Ask HN: Not so costly, private custom domain personal email hosts? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Not so costly, private custom domain personal email hosts?

3 pointsshelled7 comments

- Cost up to/around $30-35/year.

- Mail storage: >= 2GB is good enough for me; >= 2 custom domains; 2FA support.

- Catch-all; sending email/replying from <any-user@my-custom-domain.tld>

- IMAP; new mail push notification; virus/spam protection; blocking domain/email; whitelisting

- privacy; solid reliability; trust/reputation

- What are not needed: notes, calendar, a suite and shit, contacts, apps, docs, chat, video, team, sharing, cookies, lemonades, drive, anonymity and whatnot. I just need reliable custom domain email hosting.

And yes, also needed:

- At least responsible email and/or chat support (not single person beta projects like PurelyMail)

- And a support team/staff/founder who do not have a habit of being (border-line) rude/hostile and callous in responses and often make you feel guilty and ashamed about ruining their tranquil week by encountering a problem or having a question.

FastMail is too costly (for me) and I wish I could repurpose those remaining 58-50 GBs for storage to justify the higher cost (and use for backup but 50GB of that is actually reserved for mail). Proton is actually too costly. Tuta doesn't even support IMAP (which they say is a feature, not a bug). Also, not mailbox.org.

Is there anything else out there? Just in case.

Zoho's been around forever and their Mail product costs $1/mo: https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html

They also have a "forever free" plan that might do what you need.

I always thought of them as the budget alternative to Google, iCloud, MS Office online, etc.

Hey, thanks. I don't think they are good on the privacy front (they actually share/sell your data with marketing and ad partners; at least they are upfront about it in their P&Cs).

Otherwise it would have been perfect for me as I could get phone support (no charges) and "walk to their office" support as well :D

Wait, they share your emails with outside partners? Or did I misunderstand you?

That's what they say in their T&C and sample this https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/community/topic/unable-to-se...

Then actually went to a reddit post and repeated the same things there.

You're not missing anything with FastMail. I started using it based on HN recommendations but eventually discovered its spam protection is too strict. It's not false-positive'ing emails into the spam folder, it's flat out rejecting them.

I've tried to work it with their support - who were responsive - but nothing has improved. I'm in the process of shifting providers, perhaps based on recommendations you get here.

Oh is it so? What are your shortlists?

I am not sure I will get any recommendations here. I posted at a time when usually majority of HNers (i.e US) goes to sleep :D

I have none ATM, sorry. FastMail was mentioned the most often so I went with it.

I've used the free Proton mail but I'm not sure about price + features for using a custom domain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com