suite.
I know it's cool to hate on Google on HN but for my part I'll forever be hating on Microsoft and Meta. I tolerate Google.
Gmail STILL doesn't support push for Apple Mail.
This and them sunsetting Exchange EWS (which enabled push) was the straw that forced me into looking at other options (the other being them forcing you to pay for Gemini even if you have it completely disabled in your Workspace)