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Comment by cremp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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