Migadu – No-nonsense multi-domain email at a flat price | Hacker News Reader

Migadu – No-nonsense multi-domain email at a flat price

migadu.com

275 pointstsujp168 comments

I'll repeat my comment from nearly seven months ago [1] since it left a really bad taste about how users are dealt with. Nearly a year ago when the initial waves of the pandemic were raging on, Migadu removed its free tier. That's not a problem by itself because businesses have to make money to sustain and grow. But Migadu gave one month’s notice (contrary to the claims in the replies, that's what I saw) for users to switch. The replies to the comment also said that the new lowest paid tier was "affordable in every corner of the planet", which sounded quite ignorant even for a non-pandemic time.

Another point, which may matter to some people, is that while Migadu may be a Swiss company, the data centers where the mails are hosted were in France (this was the case at least a year ago). So the situation is somewhat comparable (not entirely though) to Fastmail being an Australian company with data centers in the U.S. being used.

For those who want multi-domain email services for a lower (flat) price, look at mxroute. It's based out of the U.S. though, which may not be an option for people who want certain services outside Five Eyes jurisdictions.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25382626

> It's based out of the U.S. though, which may not be an option for people who want certain services outside Five Eyes jurisdictions.

Are you saying it's based in the US? (Brit here.)

The question is not Brit-specific so to speak. Saying "based off of" to mean "based on" and "based out of" to mean "based in" etc started relatively recently in the U.S. In the NYC area, people also say "waiting on line" instead of "in line" which grates me to this day, but at least I could find that usage special-case in a foot thick Webster dictionary back when I first encountered.

I believe the "based off of" and "based out of" were popularized among the hipster brogrammers of early 21st century, but I might be wrong.

I am not a native speaker.

> which grates me to this day

You might be saddened to learn that languages are a living thing :), and only "owned" by the people speaking it. Dictionaries are always behind by definition, because they encode the words that have caught on sufficiently: there was never a new word created that was first put into a dictionary and people picked it up from there.

Basically, don't get stressed too much with language changes, because it does and always will. Or what are we to make of "brogrammers" (even "hipster" is relatively new, not to mention most of the computing jargon).

your absolutely correct. its the way its always been.

Yes, mxroute is based in the U.S. (the company as well as its data centers).

This isn't true. MXroute mostly uses Hetzner in Germany. But there no guarantee to server location.

> Another point, which may matter to some people, is that while Migadu may be a Swiss company, the data centers where the mails are hosted were in France (this was the case at least a year ago). So the situation is somewhat comparable (not entirely though) to Fastmail being an Australian company with data centers in the U.S. being used.

> For those who want multi-domain email services for a lower (flat) price, look at mxroute. It's based out of the U.S. though, which may not be an option for people who want certain services outside Five Eyes jurisdictions.

Weird speaking that, but I would be more of concerned of (an accidental) breach of privacy by some Migadu employee than some <country-name> burreau. Not saying about some typical script kiddie or some hacker-magician getting in possession of logins with passwords as leak. It is likely new on the market and I am tempted to say it has near-zero reputation for anyone looking for a private mail right now. Location do matter, but execution more.

> It is likely new on the market and I am tempted to say it has near-zero reputation for anyone looking for a private mail right now.

GP here. Not sure if you meant Migadu in this sentence, but Migadu is not new in the email market. It has been around for several years (don't want to visit the website to look it up). I also don't believe that it has near-zero reputation.

About page says 2014.

Maybe "likely new" is a bad word to describe it. Comparing to many email providers I know or used 7 years is a pity. It have matured enough to consider it will stay for longer and it won't disappear soon, what has happened to many competitors on e-mail service market. I said "new", because both Migadu (since 2014) and even ProtonMail (since 2013) brought a lot of fresh air in last decade. I my observation for some reasons Migadu gained more attention among people looking to have an email with own domain name in last few years than in previous. When I also shared a link to Migadu to some friends, they also saying "oh, I hear about it for the first time". That's why I am saying "it is likely new on the market", it still have potential to gather new customers by advertising (on the contrary to ProtonMail, which seems media coverage helped a lot).

> I also don't believe that it has near-zero reputation.

Well, I guess I was too harsh but it is small company that already had various problems while operating (thankfully only downtime / lack of support) and it is hard to trust that no leak or breach will happen (and this is what makes me more concerned than some bureau). I also said "it has near-zero reputation for anyone looking for a private" - I don't generalize to whole service but only to private/safe message exchange. This service is perfectly fine for people in IT, startups or just personal emails but if I would be a person, who exchanges confidential documents I will stay away from Migadu. Why? They do not encrypt data on their servers [0][1], which is clearly opposite to what ProtonMail does [2].

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/ltcjc5/what...

> 4. They don't encrypt anything other than SMTP, IMAP, HTTPS. You can encrypt your emails manually but they don't encrypt anything on their servers. They claim this is impractical and doesn't truly help with privacy or security.

> 5. They don't force you to give them your real name or personal info, but there are no anonymous or cash payments. They only process payments via PayPal or Stripe though they claim to not keep any information about you that way.

[1]: https://www.migadu.com/procon/

[2]: https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/what-is-encryp...

> while Migadu may be a Swiss company, the data centers where the mails are hosted were in France

> So the situation is somewhat comparable (not entirely though) to Fastmail being an Australian company with data centers in the U.S. being used

I don't know if it is a good comparison, as European countries (France included) are subject to GDPR, which does not really have an equivalent in the U.S.

GP here. My points were about surveillance arrangements and information exchange between countries, like the Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, Fourteen Eyes, etc. Also, as far as I know, Migadu does not encrypt data at rest. Anyone who gets access to the servers gets access to all the data.

They have a great FAQ explaining that and I agree with their conclusion - all the encryption claims by other providers are nonsense and don't offer real protection.

Around the same time last year they also had a storage layer failure, and my catch-all rules disappeared. And about a month before that they changed POP3 address.

Both of these changes happened without any email announcement, only visible on their site. So effectively because I didn't login into Migadu dashboard, I was losing emails.

Yep. This was exactly my experience, resulted in failure to recieve mail (and my email being deassociated from the accounts of my bank and rental agency).

I had a back and fore with them on HN some months back and they were trying to whitewash their handling of the storage failure / rules deletion.

The savings are not worth the risk.

I had this issue too - all rules were deleted as they switched form regex to something else. I have no idea whether I missed anything and they really could have done an anouncement.

Otherwise have been quite happy and except for a lack of calendar it all works quite well.

I experienced the same thing, and it took me a couple of weeks to realize I wasn’t receiving emails. Luckily I was only testing it out with emails for non-essential services. I found it difficult to understand why they continued to not make an announcement even after I, and presumably other people, made them aware of the impact the change had.

Im surprised that there is no response from Migadu here.

> For those who want multi-domain email services for a lower (flat) price, look at mxroute

I was very interested and very seriously considering signing up, until I read this: https://mxroute.com/docs/do-you-support-2fa-on-email-account... While I respect Jarland's opinion/stance, I do not agree.

What do you disagree with specifically? The reasoning in that link is absolutely correct. We can argue that POP, etc. should have 2FA support added to the protocol, but that's not the point the author was making.

Loads of folk use just webmail though, and SMTP/IMAP is usually disabled until they generate an app password.

If you do enable SMTP/IMAP: sure, it's correct. But that often doesn't apply, so I don't think it's a "trick" or "sleight of hand".

Use case: I have an unattended cron task polling my IMAP account to archive the mail every 4 hours. I specifically use an IMAP read-only unique ("per-app") password for that script/connection; under no circumstance should that password have access to write to IMAP, touch POP or SMTP. Fastmail allows me to do this with ease, and I can create as many as I'd like with different ACLs. The mxroute reasoning simply does not consider all the use cases people have and want per-app passwords for to increase their personal security posture.

The ease of creation of app passwords and protocol-level controls really are fantastic in Fastmail. I hope it never goes away.

Compromising a user password does not grant access to the web client (where all the important settings are at) if 2fa is enabled. App specific password only allows data exfiltration and most enterprise email servers/authz systems can be configured to automatically block access from VPNs/foreign ips. These days emails are tied into calendar and Oauth and many other things, blocking access to the inbox is just one layer in a very a big picture.

Modern IMAP servers support OAuth2/OIDC, (Thunderbird supports this dialog) and IMAP/POP/SMTP has supported kerberos since forever (Though that typically is only within a pre-setup organization).

The problem is that a very significant number of email clients don't because it's not part of the open standards that they're implemented for.

This advice is incorrect from a security perspective.

> While many offer this, no one tracks them, and they can’t be limited to just the app (because, again, the protocols don’t work this way). So if your account gets compromised and you have 50 passwords, what do you do besides delete all 50 passwords and start over? Delete them one at a time and see how long it takes for spam to stop going out from your account? Reduce server security and log which password is being used (because that’s the only way to gain that insight from the universal protocols)?

1. Give the passwords names that identify the client app 2. Track that name / login / actions - it's not less secure to track browser type on the web, the equivalent is what's happening here (that's iPhone1, thunderbird on my mac, ...) 3. Present this information to the account user. I should have access to the logs of who's accessing my data. 4. If your account has 50 passwords, it has 50 clients that you have to delete and start over on. Same as if you'd used a single password on all 50 clients.

How do you track the name without tracking the password itself? The IMAP standard doesn't provide a function for this. You'd have to log the password used and do it that way. It'd be hard to implement such a thing with the base protocol without adding a security concern.

Then again I'm not a software developer, I'm an admin and hope to be hiring a dev this year. MXroute works mostly on open source or licensed software, with a heavy focus on custom in-house configuration being around the outbound relays, as the initial focus of MXroute was based on getting emails to their recipients, no matter the cost. These days, that's increasingly difficult and time consuming for a lot of people (IP reputation, etc).

I'm a dev not an admin. Change your password query from something like (pseudo code)

    SELECT username, ... FROM applications WHERE username = ? AND password = MD5(?)

    SELECT username + ' ' + applicationName FROM ... (as above)

Then log the user name for each session, or return an extra field that is the app name when doing a password check (assumes your MX can do this). This is the general idea, and it's more pointing out why the advice is wrong, than talking about how to fix it and make it possible.

And that's totally cool. I think a lot of alternate perspectives around this focus on proprietary implementations, and my focus revolves mostly around open source and licensed software. MXroute isn't a software vendor, and this confuses a lot of people because there are a lot of mail providers out there that are. Google and Microsoft are easy examples.

Completely understood by me, hopefully I said this in a way that was productive. :) Per-app passwords have their use cases and I think techs have been banging on it in open source for awhile, example: https://www.happyassassin.net/posts/2014/08/26/adding-applic...

Similar issue. Just chiming in to say it wasn't just you and I've since left Migadu forever as well.

I remain baffled at the folk wisdom of using providers outside the United States in order to avoid the Five Eyes IC. You accomplish the opposite thing by doing that. NSA is literally chartered to hack into things outside of US jurisdiction; they don't even need permission to do it. They might even need permission not to do it.

Obviously, hosting in the US isn't a cure-all. And there are other good reasons to work with companies in Europe; for instance, their data privacy rules can often be better than ours, which can give you some commercial protections.

But these discussions about where people's email is hosted always talk about jurisdictional issues, and the only jurisdictional issue that matters here is this: if NSA is going to swipe mail from Google Mail, there's a whole fuckload of paperwork they have to do. If they want to get mail from your random email provider in Switzerland, they can just push a button.

Excellent point! Illegal domestic spying in the US has mostly gone the way of the dodo bird because of certain whisteblowers.

I want to be clear that I have zero doubt that illegal domestic spying happens in the US. I chose my words carefully.

Recently there has been increasing government interest in "domestic terrorism" which is basically the public facing component of an increase in funding for three letter agencies.

You are being sarcastic I assume.

If you are trying to avoid spook you're fucked anywhere you are: US EU whatever. Yes, if the NSA want your US email they probably won't press that button, but they'll ask GCHQ to press a UK button insetad and get it that way. Also, if the FBI wants your email they will just send a guy in a black MiB suit & 9/10 times the email company will roll over. If they meet resistance FBI just go to a tame US judge (they have loads) who rubber stamps the writ. If your server is in .CH they need lots of paperwork and a good arguable case. So yes it is worth hosting outside US. Ask Microsoft about why they do EU data hosting in Ireland.

Your kinda proving parents point. To get email content outside the USA, there are no rules. NSA can do more or less what they want to obtain that data (hack,bribe,etc.)

within the US, it requires some type of judicial process. You can argue about corrupt judges, power tripping FBI agents, etc. etc. but the fact is, its harder to obtain this data inside the USA.

Further, if you are just committing regular old crimes, the FBI will need to run some type of parallel reconstruction IF they obtained your data using less than pristine methods.

What DoJ attorney would risk their career cause some dumb-ass FBI agent went rogue and pistol whipped the sys-admin for the data?!?!?!?!

I'm not even trying to say you're meaningfully protected by US jurisdiction. I personally think you are, but I won't try to win the argument, and I think reasonable people can certainly disagree. I'm just saying that, if nothing else, selecting a smaller provider with fewer security resources just to get outside of the US is not a win with respect to mass surveillance.

If you read finish, he basically proved to host it outside USA or any 5eyes. Hacking is way more difficult than pushing a button. This is why FBI insist a backdoor key for phone manufacturers.

If we're not on the same page about why it's harder to crack the encrypted filesystem of a locked recent-model iPhone than it is to hack into an always-on database-backed SMTP email service, there's little point in us debating this further.

This has been my position for a while as well. We even saw last year the revelation that the CIA had been in Switzerland:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-...

It's definitely a false sense of security to assume that being on one side of a particular border increases your security. There may be degrees of truth to it but there's no "if your data is here, no agency will ever come for it." When protecting the contents of your data is important, the largest workload should be on sender and recipient. The protocols they decide to use, the encryption they choose for their content, etc.

I appreciate your recommendation. I'm no friend to intelligence agencies, but I don't want to necessarily put myself out there as a competitor to something like the old Lavabit. I'm not looking to be a victim of the US government any more than I want to see my customers victimized by them.

Ive had a bad enough experience with migadu that I am compelled to actively warn people not to use them (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25054091).

Migadu has taught me bargain basement email is too expensive in the long run.

Their $19 (Micro) Plan lists "200 in/day and 20 out/day". My email usage, personally, seems to be in bursts. It stays below 1 or 2 outbound mails on most days, however on some days (rarely) there'll be threaded conversations with >50 outbound mails. So, I feel like it would be fantastic if the plan had monthly limits instead of daily limit. Or some other sort of limit, say EC2 like, which would allow the user to consume the resources in bursts.

"90% of any unused allowance carries over to the next day" is a neat way to allow 10x bursts while keeping allowances understandable.

That is a 1.9x burst, not 10x, right?

And that's at best, assuming you got no emails at all the previous day.

No, because it can carry over multiple days...

So eventually the maximum you'll get is sum 0 to inf [ 0.9^n ] ... Which is 10x

I read "90% of unused allowance carries over to the next day" as unused allowance carries over exactly 1 day. That is, it's the allowance that carries over, not the carry over.

If allowance is fungible like you say, then sure, you're right. My experience of accountants and lawyers is that they don't treat these things as fungible, and are more likely to do something like:

  Day 1:
    allowance 200 emails
    carried over 0
    consumed 0

  Day 2:
    allowance 200
    carried over 180
    consumed 0

  Day 3:
    allowance 200
    carried over 180 // 90% of 200 not 380
    consumed 50 // consumption taken from allowance first

  Day 4:
    allowance 200
    carried over 135 // 90% of 150 not 200 or 330
    consumed 0

and so on.

Maybe it's treated as fungible, but IMO the above is how lawyers and accountants would treat it.

They say it is a soft limit. You'll at most get a warning/request to update but they promise not to block.

As a Migadu customer, that’s not my understanding. From their website: “When reaching incoming messages limits, we will warn you and allow for some tolerance of up to 25% over the plan limit. If even the higher tolerance level gets reached, we will start deferring messages until either the following day or the plan is upgraded. […] When reaching outgoing messages limits, we will warn you and allow for some tolerance of up to 25% over the plan limit. After the tolerance we will start rejecting outgoing messages.”

While $19 yearly is admittedly very cheap, 20 daily outbound emails seems like an absurdly low limit. I can't imagine many sole proprietorships (as they suggest as customers for that tier) would be able to sustain that.

Especially since most email providers count a single email addressed to 10 people as 10 emails. Get into a back and forth discussion with a moderately sized group and you'll hit your limit after only a few messages.

Yes, I was also quite excited until I saw the message limits, it feels very archaic.

So far the best email service I've found is Tutanota, who provide a custom domain for €12 / mo if you pay yearly [1], which is the cheapest I've found so far. I also like how my mail is encrypted at rest. The only downside is I have to use their web client which has limited features.

[1] https://tutanota.com/pricing

I have used Migadu in the past and I had absolutely no complaints. Everything worked as advertised and I had no delivery issues.

I chose them for their pricing model: they charge not per mailbox or domain, but rather per total number of emails in/out and storage. While this probably makes them less money, it always seemed like an honest and fair approach to billing.

Me too, it works. I wish it had whatever IMAP feature it is that makes server-side search possible in K9, that's a bit of an annoyance.

Also another happy Migadu user, on their micro plan. I mainly use it for small projects, it’s great because I pay a flat $19 fee for unlimited domains. I’m happy to upgrade once a project requires it.

For my personal domain email, I use Fastmail, but that comes in at $50 yearly. Not something I can justify when just playing around with an idea.

According to their website, Fastmail allows up to 100 custom domains on a single account, so it's not like you need to buy a second account if you just want to receive/send email on a domain.

Yes, but you pay per “user”. So if you want to separate your accounts, you want multiple users.

Right, but I don't really see why you would need separate accounts. In my experience a single account for multiple projects is actually very convenient (with rules to automatically sort incoming mail).

In my opinion, multiple accounts are really only necessary if you have employees or collaborators and want to make sure that not everyone can access your stuff.

But that's just my point of view, I understand that what works for me may not be suitable for your projects.

The way that users work with Fastmail, is that each user has a single email address, the rest just acts as aliases to that address. So when receiving works, sending always happens with the main address.

For small projects, I don’t necessarily want to reply with my main address, hence why I want to have it seperated.

> sending always happens with the main address

Not true. You can set up Sending Identities to use another address for sending.

Oh really, I’ve been looking for that, but was never able to find it. I’ll take another look later today.

Here is a comparison which lists some cheaper alternatives to Migadu: https://blog.m5e.de/post/comparison-of-email-hosting-possibi...

Your conclusion is spot on! I've been looking for providers that are lower on the cost for more than one mailbox with custom domains and being outside surveillance jurisdictions.

One point about your post: Migadu has (or at least had) all the data stored in data centers in France. It also doesn't encrypt data at rest. So I'm not sure how the privacy angle exactly works.

Why the fixation on religion of founders?

I am an Atheist. I don't want that my money goes to people who want that their religious worldview takes over.

Using a service from a Hindu nationalism supporter goes against my personal world view.

I included the religous connections because some other people might also have similar thoughts.

You have virtually 0% chance of ever knowing what the recipients of your money spend it on. Anyone could be giving it to extreme political groups, abuse groups, extreme religions. On the other hand, a religious person might not have any interest in supporting extremism.

The money also goes to silent partners, investors etc. so where do you stop?

We should judge people on their integrity and business model imho, religion is a straw man.

This is a small reason why I am trying to switch away from Zoho right now. :/

> I am an Atheist. I don't want that my money goes to people who want that their religious worldview takes over.

That is not the same thing as being religious.

Where did you read that Zoho is furthering Hindu nationalism? I’d be curious to read a source.

I’ve used Migadu for about 3/4 years now to provide email for hosting clients. They’re good. They had a little wobble at the start of the pandemic but otherwise no issues. You get full dmark, dkim etc and autodiscover. Massive mailboxes. Would recommend.

I use Migadu myself and have nothing but compliments for them. They do offer a calendar but it's only as a bare-bones complement to their main focus of email, so if you do not care about having invite responses and the like and just want: X is happening at Y functionality it's perfects for that too.

I feel like they really care about how they offer their service and given how laser focused it is that translates into me being extremely satisfied with their offering.

I use migadu for all my side-project-esque domains because of their pricing, and their service has been wonderful.

Unfortunately I’m still using another provider for my primary domain because I can’t get real time push notifications on Apple Mail with Migadu—they’re limited to 15 minute fetches for best case scenario

I started using Migadu recently because it offers - as far as I know - unlimited mailboxes and aliases on a single domain, and unlimited domains for a cheap, fixed price.

There isn’t anyone else that does this that I know of, and so the value provided in this one area is incredible.

There are other limits, like sending 20 emails per day on the cheapest plan, but I don’t think I’ve ever sent that many emails before.

Even Gmail has unlimited aliases, via catch-all (everything after +). With Gmail, specifically, you can use dots (.) in an e-mail address for aliases as well. I'm not using Gmail, but I would not use an e-mail service without catch-all. The dot behavior, however, is weird. Nobody does it that way, 'cept Google.

The + isn't completely helpful if the intent of using aliases is related to spam. All spammers know how these work and can figure out the main address by discarding the + and whatever comes after it. The dot has been somewhat of a problem to use where it seemed as if Gmail allowed other people to create the same address with dots (I don't recall the details since this was a long, long time ago).

You can opt to only ever use + and then put a lot of weight on spam score on anything not using the + (or using whitelisting without the +). It can also help when trying to figure out who leaked your data. Literally, data breaches have been found/exposed by a few heroes who used this feature.

Or unlimited aliases

    - service@example.com
    - anotherservice@example.com

And they all land on the same inbox and you don’t have to worry about those services that still don’t allow +

> The dot behavior, however, is weird. Nobody does it that way, 'cept Google.

I think it makes good sense for a free email provider. You don't want to distinguish bobsmith@... from Bob.Smith@.... It will just cause misdelivered emails.

There's mxroute in the U.S. that provides a similar service, but has pricing primarily based on space usage.

Question: beyond a certain degree, why would you try to save money on email that much? Email is pretty much the weakest link for most people from a security perspective (ie password recovery), so I would want my email provider to have enough resources to properly secure the thing.

What are people using these providers for, and do you feel like they secure your mailbox enough?

I use it for primary email, and based on communication with them and experience with Gmail and O365, certainly trust migadu more than the usual suspects.

Remember that email communication, irrespective of provider, is not secret unless GPG or similar is used. If a MFA enabled account can be accessed with only a password reset email, it is fundamentally insecure.

While of course in theory you are correct, the fact remains that you are able to reset your password using email in many online applications, and that addressing this is out of control of the user. Using a secure email provider, however, is within control and can certainly go a long way in mitigating the risks here.

It does very, very little to mitigate risk when you are using an insecure medium.

Regardless, their security is respectable and their fair simpler infrastructure makes me much more confident that it isn't full of holes.

I use MXroute for low volume, automated email from software and devices. Having unlimited mailboxes (one per device) and super low (configurable), per mailbox quotas is a better solution than the expensive providers have.

Office 365 is brutal for sending from devices. In fact it’s impossible with security defaults (more like overrides) enforcing 2FA and one of their supported options is literally (I’m not joking here) to use another mail server that’s not Office 365.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/mail-flow-best-pra...

That's why I use protonmail and don't even know how much I pay. IMO email is the single most relevant part of your internet privacy and security. Nearly everything builds on it.

The most important feature I look for is Search. Really, email servers should primarily be search engines (and should use something like Lucene for storage). With Gmail I can search the last 15 years of email instantaneously. This is their killer feature. Migadu does not even mention search.

You would be using thunderbird or whatever your client of choice is so that’s where you would be searching.

If I want to search the last 15 days of email then client-side search might work. If I want to search the last 15 years of email instantaneously then I need server-side storage and search.

I've been using migadu for a year-ish, its a nice website. For only 20$ a year I don't think I've ever noticed down time and almost never received spam.

I'm looking forward to them deploying 'Alps' their new UI I've been using it on my self-hosted mail and its pretty sweet.

I got my email hosting via MXRoute when they gave out a lifetime plan for $50 on Black Friday ( https://mxroute.com/pricing/ , currently available at $150). It's a very no-frills service, they provide a webUI via Roundcube, Crossbox, Rainloop etc. I am pretty much reliant on Thunderbird on the desktop and K9 on Android. I've never had issues and I'm switching over from gmail slowly.

Lifetime these days means 3-4 years.

I'll go out on a limb to defend jarland (the admin of mxroute) and say I genuinely don't think it only means 3 - 4 years here. And even if it does, $50 (or even $150) for a 3 - 4 year service is pretty darn awesome.

Oh wow, I remember jarland from LowEndTalk.com, can definitely vouch for him. Quite an interesting interview with him about MXroute there: https://lowendbox.com/blog/interview-qa-with-mxroute-owner-j...

It's a very tight line to walk, when I intend to offer these lifetime packages and run a company that outlives me. That's why you'll see the price rising on it. I'm trying to find the impulse buy threshold and exceed it to stay on mission. These plans can only fill small unused corners of already profitable servers. Anything more is irresponsible on my part.

Damn, $50 is quite sweet for unlimited. $150 seems bit on the higher on the side. I am cursing myself for missing that offer

Relevant post about Purelymail.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27707857

I use uberspace for solely email, they provide a shell and bit more. It has been working well for me: i can have full 10gb space for email(now you can even buy more space), aliases/mailboxes as i need. https://manual.uberspace.de/mail-access/

Good timing, I'm in the process of looking to migrate my emails. Currently on O365 for 3 of us, but as we now all get Office products via work, I can't justify paying ~£30 a month.

Looking at our usage, the biggest account is 3.7GB, and in the last 180 days the most emails sent was 12 in one day, and the most received was 158 - so micro looks like a fit.

The pricing looks pretty spot on for what we need, and the features seem good, so I've set up a 14day trial with just my email to see how it goes.

I guess the only thing is calendar and contact sync, (I tried to get the calendar to work, but keeps saying it does not exist /shrug)

Any recommendations for a calendar/contact provider?

Fastmail does it all, you can have one user on the professional price and others on the basic plan and share a custom domain

https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/

One downside, apparently you can’t use their (great) app on the basic plan and share the domain with the master user.

Speaking for calendar, I basically signed up for a new Google account with that custom domain email address and use calendar on it. Syncs neat to my Android.

They have pushed a basic CalDAV (and CarDAV?) feature out on Migadu for what it's worth. I think they're new enough that they're considered beta and not in marketing materials.

https://www.migadu.com/guides/thunderbird/

Yep, if you contact them about it they'll provide you with more info. Both CardDAV and CalDAV will be available, documented and all, to the public in September/October. When I emailed them earlier today about it (pure coincidence) they gave me the necessary info on CardDAV and also directed me to a post[0] made by another beta tester explaining both DAV services in more detail.

[0] https://www.billdietrich.me/SecureCommunication.html?expanda...

I don’t ever want to have a limit on emails in/out per day. Or at least not an advertised limit for emails in.

What happens if I go over the limit, people that send me email get a message that their email bounced because my plan doesn’t allow more?

> If you try blasting mails in or out, your limit will be quickly gone and you will not be able to receive and/or send more. This will also trigged a bunch of alerts on our end. In most normal situations, you will be warned if you are reaching your limits so you have time to analyze the traffic and possibly upgrade your plan. This allows you to pay only what you really use.

> If no upgrade is made, incoming messages will be deferred until the following day, and sending messages will be refused If you try blasting mails in or out, your limit will be quickly gone and you will not be able to receive and/or send more. This will also trigged a bunch of alerts on our end.

> In most normal situations, you will be warned if you are reaching your limits so you have time to analyze the traffic and possibly upgrade your plan. This allows you to pay only what you really use.

> If no upgrade is made, incoming messages will be deferred until the following day, and sending messages will be refused

https://www.migadu.com/procon/#daily-limits-apply

Migadu is fantastic. No complaints. Their support is very responsive -- they even gave me a 50% student discount!

Options: Zimbra [0] and GoDaddy VPS [1]?

My current setup is very simple. We have a GoDaddy Gen 4 server (don't knock it, rock solid, no issues at all) were we host email for multiple domains as we please. It's super simple. No email hosting nightmares. Just point the MX record to that server and host the site anywhere else or on the same server. One fixed annual cost (~$600/yr) and you can do whatever you want. This is hard to beat.

I've been thinking of migrating to a Zimbra setup to self-host email on something like a Linode server. I absolutely detest per-mailbox/per-user plans. Frankly, it has been very hard to beat our current GoDaddy setup.

If you are dealing with multiple domains, each with multiple mailboxes, costs can add-up very quickly. It then becomes a cash bleed. Every service (not just email) wants $5 to $20 per month from you. It is very easy to end-up spending thousands of dollars per month through these "bleed" costs.

Anyhow, other than time to make the transition, what has stopped me from taking this path is that Zimbra seems "fat" in the sense that it requires a "fat" server to run.

[0] https://www.zimbra.com/ [1] https://pk.godaddy.com/hosting/vps-hosting

Umm am I missing something? Wouldn't you just use GSuite and set up other domains as aliases?

> Umm am I missing something?

Probably.

> Wouldn't you just use GSuite and set up other domains as aliases?

Not if you think this Migadu or some other service suits your needs better or provides better value.

Some people want to limit their exposure to google. Also a healthy market for email is a good thing.

some people dontdont want google in their lives.

What luck!

I have been trying to move away from Zoho. I tried protonmail for the last month but it's not for me. E2E is great but the loss in functionality is a bit much.

I switched to fastmail today but I have ran into some issues there as well[1] and so far I have seen a lot of recent reddit posts criticizing the extremely slow response time(2+ days) in support tickets. So, now I am not sure if fastmail is a good option.

Migadu has been recommended to me in the past, maybe I should try that out

[1] https://reddit.com/r/fastmail/comments/m4rj0g/_/h3tq036/?con...

Mind if I ask why you're moving away from Zoho? I've been debating moving my email to Zoho since they offer a cheap $12/year plan.

I might just move everything to iCloud+ when they start supporting custom domains this fall since $1/mo for 50GB seems pretty reasonable.

1. Huge email deliverability issues. Quite a few emails just get lost somehow. Just today, someone forwarded a book and hours later I still haven't received it.

2. Terrible, Inconsistent UI.

3. Push notifications are broken and Their apps are broken. I dont get notifications in clients configured with IMAP and their apps also dont send notifications. I have to manually refresh in both cases.

4. Relatively minor issue but I am against Zoho's founder's political alignment, and that is putting this issue mildly.

Just another data point.

I had great delivery with zoho for year even use their free plan. They used to offer SMTP/IMAP on their free tier few years ago and continue to granfathering those my account.

If you like consistent UI then no one can beat gmail. Even fastmail/protonmail/outlook cannot beat gmail in UI/UX to me.

Stay away from iCloud is my advice. Their proofpoint spam filtering is the worst to deal with. Lots of people are going to have trouble reach iCloud inbox.

Anything but not iCloud. That isn't their primary business and consider level of Apple support and randomly ban/block people out of iCloud(you will find some here), I would advice against using them.

Give zoho I tried. They are very reliable, their spam filtering isn't as good as gmail so sometime legitimate emails go to Spam but that's a problem with any mail provider. Time to time you have to train spam system. Especially if you got a lot of email from people with a new domains email you first time. New domains that are created within 7 days and send out email are more likely to be flagged.

inbox.eu is alternative which is much longer in business (since about 2000) with flat price per mailbox 9.99 EUR per year (now it is only 3 EUR with discount- no promo code needed).

I'd never heard of this before. Would you know if the offer will hold good in the future (on signup now) or if it's only for something like the first year (and will be switched to the normal one later)?

It's also not clear what the jurisdictions of the company (I presume Latvia) and its data centers are.

This looks like a good option for semi-important communications if the need is just for a few mailboxes.

All servers are located in Latvia. We don't use cloud and all servers are managed by us. Discount is available for quite a long time. Maybe even year but can be disabled in near future but I do not know specifics

Migadu has unlimited domains and unlimited mailboxes per domain even on the smalles plan for 19 bucks. I don't see how 9.99 EUR PER mailbox is an alternative to that.

this sounds little bit absurd. in no way somebody with million mailboxes could migrate to migadu and pay just 19 bucks

For those who want to get their hands dirty, here is a full, step by step tutorial to set up your own email server: https://www.linuxbabe.com/mail-server/setup-basic-postfix-ma...

migadu's mail number limit does not make sense to me: This risks losing emails.

That guide is all very well but it is very complicated to follow and setup, and I have been using Linux for a reasonable amount of time (10+ years).

I was surprised that there wasn't an open source script, a bit like you would run with apt-get, that would simply ask you some questions and do all the bits for you.

Postfix is obviously really powerful but for a noob to it, I found it overwhelming without consulting lots of docs.

I did find https://www.iredmail.org/ but that has a feature limit for the free version. The bits you actually really want costs up to $500/year. Not much if it is for your main business, but a lot when you only want it for a part of your larger system.

If you’re open to using Docker

Try out this [0] , it’s pretty easy to self host , comes with decent defaults and makes it quite easy to setup a bunch of tools from spam checking to anti virus , dkim , dmarc , etc and gives you some handy parameters you can change in its default config file after that you can further customise the tools it uses directly (although I’ve only had to do that once or twice while setting up some custom settings) Takes 5 mins to setup a decent instance

[0] https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver

I use postale.io after I switched away from Migadu (got in while they had a free tier). Excellent and reliable service over the past year.

Yep, they’ve been great. Too bad they stopped their free tier.

I'd readily pay that dollar though (I guess I should!). Uptime and delivery has been as good as the best for me.

I like their pricing better than Migadu's, however, I don't want 50 mailboxes with 3GB each, I want 5 mailboxes with 30GB each. That would be perfect.

I have approached them with similar questions and they made the change without any hassle.

I tried Migadu in 2019. I did a lot of testing to make sure it can actually deliver emails to other providers like Gmail and Outlook. The test emails were fine. But then the very first real email that I actually needed to be delivered, it immediately went into the spam folder in Gmail.

It's a bad idea to use a small email provider to send emails.

Have never had that issue in my few years of using it, and I regularly send to Gmail and Office365 addresses.

It is a bad idea to support monopolization.

Why did you downvote me? Good for you if you never had an issue, but I did have an issue, and people should know that this is the risk they take by using small email providers.

>Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We need more small email providers, not fewer. The fewer large providers there are the less power they have.

Did you have SPF and DKIM records created properly?

I love Migadu, I have been customer for half a year.

My major problem is the lack of cross platform email clients with snooze capabilities.

This translated in me using gmail UI, which is what I wanted to avoid in the first place.

You can get to paid email clients, but they all include email hosting, defeating the purpose.

I wonder why nobody has mentioned tutanota as an alternative in this thread. It's not too expensive and quite safe as far as I'm aware. If anyone knows a downside to it please share it with us.

Not really the same, you have to use their clients to access your email (and doesn't seem to have a bridge like Protonmail) so you are effectively locked in

Tutanota ain't very safe

https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/08/german-secure-email-provid...

Is there reason to believe other mail providers aren't subject to the same kind of court order?

Yes, if they are not headquartered in Germany.

What does "user" mean with tutanota? If I want multiple custom domains, I need to go with the business account, which has a 1 GB storage limit and a 5 aliases limit. And then it is only for a single user. Does that mean, I cannot have independent login data for the multiple domains/mailboxes I create? Because then it is not close to a viable alternative to migadu.

You can have an independent login account but that comes at an additional cost of 12 EUR. That's on the top of the Business plan's cost of 12 EUR + 12 EUR.

Okay, then that defeats the purpose of why _I_ chose Migadu, where there is no limit on the login accounts.

I was a paying Tutanota customer for two full years, but ended up cancelling recently. Reasons being lack of IMAP (ProtonMail does), slow development, [missing features](https://old.reddit.com/r/tutanota/search?q=missing&restrict_...) yet their focus is on building quantum cryptography defense, and most importantly, their recent change in domain limit. It used to be unlimited on the 12 EUR plan, but without any announcement to the end-user, they limited that to 1. They [fixed that later](https://old.reddit.com/r/tutanota/comments/lwr2ag/important_...) but I no longer trust their business practices.

I have a decent domain and good knowledge in backend / scaling production servers up. Anyone can recommend a good white label / open source package which I can use to build a Migadu clone ?

Many people here are mentioning alternatives. The ones I’m using are mailbox.org (although they recently raised prices for new customers) and uberspace.de (includes ssh access).

For $70/year Microsoft lets me point up to 99 domains at a cloud exchange server. This has been working well for me.

Many of us care about their privacy tho. Microsoft does not have a good track record in protecting valueable data.

The emails in your inbox are primarily coming from Google/MS servers.

Are most transactional or newsletter services hosted with MS or Google? I honestly doubt that, if anything I guess Amazon is the dominant force here. Also Google does not exactly have a bad record with Gmail.

However no, most privacy relevant emails I get are either directly sent from a Webservice, company own SMTPS or other privacy aware email providers.

Sure some friends hit me up with their Gmails, but I usually do not consider these mails privacy relevant.

Can you elaborate this setup a bit more?

Assume they mean using a basic Office 365 plan. That’s cost per user though, not really a comparable pricing plan.

20 outgoing emails per day at micro service for 19USD a year? I really hope that's very bad joke

Mini with 100 outgoing emails for only 90USD a year is comparably bad

Perfect for a single/family user who's got multiple domains: they are obviously targeting customers like me with it (20 emails per day is over 7000 emails a year: how many did you send out the last year?).

The price is right, concerns over privacy and support are not.

They will happily tune the plan for you. I made a point that we are only 2 in the family abd we need only half of the 90$ plan, they made a custom plan for 45$

this is the worst landing page i have ever seen for a SaaS product

Why? It says exactly what it does? It hosts email. That is it.

I think it's quite refreshing to not have parallax scrolling, and the same tired looking icons and vector graphics.

Everything I need to know is pretty much there on the front page.

- there is far too much detailed copy above the fold - the copy around the call to action is too vague - there is no example of "what you have now without migadu" versus "with migadu"

in summary it makes it very hard to quickly identify the problem it solves and illustrate how migadu fixes it.

take a look at this article: https://blog.roastmylandingpage.com/landing-page-roasts/

IMO it's one of the better landing pages. It tells you exactly what they offer (email hosting with unlimited domains), and what features they support. Pricing is straightforward (with no nonsense discounts for the first N months) and one click away.

Linked article is just an opinion of some person, and I have to say I quite disagree with it:

- If I'm looking for a email hosting, I definitely know what the pain is, and I assume they will fix it by providing hosting for my emails.

- Testimonials & awards are bullshit. They don't help me determine if I want to use the service or not.

Yes the linked article is the opinion of one person. One person with a proven track record of maximising the conversions from landing page visits.

I disagree :)

"in summary it makes it very hard to quickly identify the problem it solves and illustrate how migadu fixes it."

I want to host my email, they host email .... there isn't much more to it :)

They don't really advertise, and it is word of mouth it seems - if you have got there, then there is a pretty good chance you know what you want, and can spend a few mins to read through and see if it fits.

I really dislike this "distil everything down because people can't spend a few minutes reading" trend, everyone seem far more interested in marketing fluff and speak, and not just taking the time to understand what they want

purelymail is a better deal

29usd a month is not "Humbly Priced" imo. I receive thousands of spam email.

Simple mail hostings on the rise nowadays.

What next? UUCP providers? Flat price BBS?

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