Oh cool, my project is on HackerNews! I was wondering about the sudden uptick in user signups, and then I checked HN...
I'm Scott, feel free to ask me anything about the service.
I'm Scott, feel free to ask me anything about the service.
I hope you have personal contacts on the Gmail team at Google, much as I’d like for this to be a joke.
It’s possible that my issue was too low a traffic to ‘hold onto’ my score with Gmail, since it was one domain and one email address. With some luck you should be able to have enough traffic to avoid that. Best of luck.
My domain is a year older than Google itself and has been in continuous use for e-mail that whole time. The IP addresses it is on haven't changed in a decade. But that didn't matter. DKIM, SPF, DMARC, forward and reverse matching DNS, exactly four users who do not send spam under penalty of being buried under legal solicitations for green cards, and all the rest didn't help. Randomly getting sent to /dev/null for no good reason. And not enough traffic to qualify me to use their Postmaster utilities.
Three years ago I gave up and ported to Fastmail with a tear in my eye for the days when even the smallest net on the Internet could be a full participant.
I lost a lot of business back then. Thanks, Google.
It’s a clown show. The opaque filters are just an excuse to engage in anti-competitive behavior IMO.
I find it sad that that‘s pretty much a waste of time now for most use cases.
The good news is that if you have postfix, using postscreen with an informed choice of blocklists is enough to deal with 99%+ of inbound spam. You can strap in rspamd or spamassassin/amavis behind that, but it's mostly not needed.
The inbound-mail-problems are largely solved, but surefire delivery to other parties is a matter of IPaddr/domain reputation, properly implementing relevant standards, and luck.
If you're interested in learning more about (including, but not limited to, self-hosting) email, the #email channel on the libera.chat IRC network is a great resource to ask questions.
I had this issue with SendGrid years ago: long story short, after discussing with support and eventually an engineer it turns out they weren't just looking at the status codes, but at the status messages. I don't recall the exact patterns they used, but they will retry if the message matches a fixed set patterns, and otherwise it would just discard it.
There was some back-and-forth over this, because our customer just had greylisting with the "wrong" error message. To be fair, they did turn it off for a few hours and took the conversation serious (none of this "we have passed it along", never to be heard from again) but they got back to us they turned it back on again "because the queues got too large". I mean .... okay.... Seems rather curious to break a fundamental aspect of email because "muh queues". Not having to worry about this sort of stuff is exactly why we're using SendGrid in the first place :-/
My experiences with MailGun were also not exactly stellar. At the time at least, these people literally did not understand how encodings worked and would mangle e.g. Greek or Hebrew emails in ISO-8869-7 or -8. Why? Well, turns out that "emails should be in ASCII or UTF-8 and there is no way for us to know which encoding is used". Ehh ... there is literally a header telling you... I sent a nice detailed email explaining this: no reply. Some follow-ups over the course of a few weeks: no reply. A not-so-nice snarky email inquiring whether the entire MailGun team was suffering from a horrible debilitating disease and if there was anything I could do to help: "well, we just didn't know what else to do as there is no way to solve this"...
I'm hardly an "email purist"; I understand there are practical concerns and the RFC isn't a stone tablet from the mountain. But this was just ridiculous. There are a bunch of other cases both SendGrid and MailGun are actually quite bad at.
Dealing with email providers is always a frustrating experience.
https://www.dcc-servers.net/dcc/
It appears to support "weak" IP matching:
> All or part of the IP address of the SMTP client can be optionally ignored by DCC clients as far as the greylist triple is concerned. This feature may be useful for legitimate mail systems that shuffle messages among SMTP clients between retransmissions. See the dccm and dccd man pages.
https://www.dcc-servers.net/dcc/greylist.shtml
It doesn't quite sound like it does a job of 100% "same email, same sender, different mx in same domain" -but I suspect it works well enough in practice?
> Usually the DCC greylist system requires that an almost identical copy of the message be retransmitted during the embargo. If weak-body is present, any message with the same triple of sender IP address, sender mail address, and target mail address ends the em-bargo, even if the body of the message differs.
> If weak-IP is present, all mail from an SMTP client at an IP address is accept after any message from the same IP address has been ac-cepted.
https://www.dcc-servers.net/dcc/dcc-tree/dccd.html#OPTION-G
I can't recall what I used for greylisting last -possibly greylistd.
Anyway, the smart play these days might be to whitelist/greylist via SPF - I'm not sure if spammers (of the variant caught by greylists) generally have SPF?
See: https://poolp.org/posts/2019-12-01/spf-aware-greylisting-and...
https://github.com/poolpOrg/filter-greylist
Ed: although if service providers like mailgun simply ignore rfc and only "sometimes" retries... wwell that's a problem.
> To activate a trial account, you will need a reasonably modern browser and a phone number that can receive SMS texts.
It makes no mention of the use of a "hashwall" ... It gives no indication of what the user's browser is going to do ... Just a progress meter with a note saying it will take about 3 minutes.
This feels fishy. Especially if a user doesn't know how to get into the developer console, find out what's running etc.
Just completed my signup. I am going to check if the domain that failed to work with forwardemail.net[1] will work with your service.
If it does, then I'll say goodbye to my $36 and hello to your service.
Update: While setting up, I noticed:
- Ownership record content in `code.codebox` does not fit in the content area and extends entirely too far to the right. I had to inspect and copy out of developer tools.
- In general, UI elements seem not properly aligned, contained.
These are not deal breakers to me. The site might actually benefit from going more old school. Trying to fit everything in a narrow box with large font sizes and padding is hard.
Update: I had already clicked on CloudFlare instructions. It's the friendly stuff that has the problems I mention above. The actual information at the bottom of the page is actually displayed the way I would have expected.
Update: After creating the DNS records, I noticed the checks were still failing. So, I replaced the actual IDN in the textbox with punycode and the DNS checks worked. It would be a better user experience if the punycode conversion step was handled by the UI.
Update: Created a new user on the custom domain. Login box does not accept IDN either but the email composer does show the from address using IDN instead of punycode.
Update: I was able to exchange email with a Gmail user. Did not go to SPAM. But, in my reply, Gmail did give a scary warning about the IDN. To be clear, there is nothing the email provider can do about that :-)
I'll try out a few more custom domains and very, very likely switch. Thank you and good luck.
Second attempt, and I got a place to put the code. Then, while I was filling up the registration data, the page refreshed and started all over.
Third attempt finally worked...
Not the best on-boarding experience, but hey it really is cheap!
I'll make a note on the UI elements. Honestly hadn't thought about the punycode usecase, good catch.
Yeah, I figured that out, but someone else might think you are trying mine some *coin or something. I am not sure if I would mind it if you did, but it would be good to tell up front what you are doing. It does seem to be a much better than recaptcha.
The fact that it works is good enough for me. I am going fiddle a little more before I sign up, but it looks like this is fills my needs.
If you need more than three domains, try Migadu(not affiliated, just happy customer), they have no formal limits to their "micro" plan and is cheaper than FastMail. Migadu also allows adding alias domains(something I haven't seen anywhere), basically if you have a mailbox like "merlinscholz@domain.tld" you can attach some more domains as alias, like "@domain2.tld" "@domainx.tld" and those will all receive/send/operate as the same "merlinscholz@domain.tld". Neat feature I haven't found yet on other services.
12€/yr for 1GB + custom domain + 5 aliases (plus catchall).
But 10€/ month for unlimited storage and users is definitely a good offer, too.
3 Gb is plenty for a few months of "live" email but after that what should we do to keep those emails -- and still have them searchable if need be?
The local maildir account is searchable like any other mailbox (I have about 10,000 messages going back to 2003). Syncthing[2] is configured to sync the maildir directory for backup and sync.
Supporting ManageSieve is a nice touch. Most sieve services only allow managing sieve through a web UI.
I use Fastmail and like that they contribute to open source mail servers, and do standards work (JMAP).
Does PurelyMail contribute to open source?
Some of the libraries I wrote are open sourced and on my Github account, e.g. the web framework: https://github.com/ScottPeterJohnson/shade
I hope you don't find the pain of diverging from the mainline to be too great. We kind of cheated there with Fastmail and Cyrus IMAP by merging all our changes back to the mainline, since there wasn't much other development happening.
(We're also working on JMAP for calendars and for contacts over in the IETF working groups - hoping to publish Calendars by the end of this year)
I think Gmail really shines at this. It's one of the reason I was thinking of switching to Hey email also, though after reading Hey's reviews I've decided not to. So anyway, would love some comments from users or you about how good you are at separating the wheat from the chaff.
In the long run I'm probably going to replace the Bayesian part of SpamAssassin with something custom, simply because operationally it's painful and I think neural nets are closer to state of the art.
1. I don't know if it's the social media kiss of death at work, but I'm getting lots of SSL errors trying to load your site. It's a crap-shoot whether it works or not right now.
2. Seeing this post, I posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27711124. If you don't already (did I miss it?) it might be worth tossing up a page or an item in your FAQ teaching people about how they can go about migrating their email address to another/your service. I don't know how easy/hard it is (hence my AskHN post), but the perception is that it's nigh impossible to do.
Hard to say for sure. None of the servers really went above 15% average CPU and I don't think they maxed out net, and the health checker for HTTPS didn't have any problems. I'll doublecheck.
On the subject of migration, I'll make a note to add a FAQ for that, thanks.
Usernames on shared domains:
1 to 6 letters: $1.00 per user per year
7 to 12 letters: $0.25 per user per year
13+ letters: $0.10 per user per year
2. Do you support IPv6?
boss@example.com is cooler for some than john.n.johnson.2@example.com, and they will pay.
2. Not at the moment- IPV6 support is a little dicier for mailservers because the scarcer IPV4 address is often used as a antispam signal.
Sadly the lack of IPv6 is a deal breaker for me.
Purelymail also has some domains you can use like I can get "koselig@purelymail.com" and then I'm charged in the 7 letters tier for it.
At least that's how it's been for me as a happy user of PM for the past year and a half.
Sure, i use IMAP and have local copy and backup. But Murphy's law, my Laptop die at the same time and my backups were stolen.
Also, I generally don't stop the service for maintenance, unless I need to upgrade the database engine.
>You cannot have more than $50 in credit at any time.
Just curious, why a $50 limit? I'm the weird kind of guy who likes to pay years in advance. If possible, please consider raising this limit to $100 or even $200.
How is the mailbox on phone? My major problem with email hosting is the lack of a decent mailbox service that's available on. Windows, android, linux that's either. One-time-purchase or open source. A monthly fee is fine if for unlimited users (I have a family)
Generally phone access is third party through IMAP. On Android I personally use K-9 mail, but you can use anything that supports IMAP anywhere, which is a pretty good number of options for any platform.
I wish K-9 had snooze-email, it's the one feature (non-standard) I use a lot
You can still use Purelymail for mail, and have your mail client provide a cohesive mail/contacts/calendar UI.
(I use a paper diary, YMMV.)
Obviously you reached the right audience and they liked what they saw to post it here and generate so much interest. Consider me another subscriber!
I am usually the classic "engineer who neglects marketing" archetype. Maybe at some point I'll overcome that.
Great job.
Same idea as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
Similar idea to cryptocurrencies.