Ask HN: What the easiest and cheapest way for me to set up email? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What the easiest and cheapest way for me to set up email?

5 pointsjdasdf10 comments

I've had a domain name for a couple of years that i have a small static website with just my CV on that's hosted on S3. It's essentially a plain old S3 bucket with the html page on it that just serves over http.

I've wanted for a couple of years to use the domain name for email, mostly with the intention that I could just give anyone an arbitrary email address with that domain name, and it would go to a centralized inbox that I could just read/send emails from.

Unfortunately I'm not really familiar with email, and don't really have the time or brainpower to setup a full on email server...

Is there some sort of "plug and play" solution I can quickly setup without a lot of maintenance that would serve my purposes?

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Gsuite and office365 business essentials lets you do it for around $80 a year, and also gives you online office + storage.

iCloud lets you do it cheaper if you have apple+ or whatever it’s called.

Email services like Runbox and their American counterpart that someone here can probably name. Will let you do it even cheaper.

All of these options have guides on how to do it that I could follow with now knowledge on the stuff.

I have personally used all those options except for the iCloud one. I’m currently using office365, but I’m considering moving to iCloud since we have the Apple+ family thing anyway and it would save me $80 a year. I’ve just been too lazy to make the switch yet. I left runbox for gsuite because I wanted the storage, then left gsuite for office365 because Google made it harder to be a “private” customer on their business plan. The office365 thing is pretty amazing, but again, it’s currently a redundant expenditure for me.

I'm concerned about the reliability of Googles offers, but the Office 365 might be the best option for me, since i'm already using the personal version of it, it shouldn't be a much bigger expense.

Another vote for Fastmail. You literally just set up an alias of *@yourdomain.xyz and any ‘arbitrary’ address will auto routed to your inbox (amazon@yourdomain.xyz, google@yourdomain.xyz, yourmom@yourdomain.xyz, etc). All of those will immediately become valid addresses without having to explicitly set those aliases. I think this is exactly what you want?

What you're describing is a "catch-all" and most provide this including namecheap's email solution. Once you buy a domain, an email is a one click deploy with a catch-all setting.

Cloudron as an image. I run mine on Linode. Takes ~10-15 min for the image to deploy, a couple of “hours “ for DNS to update. All you really need is a domain.

Extremely well documented. https://www.cloudron.io/

I recommend Fastmail: https://www.fastmail.com/

It's not free, but you get decent support, and it's their whole business, not a sideline, so there's a good chance they won't yank it.

I've been using Fastmail for my side business for a year now and am happy with it. Pretty straightforward to set up with your own domain. Trivial to set up a number of aliases for a single inbox.

no idea about S3, but I take it you've seen this?

https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/projects/setup-email-...

I hadn't actually! I'll check it out!

Do you recommend?

sorry, no idea about S3 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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