Deliverability concerns have me scared to use anything that’s not a proven strong success for outgoing mail and SES seems very affordable for sent emails, especially if it’s not receiving them.
Plus we have a few extra features like blogging from your inbox (like Hey World) and a cdn to host and share images and files.
This looks awesome! Thank you so much for building it and for reaching out here. Very glad I found it.
The biggest feature I “need” is to be able to send emails from any address on my domain even though I only want one login / one inbox. I’d like any wildcard addresses to go to that inbox as well:
So my intended workflow is:
1) Sign up at www.vendor1.com using vendor1@mydomain.com (even if this address is not already registered on my incoming mailserver)
2) Any emails sent to *@mydomain.com should just go to my single unified inbox.
3) When I send an email I’d like to be able to specify to send from runnerup@mydomain.com or vendor1@mydomain.com (or anything else for that matter). Re: Replies would ideally automatically have the sending email filled in as whatever email was used to reach me in the previous email that I’m replying to. I’d like this to be accomplished without the typical use of reply-to or alias, so that the email headers looked perfectly normal for all outgoing emails as if it were a real account.
Curious how much of this functionality your service could support. I was planning to build it all myself so I’d still be happy to build it on top of your service, as long as wildcard sending and receiving could be supported.
Finally, purely out of curiosity (it doesn’t affect my decision), what are your plans for monetizing the free users?
Also some other notes (while reiterating that I like the idea of your service and like that you reached out to me here):
- I can see one of your testimonials is from a technical woman who runs a blog at ——-@moogle.com which is also the domain linked in your HN profile. The testimonial came across as “I had my friends try this and this really was their genuine response but we ‘marketing-ized’ her response” and then seeing the same domain on your profile confirmed the initial reaction. That’s fine but eventually getting some testimonial from someone with gravitas, or just stating “our customers like x, y, z” might make it feel more genuine. The testimonial from “ Sandhya K Assistant Professor, Economics @ MDAE” worked super well, and almost could have been even higher on the splash page because it was the first thing my brain said “ah okay cool I’m starting to see exactly what this product they’re selling is, and it’s potentially right for me”
- I’d love a little animation or additional explanation about how the buckets work. Do they need to be set up ahead of time, does each ‘bucket’ count as an “account” for billing tier purposes, etc
- Pricing page isn’t immediately clear what paying $30/mo actually gets you. Having the features side by side with similar open bullets vs filled in bullets to signify “this is included, this is omitted” helps instantly figure out what the end user value prop is. This info could also be on the landing page. I get suspicious of “click here for pricing” because I worry it will make me email someone and there wont be publicly posted prices. Something about the button style for pricing on main page implies “contact us for pricing info”
- I see now on the notion blog the following verbage[0]. I’m not sure if my use case above is truly your target user story, but had I seen this blurb at the beginning of the main page is already be signed up before typing all this! It’s the perfect summary, at least for my user story.
0: > With PretzelBox, they can hand out as many email addresses they want without provisioning them upfront at no extra charge to different audiences.
> E.g., their affiliates can use *affiliates@my-business.com* while inbound sales enquiries can be handled by *sales@my-business.com.*
> The best part is the all these emails received by these different email accounts are automatically forwarded to the email account used to sign up for PretzelBox so while vendors and customers alike think they are communicating with a company with a different departments to manage different facets of their business, behind the scenes there is a far smaller team managing the show.
Yes, it’s possible to send emails from whichever email you received an email on. E.g., if you receive an email at vendor@my-domain.com, you can reply from vendor@my-domain.com or optionally runnerup@my-domain.com. Of course, AWS SES manages sending reputation very carefully so email sending might involve some paperwork.
Yes, one of the testimonials is from a moogle user..and it does seem very “you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours”-ish but here’s the backstory. While I was ideating PretzelBox, moogle was the brand name under which I launched the blogging piece of PretzelBox.
I’ll look into your other suggestions and explain/highlight them more on the home page if possible.
I’d love to have you as a user given that we probably match 80% of your states needs. I’m available at Sai @ PretzelBox.cc if you want to follow up.
BTW if you don't go with PretzelBox consider the following for running mail:
https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy
https://github.com/albertito/chasquid
https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox
https://github.com/Mailu/Mailu
I personally use maddy and it's awesome