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> If you just want a reliable mail service, just use https://fastmail.com. If you want even more freedom and configurations, do try to set up a mail server. But it is hard. A bit hard.

I used to run my own mail server, but I eventually migrated to Fastmail. I liked then because their software stack was similar enough to mine (compatible filter rules) and I knew where to find their admin on IRC.

The reason I made the switch is because I was sick and tired of my Email reliability depending on the reliability of my home Internet connection, and my co-lo/remote-hosting situation (at the time) had different reliability issues I didn't want to risk.

You switch to a third party mail provider for the same reason you buy a new car instead of driving around your classic you've been fixing up as a daily driver. Not because you don't like it, but because sometimes there's benefit in offloading the annoying bits of your hobby so you can focus on the interesting bits.

Fixing up an old car is fun. Doing it in chunks of a few hours so you can drive it work the next day is less fun.

Running your own mail server is a fun challenge at first, as you have to figure out why some random site won't talk to your server, or why your load spikes at random times. Then you decide that diagnosing other people's broken configs and dealing with drive by spammers is annoying and boring.

I love the car analogy. Once something becomes your lifeblood, tinkering is much less fun.

> A mail server is hard.

yeah, but compared with other services like WWW mail is IMO harder. You deal with two main Protocols and a lot of software. While mail takes 11 components in your tutorial, you'd get a website in 4. And some parts are hard to debug. I have very little means to debug why my mail wasn't delivered to my bosses gmail.

I've built https://kopi.cloud to try to provide an alternative option in between being locked in to a big mail service and running your own mail servers.

It's a consumer-oriented SaaS for taking control of your personal mail - there is no enterprise pricing, nor even a subscription pricing option - though you can you can choose to pre-pay for the service years in advance.

Kopi uses Amazon SES for email delivery. We know Amazon wants to make sure that their service is a viable product for mail delivery at the commercial enterprise level. The idea is that Kopi can survive as a viable retail product by riding on the coat-tails of that desire and arbitraging the cost of mail handling via SES so it's cost-effective at consumer level.

The intention is to run it as cheaply as I can, ($1USD / month at the moment, though I make no guarantee that it can stay that cheap forever) and to give people the ability to choose between different mail services.

The idea is that you can manage your own domain, and setup your DNS to use Kopi as your mail exchange via DNS MX records to forward your email to whatever mail service you choose to use. If people don't want to even run their own domain, they can can use the shared Kopi domains if they want - with the understanding that those mail addresses are locked to the Kopi service, but at least they can change mail service whenever they want.

The goal is to be easy enough to use that you can set up your email handling via a smart phone, and cheap enough that running your own email handling using free software should seem expensive by comparison.

Though I'll admit - marketing this thing is a bit of a problem right now :)

> If you just want a reliable mail service, just use...

non-Fastmail options that are a lot cheaper for multiple mailboxes and provide more, like Posteo, Mailbox.org, Runbox.com, Mailfence, Migadu, etc.

> and provide more, like Posteo

Thanks for mentioning some alternatives, but I've just checked the first example and it does not support custom domains (which Fastmail does), so it does not "provide more".

Depends on your definition of “more” and also who you are as a user.

Just for arguments’ sake, I could argue that Fastmail’s privacy stance and policy don’t matter much compared to Posteo because of what’s written on their websites as well as which jurisdictions these are located in, and hence Posteo is better for privacy. I could also argue that for non-technical people, having a custom domain and managing it is a pain, compared to just choosing some domain from a list of predefined domains in a drop down and not having to worry about domain renewals, MX records, etc.

I’m not saying that custom domains are bad (they do allow you to switch to another provider easily), but there are trade offs to consider in both cases, and hence what may be “more” for one may be “less” for another.

Also consider the price difference when multiple mailboxes are required. Fastmail becomes quite expensive very soon compared to the others.

Hasty generalization. Many of those in that list support custom domains. Only checking the first and applying that to all is just lazy.

Where did I apply it to everything? To falsify an argument you only need one counterexample. I'm happy with all the alternatives (as mentioned before), but I'm not happy with a claim that can be falsified with the first example.

> To falsify an argument you only need one counterexample.

If you want to apply logic like that, you have to apply it correctly. To falsify a universal claim you only need one counterexample, but the original poster never used a universal term (all, never, etc). If it wasn't a universal claim then you can't apply the rules for universal quantification to it.

More to the point, my comment wasn't attacking your logic, but that you seemed to dismiss the entire list based on the one example. I didn't see where you mentioned you were happy with the alternatives and only critical of the one, if that was the case then I just missed the larger context and I apologize.

I never hear Zoho Mail mentioned, I migrated from Fastmail, 1/5th of the cost and if anything slightly better interface as a bonus!

So cheap they don't even mention their prices on their prices page, that is cheap.

https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html

One of the "more" things many other services provide is far better privacy. European law is much more protective of human rights than American (where Fastmail hosts its servers and emails are "business records") or Australian (where Fastmail is located and where even warrant canaries are illegal).

FYI there was an article on here a little while ago about a man that used GDPR to get access to all emails by his colleagues that mentioned his name.

Citation needed. This is certainly not the intent of the law. If this story is true, that mail provider ('s data protection officer) broke the law.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/university-blacklist-ac...

Google Apps for Domains is great too, has been rock-solid for years.

Running mail server is easy, if you do it for yourself. If you do it for "friends and family" it is not.

Not because DKIM and DMARC those you setup once and don't care.

Because doing something for people and for free is hard.

I also use Fastmail to host my calendar and contacts - next to my email. I enjoy the web interface and lI especially like that the iOS integration just works.