Are you buying domains for fun? you can setup email easily | Hacker News Reader

Are you buying domains for fun? you can setup email easily

mailway.app

18 pointssvensauleau35 comments

This is what I see https://cln.sh/1LC7jA

Why even use floating point there, I wonder. Should probably be static text.

It is static text :)

Ok, I see. Kinda clever, but in my opinion it leaves a bad first impression. I thought it was a bug and so my first thought was, "if they can't even get that right...".

I would recommend maybe changing that, but I understand if you want to keep it.

Turns out, it's a "feature", judging by some other comments...

I've been using forwardemail.net for years. When I started the project was a few scripts on github and it's grown into a fully-fledged (excellent) product. If you're in the market for this I highly recommend you check them out. You can get pretty far with the free plan, and the paid is priced just right ($3/month right now) so that's what I do to support them.

I have also used ImprovMX and had good success there, although I ended up leaving because the free plan was too limiting and the paid plan was too much ($10/month last I checked).

Both services have great UX. It's hard to go wrong. I'll probably try out Mailway as well just for comparison.

Note I'm not affiliated in any way with forwardemail or ImprovMX, just a happy user.

Are there any solutions out there (FOSS highly preferred) that convert email into a REST/JSON API? What I really want is a traditional email account but headless (a frontend UI that works would be great, but there are plenty of those around already). I have a bunch of other projects I'm working on at the moment so I haven't built that myself, but I've gotten close a number of times. I would pay $3/month for a small account like that, going up to $10/month for lots of storage (but I won't need much personally).

I've heard that Gmail actually has a pretty good API, but I haven't looked into it. Has anyone tried using gmail from the API?

I believe https://mimestream.com/ is built around the Gmail API.

Fastmail developed https://jmap.io/. Not sure how easy it'd be to translate SMTP/IMAP/whatever into that.

I have been looking for a similar solution, I used the Gmail API to create emails with labels and it seemed pretty ok.

mailway will provide webhooks when an email is received, no plans to actually send emails yet but mailgun has a good API.

Forgot to mention that mailway should be open-source in the future, so you could run an instance.

Advanced price is NaN

Because it’s the “contact us” for pricing model.

NaN looks more like a glitch to me. Which made me close the website immediately. I’ve heard about their « contact us » model thanks to HN.

It's on purpose because the pricing model is still work in progress.

I might recommend saying "Contact us" or "Coming soon" – I also thought this was a glitch or that you were attempting to serve personalized pricing and it wasn't working.

Was not obvious to me at least

"Contact us" to me almost always means "you're going to have to talk to a salesperson who's trying to maximize their commission." That doesn't sound like someone who's "buying domains for fun" would really want to do. It also adds a significant amount of friction to your customer acquisition process.

I agree, I also don't like it. "Contact us" has been removed

Also similar: http://www.improvmx.com/

My domain registrar (Namecheap) provides mail forwarding for free and I've not needed more than that.

I find https://purelymail.com that actually hosts your email a better option. Less glamour on their website, but way more functionality.

Migadu only charges for emails sent, so is quite economical for many scenarios. Also mailinabox makes it very easy to set up a quick mail server for not super important domains.

That pricing model don't work for me. If I am buying a domain just for fun, I won't want to contact them for quotation -- I want something one or two clicks away.

The pricing model is still work in progress. The service will allow anyone to add domains and receive emails, one or two clicks away.

Can someone comment on the security aspect of forwarding mail? Does it add another layer of complexity/attack surface or is it negligible vis a vi the added privacy.

Yes there is a bit of added complexity. By SMTP's nature, the forwarding mail server will need to receive your email, before they can forward it to you. For that reason if you use a service for forwarding, you'll need to make sure you trust the company running this service, or only use this service for low-damage forwarding.

Ok. So this brings no added benefit over the free domain forwarding that's included with registrars these days?

Not all registrars include a free domain forwarding, that's the primary motivation for the service.

From a security perspective, the emails will be readable from such a service.

I think the benefit is to be able configure fwd’ing rules, I believe.

Any possibility to self host?

You can self host forwardemail.net: https://github.com/forwardemail/forwardemail.net

I haven't tried it myself but the maintainer is prominent in open source so I'd be pretty optimistic.

I'm planning to open-source the service, anyone will be able to host an instance and internal API to use it will be documented.

That's amazing! Do you have a rough idea when you plan to release? Like, are we talking weeks/months/years?

Totally fine if you don't know, but I may hold off investing time into something else if you expect it to be soon-ish.

It's hard to say, but months sounds like a reasonable time.

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