Hacker News Reader

Comment by Felz | Hacker News Reader

Hi! I am the "Scott" from Purelymail in question. In the hopefully unlikely event I'm hit by a bus, I do have friends who could step in to keep it running for a while. One of my infrastructural goals is also to have it run itself without manual intervention, where feasible. It's not 100% there yet, though. (Hence the beta.)

As to the terms of service, as far as I know the clause you quoted is fairly standard cover-your-ass. I've probably seen it in a few other service terms. Presumably, Fastmail words it as they do because they've covered all the reasons they might want to do so in their terms already, and have decades of legal experience.

View on HN

Hey! I feel like ensuring you clarify you'll only shut down an account if they break the rules you set out is a really good practice and there are examples, like FastMail's, you could borrow from. I know the standard boilerplate is to give a service the right to do whatever it wants, but as a small indie service operator you can be better than the fairly standard! ;)

Your service running itself is a good idea for avoiding you doing a lot of work, but if you got hit by a bus it is likely someone would shut off your credit cards that pay for services your services depends on and even if it's a box in your house it will end up unplugged. I'd strongly advise some business continuity involving a very trusted friend or family member who can be your second in managing the service at minimum, who has access to everything and knows what to do already.

I hope you don't take my comments as too much of a knock, what you're building is hard and worthwhile, and I wish you success with it. I'm on FastMail but that doesn't mean I always will be, and I like to have good options by good people.

No offense taken! I think you're broadly right that I could be doing a better job on reassuring messaging, and I'll put that on my work queue.

I also hope to solve any bus factor problems before leaving beta. Right now if I were struck down, I think I'd still have about 9 months worth of free AWS credits on the account running the service, plus any profits. (It's not quite a self sustaining business yet, but it's not that far from it either.)

...also, once it's a self-sustaining business, there will be the opportunity to hire people and decrease the busk-factor risk.

@Felz, hey mate, I love what you are doing. I will get Purelymail featured on SaaSHub for a few months. Hopefully that may bring you a few new sign ups. Please just get it verified there and improve the listing.

Keep up the good work!

Cool! I'll take a look.

Your responsiveness on these questions is seriously making me consider picking up an account. I, too, am looking for an excuse to migrate off GMail (It's a significant project once you have 30+ accounts) and your product might just be the straw needed to get me moving.

I do try to answer questions on HN. It's a little hard to keep track of threads over time, though. (Am I missing something?)

Anyway, good luck getting away from gmail!

Could you also commit to notifying users when the privacy policy or terms of service change? I suspect you already do this, but it would be good to have it in writing.

Sure. I'll add that in to the company policy documentation I'm going to draw up. (Or put it in the TOS itself?)

Hey Scott, Purelymail looks like a really nice service! Out of curiosity: how are you handling deliverability/avoiding spam filters? From my experience, hosting my personal email, any messages I send almost always go to spam (unless it's a direct reply to an email I've received). (I've set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, a PTR record, etc) Is it just a matter of building up enough email volume?

I don't think it matters even with all that stuff. The first time you email anyone, it's going to go to spam. Once you have established a mail flow, then it will continue. The best setup is to have them email you first, then your replies will already be well scored.

I wrote a blog post on this a while back:

https://news.purelymail.com/posts/blog/2019-06-21-deliverabi...

Unfortunately there aren't any easy answers. You'll have to be persistent.

Seeing this thread prompted me to sign up - I've been procrastinating over ditching gmail and consolidating on one IMAP provider for ages.

I shelved my one main doubt (I don't think much of Roundcube) and started the process today. Seems like you've done a really good job. Recipients have been getting all my emails, and I have found the integrated migration tool invaluable in getting set up.

Good luck with the venture.

> friends who could step in

"could" or "would"? Is there something in place, and have they agreed to this?

Could. I'll see about locking one down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com