Show HN: Normail – un-fancy email with cal, contacts, and Nextcloud $50/year | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Normail – un-fancy email with cal, contacts, and Nextcloud $50/year

normail.co

13 pointsjamescampbell19 comments

I absolutely do not understand how you believe trusting an individual on the internet creating a fly-by-night service is better than trusting a company with 20-years in the industry, and GMail a product that has been around for 15-years.

You're hosting all of this on a single machine -- with no redundancy -- with no DDoS protection -- and it makes me seriously doubt your sysops and opsec skills to be able to deliver a secure and reliable product to your customer.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: box.normail.co. 3464 IN A 178.62.214.105 ns1.box.normail.co. 3430 IN A 178.62.214.105 ns2.box.normail.co. 3430 IN A 178.62.214.105

If you are wishing to achieve your objective of moving people off Google, you should be suggesting a provider that _does_ have the infrastructure to provide a reliable service, that is a reputable organization with a proven track record for good sysops and opsec, and is an alternative to Google.

The most important part about e-mail is longevity. It is making sure your emails can not be read by malicious actors. It is making sure your email is never down. For many people it is the absolute backbone of their business and maybe their life. I absolutely would never put this much trust in a service like this. It is preying on ignorant paranoid people with impaired risk analysis who (like you) believe Google is the devil.

You believe something false. I created amazingly secure dns zone entries glue records that are hosted on a cloud backbone. The very fact you cant see past that firewall of dns glue is proving the point of exactly how secure they are and how trustworthy the service is. Please educate yourself fully and dont jump to a conclusion like this. You really think I am running this out of my basement on bare metal or something? Would love to pentest this service since it is so early. I would be dumb not to. I guess I can transparently share the results of load at lets say 100k concurrent connections?

Let's start dissecting this.

~ dig NS normail.co @ns1.cctld.co.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: ns1.box.normail.co. 3600 IN A 178.62.214.105 ns2.box.normail.co. 3600 IN A 178.62.214.105

ns1.cctld.co. is the registry server for the ".co" domain tld. Everyone has access to the glue records. It's how DNS works. They are not secure by any definition. You can also see for yourself at https://www.ultratools.com/tools/dnsLookup (in the Trace tab after you lookup)

And your only MX record:

normail.co. 3600 IN MX 10 box.normail.co.

I'm honestly surprised you even have DNSSEC setup. That one hugely surprised me.

And the host of 178.62.214.105? A single Digital Ocean VPS in Amsterdam.

inetnum: 178.62.128.0 - 178.62.255.255 netname: DIGITALOCEAN-AMS-5 descr: DigitalOcean Amsterdam

I'll accept that you're unaware of how the internet or cybersecurity works besides a primitive level as an explanation for the incoherent technobabble in your comment.

I say this in the absolutely nicest way possible: please don't run a service where others rely on you when you know you are not capable of running a reliable service. There is a point where incompetency becomes malicious.

This smells like Mail-in-a-box... A Free solution where a VPS is $5/month max.

You target people who want to go away from Google, yet you have even worse transparency on what you're running.

Edit: As a fact... it is mail-in-a-box... This is worse than I thought. (Proof: https://box.normail.co/admin)

Who in their right mind would give $50/year to someone they've never met, that has no real worth, and is peddling a free software suite as the real deal to get away from Google.

> Who in their right mind would give $50/month to someone they've never met, that has no real worth, and is peddling a free software suite as the real deal to get away from Google.

Someone who doesn't know how to configure that free software. There is worth here for those people, but I do think $50/year is far too much considering that gets you a probably far better service with Fastmail.

Exactly. 90% of just US market doesnt understand how to run their own domain let alone setup a linux mail-server. Appreciate the feedback on the $50/year. We will see what the market will bear. Does fastmail offer cloud storage included in the $50? I used to use them way back in 2013 but have been running my own mailserver for 6 years now, so I need to update the competitor landscape a bit. I garuntee with Fastmail you dont get the same level of one-on-one support you get with this ;)

All Fastmail plans include cloud storage. Can't compare more specifics, since you don't even mention how much storage you offer.

> Does fastmail offer cloud storage included in the $50?

I don't use it, but yes. $50/year right now corresponds to the standard plan which gives you 10GB of file storage. That's detailed here:

https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/limits.html

> I garuntee with Fastmail you dont get the same level of one-on-one support you get with this ;)

I had an issue once where I moved some 800 or so of the emails I had in my Inbox to separate folders in my computer's Maildir and when I synched it via IMAP (by using the MRA isync/mbsync) it caused the dates of all of them to change in their web-client to the moment I did the move. Moving emails and synching like I did is probably a very unusual thing for customers to do. Someone in customer support ran a script (and maybe wrote it too, considering this seems like an unusual problem) to fix the dates and explained what happened to me in enough technical detail for me to figure out how to avoid this happening again next time I do something like this with IMAP. It only took 2 days to resolve the issue. I consider their support to be pretty good. :)

You sound mad, which undercuts your message. Please, you are not my target market, and also please go ahead and run your own mailserver. Anything is better than Google IMO, I dont want to be a product of a free service. Each one of us needs to decide how much privacy and eyeballs to ads they give up per “free” service they use. Also Google for business is $60 year per person so my service is actually cheaper at $50 per year with personal cloud storage that is not in Google’s servers. Some percentage of the population wants that alone because even being associated with Google and having data stored on their servers are their main pain points and would pay $50 per year to ease that pain.

Also. Vps $5 / month is $60 per year. So yes go ahead and run your own but pay _more_ than my $50 per year service that is handled for you.

Let's just say that you're undercutting your message of "You can trust me with your email and personal data" too, both in this reaction and through design.

Luckily, the paid e-mail provider space today isn't as deserted as it seemed a few years ago, so I'll ask about that instead: Why would I go with you instead of a reputable competitor in the same price range? (I pay about the same for e-mail currently)

Thanks for the response and that is definitely a fair question. I removed the lol and dude-o, apologies, I shouldn’t be rude to potential customers and naysayers alike. I am going to do a bit of research and get back to you. At the end of the day, I feel like people want to support indie vs larger corps. Call it the middle finger to the man effect. I don't want that to be the sole reason. Id like to think you like the purple stylish N as well. ;) Seriously will get back to you in a bit. Checking on security things that I believe are not as robust in Fastmail and others. I have a warrant canary up too, not linked yet. But dont want my market to be criminals either so... hmm.

A VPS is far more valuable than an email account. Compared to an email account, there are a lot more things you can do with a box in the internet you have root access to. That value difference is more than $10/year.

There are reasons to pay an email provider $50/year, but I don't think being $10 cheaper than a VPS is one of them. You have to provide something beyond what one can get with a VPS.

Got a few successful signups today, thanks everyone for the support! Im working hard to improve the service, always love the feedback good and bad. Thanks again!

Does it have a way to integrate into iPhone mail?

It actually provides the user with QR code to scan to open the link within that is your specific mobile profile to install on your iPhone that shows up as a Configuration Profile in settings with all of your information and mail account magically appearing in the mail app.

Do you support IMAP?

Yes.

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