Ask HN: Migadu? Postale? Mxroute? Or any other mail services using this model?

I've used Migadu for several years after switching from Google Apps. Technologically, I've been pretty satisfied. I have a lot of custom domains that I may want to use different users/mailboxes on and Migadu's pricing model makes that pretty easy.

In 2020, there was some turmoil with Migadu where they nearly (or completely) doubled their prices and didn't communicate it well. I was paying 45/yr then abruptly started paying 90/yr on the same/equivalent plan. They also took away a couple of features purported to be the cause behind some performance issues they had. During that time, their service was strained. Many users, me included, didn't realize there was an issue until no e-mail was received for days. Support just said "sorry" and that there was a post about it on their website. I think this situation soured a lot of users. You can read about it, including some of Migadu's response, if you search this site, reddit, and lowendtalk.

I agree with you that their speech codes in the TOS are sketchy, ambiguous, and trite. I'm not sending or receiving any e-mail like that, but I don't trust contemporary definitions for those topics. I've been considering another provider when my subscription is due for renewal because of the price change.

I left Migadu too after their pricing incident— it was terribly communicated imo and with a large increase like that you’d think they’d make darn sure you knew about it. I mean, how do you know they won’t do it again next year? Haven’t had a single issue with mxroute across multiple domains. Can’t recommend it strongly enough.

While I absolutely hate when companies hikes up prices, "how do you know they won’t do it again next year?" isn't really a good argument. Any company can and will rise their prices whenever they want.

You can not know if Migadu will increase their prices again, just like you can not know if Scaleway will raise again (they raised 3 times in less than two years); but you can also not known that MXroute will not rise theirs prices too.

You're taking my statement out of context. This was a large % increase and I didn't know about it until going back and seeing my bank statements. Raising prices a sensible amount is one thing, but how do you know they won't raise prices substantially without you knowing about it again?

And, mxroute has a lifetime plan.

That is not quite fair; even though we did raise prices, we informed twice in an announcement to all users months before it happened giving opportunity to act upon it. We have also grandfathered old pricing for an additional year to all users that asked for it.

Nevertheless, glad you found MXRoute fits your needs and budget!

I don’t think you acted in bad faith but I don’t think your announcement, whatever it was, got to everyone. I mean, you have multiple people telling you they didn’t know about the large % increase, right?

I think, unless you acknowledge the issue, it's hard to have a lot of confidence it won't happen again. And that's not to mention all the licensing language people mentioned elsewhere. It just seems like using your service would require me to read all the legalese and revisit your website at some frequency to make sure nothing's changed.

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[Wow! --first time I've hit HN's post character limit!]

Now, someone said they have this kind of attitude as a way of targeting their offering towards more tech-minded people and deterring the more needy users. And, at first, I thought; "OK. Fair enough". But, the more I thought about it the more it started sounding a bit like Steve Jobs. If I sign up and find it's not to my needs, I basically get told to fuck off because I'm obviously 'holding it wrong'.

That attitude might be fine for someone offering a free product. But it's not acceptable for a paid service. As I've said on here before, I think there are far too many developers about these days, who've seen Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds and think that being an obnoxious arrogant arsehole makes you some kind of techie rock star. When, in fact, it just makes you an obnoxious arrogant arsehole.

So there's where I'm up to at the minute. Anyone got any comments re the three mentioned above, or know any other email services which are using this kind of business model, as opposed to per email account charging?

The way things are going at the moment, I can see myself ending up spinning up a Mail-in-a-Box[5] server. As nothing I've found out there so far seems worthy of giving my money to.

[0] https://www.migadu.com

[1] https://postale.io

[2] https://mxroute.com

[3] https://www.migadu.com/use

[4] https://postale.io/about-us

[5] https://mailinabox.email/

FTR I've migrated from Google Apps to Migadu and I'm pretty happy with them but I must say the "acceptable use" clause also raised my suspicion. I guess they don't scan your email automatically but when someone brings to their attention that you're using the service for "unacceptable things" they will trigger the termination. Which, to be honest, happens with other providers even if that's not in the ToS (see Cloudflare case).

  >I guess they don't scan your email automatically but when someone brings to their attention that you're using the service for "unacceptable things"

Maybe they don't. But, as I said in another comment, I'd prefer not to depend on what I think they mean, when they might actually mean something else.

Besides, as I said in the original post who decides what is 'socially acceptable'? It's not too long ago that being gay or trans might have been construed as 'socially unacceptable'.

Who decides what's 'Nazi'? Vlad the Mad seems to think he's liberating Ukraine from Nazis. The west seems to think he's the goose-stepper. A sizeable number of commenters on HN have been accused of being Nazis, coz they disagreed with someone else.

Who decides what's immoral? That's probably the vaguest one of the lot. Morality is an individual thing. I'm sure there are things I'd consider immoral that you wouldn't and vice versa.

Nope. I don't care what the mechanics of the censuring process are. But I know I don't want to trust my correspondence to a company which sets itself up as an arbitrator of social acceptability and morality.

Imagine if your snail mail postman opened your letters and refused to deliver any he didn't approve of.

More like if you send hate mail to someone and they complain to the post office, then the post office will stop sending your mail.

> I don't care what the mechanics of the censuring process are. But I know I don't want to trust my correspondence to a company which sets itself up as an arbitrator of social acceptability and morality.

Then your only choice is self hosting because the provider can, and will, enforce any rules that they deem necessary even if they don't put it in the ToS explicitly (usually hidden behind "ToS can change at any time" clause). I've given the Cloudflare/Nazi case as an example.

If you're going the mailinabox route, I recommend also looking at Mailcow. Mailinabox is a full Linux distribution, Mailcow puts a mail server in docker-compose. Both are fully featured, but last time I looked into it I found that Mailinabox is running on more outdated/near-EOL software than I'd like.

As an added bonus, you have can pay the Mailcow devs for a hosted server so you don't need to deal with updates and such, whereas mailinabox seems exclusively aimed at running your own (which is a perfectly valid position to have as an open source dev!)

Either way, you'll probably need to do some configuration on any self-hosted mail service because SMTPUTF support for mail addresses is surprisingly uncommon in default compilation settings on open source software. Notably, the Dovecot devs seem convinced that nobody needs UTF8 in their email addresses and sometimes even dismiss this feature as "silly". Sadly, most self-hosted email options use Dovecot in some way or another so you may be out of luck if you try to run this stuff yourself.

We could all bake our own bread at home, but very few do. It boils down to convenience and time best spent.

By all means, I would recommend [5] if you have the technical knowledge to run it. This will give you more insight and appreciation for email as well [2] & [1] and humbly... [0].

Unfortunately, running an email service is a very underappreciated task; after Gmail - it is taken for granted. Cheers to Postmasters at MXRoute and Postale.io!

I can vouch for purelymail (https://purelymail.com/), it's simply amazing. Their only rule is basically no marketing emails. It's also quite affordable compared to others.

I have some domains on migadu, one on mxroute, and one on purely mail. I have my Mai domain on google, and seriously thinking of eventually moving everything to purely mail.

I bought the mxroute lifetime membership, but the storage is kinda low (10g). Also Got bit with the migadu price mess in 2020. The purely mail model of pay for what you use makes sense to me. The developer is responsive and says it’s profitable.

Thanks for this. Purelymail looks to tick all the boxes for me and their T&Cs seem reasonable [at least compared to Migadu]. I've never heard of the company though. And they seem to be a one man band, which is a bit of a concern --the old "walks under a bus" scenario.

I shall have to investigate further.

I tried purelymail and it's a good service for the money. The only problem I had is that the spam filtering is really bad.

I've used purelymail for two years and almost without problems.

They look great!

Just host your own mail server and you can have as many accounts you want - I have more than a thousand since I use special addresses when communicating with anyone who is not friend or family. If you worry over reliability - which in my experience is not a problem to be worried over given the tenacity of SMTP in attempting to deliver messages to temporarily off-lined hosts - you could arrange a reciprocal agreement with someone you trust to host a backup (MX) server for your domain(s). You won't have to deal with commercial plans, virtue signalling, filtering, bankruptcies (other than your own) or any of the other bothersome irritants which can be encountered when dealing with commercial entities. People will tell you it is impossible to host your own mail, that it takes enormous investments in time, that you'll be inundated in spam, that your outgoing mail will not be accepted by the likes of Google and Microsoft and more dire warnings of mayhem and misfortune for those who do not pay someone else to do this work for them. Nearly all of this is untrue, hosting a mail server is no black magic. Just make sure to configure the thing correctly, using a smart host to take care of outgoing mail - this is most likely mandated by your IAP - and DKIM/SPF/... to please those hosts which require it. Use Spamassassin and (optionally) greylistd for spam filtering, this will take care of the spam problem. All of this can be run on a SBC like a Raspberry Pi.

Source: I've hosted my own mail for more than 25 years now, taking it with me from ISP to IAP, from country to country, even through a period where I only had dialup (the consequence of moving to the countryside - now I have gigabit fibre in the same location) by having an arrangement with a friend who ran backup MX for me. Linux + Exim + Spamassassin + greylistd + Dovecot + Sieve is all it takes, all of it is free, running a Raspberry Pi (or similar) costs a pittance. An additional advantage is that you'll be ready for the decentralised future of the 'net.

>Linux + Exim + Spamassassin + greylistd + Dovecot + Sieve is all it takes

Obligatory reference to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

That 'obligatory' (why?) reference is not relevant in this case since self-hosted mail is at least functionally identical to 'cloud'-hosted mail, in practice often superior to such while the proposed alternative to Dropbox is not [1].

If you can not or do not want to host your own things, fine, that is your right. That does not mean that your own inability or unwillingness to do so translates to others. Some people never cook for themselves, they always eat out. It would be just as easy to present an 'obligatory' reference to 'flour + yeast + water + oil + tomatoes + garlic + mushrooms + bacon + olives + cheese = pizza', implying that those who think you can make your own are deluded. It is a good thing that most people realise cooking your own food is a good thing to (be able to) do, it would be a good thing if more people realised it is possible to 'self-cook' your own services, either from some instant package ('click here to install your own mail server') or by cobbling together the needed parts.

[1] ...but a self-hosted instance of e.g. Seafile or Nextcloud is functionally superior to Dropbox and, at least for Nextcloud, is starting to become supported in third-party products so self-hosting still wins in the end

I've used Migadu and MXRoute and found Migadu to be the easiest to use by a long shot. MXRoute's setup and configuration is full of friction and just odd ways of doing simple things like logging into your account or adding email addresses and the like.

It sounds more like you have philosophical differences with these 2 companies, as they are very opinionated right out the gate, as you noted. I think, since they're small teams, they're trying to scare off users who are going to require a lot of time and effort on the customer service side.

That said, my interactions with both companies has been pleasant and professional. But it really does sound like you're going to need to roll your own service based on your major complaints.

>But it really does sound like you're going to need to roll your own service based on your major complaints.

Ideally that'd be more the norm, but unfortunately it's significantly more hassle than would be ideal. Uptime is an issue, though most senders should retry through brief outages. Management/security updates of course aren't negligible, though in principle fairly manageable. Probably the big issue is deliverability to the big players like Gmail. They're as bad at support and opaque there as everywhere else, if you don't know someone and/or aren't big enough regardless of what boxes you check you can have email just vanish into the ether which is generally unacceptable.

One solution might be to use a decent commercial SMTP relay service to proxy that part (ie., Amazon SES/Mailgun/Postmark/SendGrid etc). Those tend to be aimed at commercial operations doing high volume but can start low enough to be worth considering. But all in all it's hard to do well despite email being so old and undemanding anything made in decades can run it fine. The foundations just aren't there to cheaply autoscale around abuse. Like, ideally we'd have secure DNS to depend on, that in turn would allow standards for just having a CA root cert for a domain put right into the domain's DNS records, in turn allowing distributed signing/encryption and making spoofing of email addresses non-trivial. No sending of any kind allowed without having it signed by something in the domain CA's trust chain. Remaining abuse after that could managed far more easily, reliably, and perhaps most important deterministically.

No such luck though! Leaving us stuck paying ludicrous amounts and dealing with a lot of crap for a service that an RPi is already has orders of magnitude more power than it should need for :(.

I'd advise against MXRoute: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225685

Maybe you will have a better time than I, but MXRoute is more opinionated than I'd like my mail provider to be. If you are ruling out Migadu, you might rule out MXRoute on the same grounds.

I’ve been using pobox.com (acquired by Fastmail) for the past 3 months after doing a lot of research just like you. They have very decent pricing, support custom domains and multiple aliases/accounts, + addressing etc. So far looks pretty good albeit simple!

I've used migadu and worked really well. I also have some domains using lunanode - great deal if you have other vps with them but have subjectively experienced more downtime.

Migadu just added master password support so can now dsync easily with another dovecot server (ie backups, move, etc). My next config will probably be migadu + selfhosted vps.

Dejan from Migadu here.

>Hate speech, racism, calls for violence, Nazism as well any other immoral, unethical or socially unacceptable activity will be denied service. If illegal, we will report such to the authorities.

That is not referring to the content of messages but rather general usage of our email service. We never look at the messages except when asked to. If you use our email service for things such as "hate speech, racism, calls for violence", all being illegal and punishable by law, we would know about it only once we receive a harassment complaint. With a valid proof we would act upon it, first level being asking you politely not to do it because it involves us then.

That is rather common sense, and we speak here from experience and past cases.

OVH's own "Personal Hosting" provides 10 emails (plus web and domain) for about €24 a year. (add VAT, if you live in a VAT state like me) https://www.ovhcloud.com/it/web-hosting/personal-offer/

Disclaimers: I don't work for OVH; I use it consistently for my customers; Still, all my own/company stuff is self-hosted on my own Colo/AS/LIR.

I'm not sure if this fits your needs or not, but have you considered self hosting with Cloudron? Free plan would work for you so you'd only be paying for the VPS.

It makes administrating and backing up an email server a breeze. Only real requirement is that you have your own domain name, and know how to generate API keys for a few services (really easy). Helps ensure you have all the important mail settings (SPF, DMARC, etc) set up.

I use BuyVM for the VPS because I can set up one of the mail settings, but you could easily use another provider (Hetzner might be good if you need a lot of space).

Also... you could host Nextcloud and OnlyOffice on the Cloudron box under the free plan as well... which is pretty much like hosting One Drive and Microsoft 365. A little more complexity to manage, but still very easy.

Now one thing to keep in mind... you still have a single point of failure in your domain name provider. It they don't act responsibly, there's not much you can do.

Friends don't let friends self-host email servers.

I have many legacy Google Workspace domains setup for friends and family who are not tech savvy. They are all comfortable with the Gmail interface, so it will be hard to move many of them to a new interface.

I have looked at the companies mentioned and came to much the same conclusion. Currently I am contemplating ImprovMX (https://improvmx.com) which could provide an SMTP server and allow those domains to continue to use Google's no-cost option (https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217#nocost). If this option is anything like GMail it should be possible to setup the 'send mail as' account as the default to continue sending and receiving mail from the custom domain using ImprovMX's SMTP.

"If this option is anything like GMail it should be possible to setup the 'send mail as' account as the default to continue sending and receiving mail from the custom domain using ImprovMX's SMTP."

I suspect the no-cost option will be nothing like Gmail. My guess is that they'll allow use to use everything except Gmail.

Everyone is still speculating about this, but most have been leaning toward the no-cost option being a Gmail address (https://9to5google.com/2022/01/27/g-suite-legacy-transfer-gm...). The wording on the Google support page mentioning the no-cost option is still vague enough to have me doubting this as well.

If the no-cost option isn't Gmail, then there's the option of obtaining new Gmail accounts and transferring the data to them manually. Then the ImprovMX option should work.

I've been using Migadu for about four years. My main complaint is that the support is not good. To be fair, they do not promise to hold your hand. And that's fine, I can usually diagnose my own mail problems.

Here is an example. I have one family member who wants to keep her email address on the family domain but have all her mail forwarded to her address @gmail. So I have migadu forward her mail to google's gmail server. One day that forwarding stopped working. So I asked migadu to check why the forwarding was failing.

They replied that they have no way to do this, and I shouldn't be forwarding to gmail. I've never heard of an email service that can't forward! They pointed me to this doc: https://www.migadu.com/guides/gmail/

Forwarding will always be unreliable, regardless of which service you use. Gmail has POP3 fetching feature for a reason, so people would forward less.

Disliking the answer does not make it incorrect. =)

> I've been using Migadu for about four years. My main complaint is that the support is not good.

I've been a Migadu customer for a few months now, and my experience with their support is contrary to yours: I've always had a reply which addressed the issue within a day or two.

What you can do is forward AND pop3 sync enabled. Gmail is smart enough to avoid duplicating emails

Chip in with a couple of friends who might be on the lookout for a gmail/proton/whatever alternative as well, get an OpenBSD VPS at 1984 Hosting, C*ckbox, FlokiNET, or basically any other hoster that allows communication via port 25 and set up OpenSMTPd and Dovecot. There are plenty[0] write-ups[1] on how to do so in case you need info.

[0] https://poolp.org/posts/2019-08-30/you-should-not-run-your-m...

[1] https://karchnu.fr/posts/2020-09-17-certificate-smtp-imap-an...

I'm using Purelymail at the moment, working perfectly for me and my few catch-all domains.

+1 for purelymail. Pricing is just unbeatable.

Whatever you decide, I'm here for you at MXroute and would love to have you on board. I understand your concerns and I wouldn't say anything to invalidate them, the burden of choice is yours and I'm merely here if you need me <3

Hey, thanks for the post. I was going to migrate some of my mailboxes to Zoho (ones that mostly receive netflix receipts and junkmail), can you elaborate about lack of unicode support? I can't find anything with a cursory web search.

My name has an accented character in it. It also begins with a lower case letter. Zoho's sign up form force-capitalised the name and also told me to 'only use letters and underscores' when I entered my name. I should make clear this was when trying to fill in my real name on the sign-up form, not the email username [I know they can't have accented chars]

Similarly with Runbox. It allowed me to enter my name properly when signing up. But in the name part of the 'from' field of the test emails I sent, it replaced the accented character with a � as in my email 'from' line rendered as F�rstname Lastname <username@runbox.com> ---like something from the 1980s!

> Quite apart from the fact that this implies that Migadu are scanning the content of every email that their users send; what the actual fuck is a bloody email server company doing, taking on the role of arbitrating what is 'Nazi', 'immoral' or 'socially unacceptable'?

Do they mention anywhere that they are actually scanning the content and/or metadata? I'd assume this just means that if they get reports about using their platform for sending unacceptable content, they have the rights to deny the service, and, if needed, report you to the authorities.

  >Do they mention anywhere that they are actually scanning the content and/or metadata?

No. But they don't say they aren't either. I prefer not to rely on "I thought you meant..." "No, we actually meant..." when it comes to contracts.

Most if not all email providers do that when they get phishing or spam alert (every user can send those) to check out if that message is actually a threat. Maybe the best option for you is to setup your own email server which is fairly simple this days.

I bet that most of these terms also forbid sending malware or spam. How is that meaningfully different when it comes to scanning email content?

I've been using MX Route after the recommendation by a trusted third party. It's been working well for me so far. No regrets and I like their simple annual pricing plan.

I have several emails on custom domain and one on gmail.com. Instead of searching for replacement of Google Workspaces I have setup Cloudflare Email Routing. It's free and with few clicks to setup all emails to my custom domain are now routed to gmail email account. This solves all my issues, since I'm almost never sent any emails from custom domains.

I'm using MXRoute ATM because it's cheap for multi domains, But its issue is that using alias will leak your real account - https://community.mxroute.com/t/disable-x-authuser-header/21...

Previous Migadu user, current Mxroute user

Both are excellent, Migadu raised prices so I snagged a lifetime Mxroute sub for $100 and have been content. Migadu gave seemingly more control and cleaner admin interface, Mxroute seems a bit slopped together but like I said, has worked flawlessly and was happy with both

Anyone have any experience with Mailcheap?

https://www.mailcheap.co

hi normille, what is with zoho and utf-8? i am planning to go there and so far it seems to be really nice ... ?! appreciate any details here!

One potential option is using CloudFlare email routing. You can use it with a regular public provider (gmail for example). CloudFlare will handle the MX side of things for your custom domain and route your emails to the public provider without requiring it to use the custom domain. The issue I’ve found is that it’s hard to set up a reply address to reply as the original email was received, so this may not work perfectly (emails look like they come from the gmail address for example). Does anyone know how to solve that part?

Afaik that’s not possible because cloudflare doesn’t offer smtp

(Correct me if I’m wrong. I’m currently using cloudflare email routing, would love to have reply as)

There are ways around this where you use an smtp service like sendgrid or aws ses. But configuring this is not for novices.

I have been using MXRoute continuously for the last 3-4 years as both my own personal email service, as well as reselling it to several of my clients for their business email services.

The pricing is hard to beat, but the service is sort of no frills. It's been 100% reliable since I began using it, but the UI, documentation, and process for setting up domains with LetsEncrypt SSL and DKIM/SPF is...unrefined is a good way of putting it. Once you find the appropriate documentation (it exists, it's just not always where you'd first look for it) everything is straightforward.

I pay for 40GB of storage (I think I pay ~$25/40GB, but it's low enough that I literally don't recall), and from there I can host as many domains, email accounts, aliases, and my choice of webmail services incl. Rainloop, Squirrelmail, Roundcube, and MXLogin. Recently they've even added an option for Horde along with a slew of other groupware products such as Nextcloud, OpenOffice, and MatterMost--any/all can be deployed under any of my registered domains with little more than a few clicks. As long as I don't exceed my storage quota, my annual bill is always the same.

It's white label, so I can brand all of the relevant client-facing endpoints and products with logos, color themes, and custom URLs with LetsEncrypt SSL. Things like spam control are nothing to write home about, but my philosophy is to pay someone like MXRoute to handle the actual Dovecot/Postfix/DNS/security and then I can self-host or integrate the other features I want/need like spam control, sieve routing, and proxies. That's everything I can think of to define my experience with MXRoute. Mostly positive, albeit unrefined. I haven't had any cause to seek out their customer service, but I wouldn't expect anything too stellar, just given how their website's account management and documentation is setup, and the relatively little effort I have seen in maintaining communication for things like upcoming invoices. To be fair, I've not had any bad experiences with them, but the reports you mention don't strike me as surprising either.

Bottom line - MXRoute is a solid choice for flexibility and affordability, but only for a specific type of user.

It is suitable for:

- People who are typically self-sufficient, and are looking to strike a middle ground between total DIY/roll-your-own solution and a walled-garden hosted service like Microsoft or Google.

- Someone who is comfortable managing things like domain registrations, DNS, and DKIM/SPF/DMARC records, and who can seek out and parse sometimes spotty documentation without requiring hand-holding from customer support.

- Orgs that need/want the option to resell basic hosted email/groupware services to clients. Just bear in mind, you are the customer support for anyone you are reselling services to.

- Orgs that might need a lot of accounts/addresses, but don't consume excessive amounts of raw storage space for emails.

There's some good feedback in there and I appreciate it!

FYI Nazis are bad.