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Comment by imron | Hacker News Reader

I used to run my own mail server for my own domains, then I realized it was cheaper and less hassle to pay someone with more expertise to do it for me.

For $50 a year, Fastmail will handle multiple domains (all aliasing to your main email) and they have a bunch of other nifty features that in my opinion makes it well worth the price: https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/

How much is your time worth, and how much time will you spend administering your own mail server per year?

For me, if I was going to spend more than about half an hour of my time per year managing my own mail server, then that makes something like Fastmail a better option.

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Fastmail is pretty fantastic. The "just pay us directly to host your mail and then we don't have to sell our souls and pawn your data" model really works nicely.

Nothing quite like being able to arbitrarily write “randombusinessname@mydomain.com” on a form and be confident it will work, all for $50/yr.

It’s good to set up and host email for awhile to more deeply understand how it works, but do it for a domain you don’t plan to use for important emails. Then, when you’re sick of it, add that domain to your Fastmail or other hosted account with a deeper appreciation for what the modest annual fee is buying.

Fastmail has an even better feature than this. If your main email is hello@example.com and you want to sign up to ‘randomsite’ you can just make up the email randomsite@hello.example.com and it will go to your hello@example.com address.

When you’re sick of it, you can just filter randomsite@hello.example.com to the trash.

Doing this allows you to generate more or less random throwaway emails at the moment you need them, from a normal domain without any prior setup.

I consider this to be one of Fastmail’s killer features.

So it's like the feature gmail (and perhaps others) have that allows hello+randomsite@gmail.com. https://fastmail.blog/2018/10/01/use-unique-email-addresses-...

That's great because occasionally email parsers on sites/apps don't accept emails with the + in them.

Sounds good for throwaway emails and not using personal info, however overall, this still has a few problems:

- your accounts on different services can easily be cross referenced in the event of a data leak, etc. They will all have @hello.example.com.

- if you actually use hello@example.com for something important, that will be gleaned as well (worse, this is true even in the event of a data leak/hacker on a single service) since this rule/feature you explained is common knowledge.

Seems the only way to overcome that is use a separate custom domain for any site you want to completely isolate, or a custom alias or new email on a major service for each.

How many custom domains can I add on that Standard plan?

Edit: found the answer on https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/limits.html

100 + 1 for every user in the account. That should be sufficient for most use cases.

For everyone who does this: I always wonder about using the same mydomain.com for many services.

Because at least one reason for doing the aliasing is privacy, and by using the same domain for multiple services, even with a different 'name' (before the @ sign), you are offering the companies ability to cross reference to other sites they partner with/have a data leak as to how users are using the app. Worst, if you do use your real name within one of the services, you would potentially be revealing that anyone who uses @mydomain.com is that person, even if you didn't give that other service personal data within their app. Sure a malicious party could expect mydomain.com hosts many users, but you kind of make it obvious it's a catchall by doing things like using randombusinessname@mydomain.com.

Thoughts?

One solution is manually making a new alias @fastmail.com for each service you want to give a unique email.

Edit: spelling

Would fastmail (or the likes) be an ok service to use for a low volume Saas to send the regular stuff, like creating an account, resetting a password and such?

Or am I asking for trouble?

It’s a great service for that, and it’s one of the things I use it for too.

You can check out their limits here: https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/limits.html

For the $50/year account they have a daily sending limit of 8,000 emails a day.

Depends on how low a volume. At my workplace we were actually using Rackspace for automated emails, but we ended up constantly blacklisted. Customer support directed us to use Mailgun for those types of emails. They said automated emails required a different setup to maintain their reputation and not look like spam. I imagine it's the same case for Fastmail.

Unless it contributes additional value in the form of fun or learning valuable skills. Of course, for an email server those traits might be overly-optimistic...

Agree completely. That was part of why I used to host my own mail.

Over the years though, it got less fun and the skills learnt weren't particularly valuable to me. Fastmail was just a much better value proposition.

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