Comment by _fqqr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _fqqr | Hacker News Reader

Hi Vinh! Congrats on your users!

I have been taking a look and have to say I am very interested and would like to better understand your product and the market you're in.

From my understanding, your product covers well my use case, a personal domain with infinite aliases for many purposes, such as unique emails for different services. Until now, I have used both G Suite and Office 365 (my current one) paying usually $5/month. Both required some tweaking to allow catch-all email with the main limitation: only being to send email from the main address, or I haven't dig deep enough to find it. Besides that, sending email from my main address (contact@domain.com) is very important, along with the integrated calendar. Pricing would be the main factor for me to migrate, specially because I don't live in the USA and these $5 amount to something larger in my country. In that case, the $1 plan is not enough for me because I am not able to send emails and $6 is too expensive, considering that with G Suite or Office 365 I get a whole other package, such as storage (specially 1TB on OneDrive) and office apps. Do you have any plans in this front?

Also, using your own SMTP servers, how often have you had to deal with being flagged as spam? From a newgrad perspective there's a whole culture on how managing your own email servers is a nightmare. How do you handle that (the spam issue) and also other things such as hardening your servers against malicious actors?

Lastly, have you considered making the process easier to send email from multiple addresses? For me, this would be amazing, although I don't know if I value it enough to pay more than the previous $5 for it. Being contacted through an alias, such as service@domain.com, and answering from contact@domain.com usually sucks and adds noise to the conversation.

Hi Mikaelmello,

Thanks so much for your well though out reply.

> Both required some tweaking to allow catch-all email with the main limitation:

This is very easier to config in our case

> Only being to send email from the main address, or I haven't dig deep enough to find it.

You can send out email from any SMTP account with us. Due to us is a forwarding first service, our SMTP account can be de-coupled from alias.

Example, say you forward support@domain.com -> personal@gmail.com, then you will reply back through support@domain.com

If someone send you service@domain.com -> personal@gmail.com, then you will reply back through service@domain.com.

Here is out document to set it up: https://hanami.run/docs/hanami_smtp So, the process is you create 2 SMTP accounts with us, get their credential, add them to "Gmail Send email as" and you can reply through the same alias that you people email you.

This is the reason our price is based on domain, not based on account or alias. You can create as many account or as many SMTP as you want.

> using your own SMTP servers, how often have you had to deal with being flagged as spam

This is the primary reason we don't offer a free plan. We try really hard to fight with spam by not attracting all of spam user just register and send email through us.

To fight with spam, here is our general rules:

1. We follow best practice of gmail.com to send email out https://support.google.com/a/answer/175365?hl=en. Our email is signed and have IP PTR setup properly, right SPF record, support IPv6

2. We filter spam ourself before forwarding/sending out to anyone to protect our IP address. We check for sender info on DNS Blacklist.

3. We rate limiting and ban suspicious to avoid them keep spamming an alias, and being forward to gmail etc.

4. We run honeypot which no one should ever connect to, except those spam bot and we ban them IP.

5. Our SMTP Credential is generated with hight entropy instead of letting user generate SMTP credential with weak password.

6. We regularly send a large amount of email, about 15 per seconds to email address we managed and manually mark them as Important/Start them. The purpose of doing this is in the case if someone send spam before our system detected, then only a small amount of outgoing eamail are consider spam so we have better chance there

7. We maintain an IP pools that we build a high reputation over time. At any moment, only 3 IP address are used to send out email. In case we are being flagged, we will kick in the good IP, deal with spam, and delist the bad IP.

> hardening your servers against malicious actors?

By not offering a freemium, and require a premium price for SMTP, we kind of limited the bad actor. We also monitoring sending out rate and warn user who send too much or has suspicious activity. Example: our SMTP are used for human to send email out, not for a script to use their SMTP credential, if we detect like 10 emails in 1 minutes then it's most likely a bad actor.

> Lastly, have you considered making the process easier to send email from multiple addresses?

Right now, we already supported that. From a single gmail/office365, you can configured it to pick any SMTP account to send email out. Example in this screenshot: https://hanami.run/mult-email.png

> I don't live in the USA and these $5 amount to something larger in my country

In that case, please reach out to me and I'm happy to offer $1 plan to you with all the features. I wrote this article https://hanami-run.medium.com/why-you-should-use-hanami-run-... and It talked about a fair price for the world.

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