Purelymail: Cheap, no-nonsense email
purelymail.com
purelymail.com
Cons: UI is bad, so you'll want to access through a client. 1 person shop. Not audited AFAIK.
+ is industry standard, supported by almost all mail servers (if configured) since long before gmail existed.
The problem with "+" is dumbass Javascript developers who use broken regexes to "validate" an email address.
+ was always a legal character, right from the first SMTP RFC 822
In other words, don't worry, they'll find a way to block your email one way or another. :P
By default it's just a valid character.
there are a number of servers that support it. wikipedia lists some if them:
I have tried/explored couple of them like Mailbox.org (of course, current user), Fastmail, Proton, and Runbox etc. Given everything http://runbox.com seems to be the best among them - much better than Mailbox. In fact for Mailbox their less than 'less than ideal' support is enough for me to move elsewhere once my balance runs out (which I foolishly pumped in more than I should have had)
Runbox isn't w/o its challenges but they do certain things really nice and they are: prompt, not into disregard a request in its entirety, not un-kind, not-jerk, not-flippant, not-entitled, not-costly, not into offering unusable shit that you don't need in an email suite to begin with, and basically open and engaging.
So while I am not a customer right now, once the mailbox.org balance is close to running out and I will leave mailbox (and leave them I will) Runbox is the first contender to replace them right now.
They didn't support a server-side filter that copied emails from the inbox to another folder. And something was wrong with their DKIM support, but my notes don't say what.
mailbox.org has it's problems though and I'd be happy to find something better.
You mean a rule where you can say [mail:received-from="domain:xyz.com" > move to > "Saved" folder] - and it happens, something like this? Honestly I did not check it but I guess they might handle it.
During my trials I didn't find any issue with their DKIM support. https://help.runbox.com/dkim-signing/ seems fine to me. You might want to ask if you are interested, unlike mailbox.org they do reply, and they reply promptly, and they reply as if they mean it.
> I'd be happy to find something better
Please do share here on HN if you happen to find something better. Cheers.
In the pricing page it is listed in the "Individual" plan as "+ Extra email addresses for personal and work".
Edit: It is possible to create an extra email address and set it up so that all emails it receives are sent to a different external email address
I've been using them for 6 years with no issues. I use it now with all my domains and never have any deliverability issues.
The owner (Jar - one person shop again) is passionate about their email reputation for deliverability and is active on both lowendtalk and the dedicated sub Reddit.
I ended up comparing purleymail and mxroute - tested mxroute and stayed with them.
Great info on setting up stuff like SPF, DKIM. Easy to set quotas on accounts, set up catch-alls etc.
Never had an issue with deliverability or anything like that.
Probably sound like a shill, but I think it's such a good option, and really reasonably priced. I have a perpetual black friday deal, and I pay like 15 USD a year!!
MXRoute has years of track record, more than 1 employee, and has good tools like IMAPSync to enable easy duplication of your emails for backup or migration to a different platform.
It wasn't really about MXRoute specifically, but the bus factor in general when trusting your email to a tiny company.
I combine it with simplelogin to handle all my aliasing needs.
Thanks for the great service.
Because for $11/year you can get a simple kvm machine and run your own servers.
On the one hand, it's just wrong. Self-hosting mail is not easy because you need to learn how things work. But it's far from being "one of the hardest things to do", even in the domain of hosting things. A properly set up mail server will seamlessly send mails to almost any other MTA. The only large exception is microsoft. The abuse their market power by black-list all new MTAs by default until you create a ticket to "mitigate" this and they tend to re-blacklist small MTAs from time to time.
On the other hand, it's that kind of statements that worsen the situation. People should be encouraged to set up their own MTAs and provided with help to do it in a good professional way. It's one important part of keeping the mail part internet free and not in the hand of few large companies.
Comcast also gives me no end of annoyance by repeatedly black-listing my server for no apparent reason. The process goes: get blocked, request reason, get a hand shrug and unblock, rinse and repeat.
But I still self host stuff using docker (shiori etc.)
I mean , see there is a difference in complexity.
Like if you want to self host supabase , its complex , but its still automatable by a docker compose.
About Mails?? I am just not sure! , Maybe I shouldn't have expressed this opinion on the internet. I was just regurtitating what I heard from r/selfhosted feeds about email where they constantly said this. They even provided some explaination (see the message to which I said "this!!" , because that's what I meant.
Maybe even what you said about microsoft. But still , I really really don't want to take any risks with the mail , like what if a critical message of email doesn't come? I don't even want to know!!
I personally just believe that due to these reasons , that mail is just an old wagon which is riding into the future. I personally would prefer mail alternatives like xmpp / (preferably matrix!!)
I know matrix self hosting can take quite some resources but I do believe that the protocol in my honest opinion could be much more better for self hosting.
Just my two cents.
I spent an hour setting up postfix and some milters on a Digital Ocean droplet around 7 years ago and it's been working fine as my personal email server with no deliverability issues or maintenance since then. I ssh in every few years to try out a new spam filter or something and maybe upgrade some packages if I feel like it. These days there are even easier mail-in-a-box style turnkey deployments that work just as well but don't need as much knowledge or setup as bare postfix.
At this point, the biggest barrier to self-hosting email is the deafening cries of people who don't know what they're talking about parroting how impossible it is to do.
But like I said, I've put very little effort into this and have no problem getting into my recipients' inboxes with all major mail providers.
[1]: https://stalw.art
[1] https://vncoupon.com/black-friday-racknerd-huge-savings-spec...
It will have more than enough resources for SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, and even a personal VPN.
It's really not difficult.
The problem is that most IPs will be tainted and unless you are a major player, email deliverability sucks.
That's why I asked, because these guys were unknown to me.
It's so cheap people probably don't buy it because it will go bankrupt.
> Also, we're in beta
> We're a small company. So small, the "we" is royal.
I wish Scott best of luck and I hope one day it reaches there but until it is anything but confidence boosting.
So yeah, at least this guys is somewhat transparent. And with services like my primary email address, I only trust longstanding, reliable services, nothing fresh, nothing beta, nothing with the bus factor of 1. But with the custom domain, at least migration is not super hard maybe? Just hope that it doesn't happen during a 2-week vacation or something.
OTOH using your own domain means you can easily migrate to a new email server in the event that Purelymail folds.
The bus-factor of one was probably the main reason I did not choose them when I de-googled myself during Google's fiasco with their "free forever" Legacy GSuite termination. I found out a year or two later that they had rescinded their termination, but it was too late. I had migrated out of Google, to my relief.
if anyone needs to move mail storage from one IMAP server to another (eg; Purelymail) I can highly recommend https://imapsync.lamiral.info/
Not for it's website graphic design, but as a CLI tool that works perfectly. "source server -->> target server" and let it run
I use it to back up/sync all of my email accounts via IMAP to a different email provider account, and it works great!
That logo is creepy though, and implies exactly the opposite.
They also ran their datacenters on 100% renewables as of 3 years ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/pa76za/is_proto...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oNX_BHgi3c
I was like , okay nobody confuses swiss and sweden but here you are!
Zoho Mail provides another option - $1.95 per month I think for my use where I am (AU) and has all the features I need for my small indie business.
One other option I tried was to actually run mail myself with Linode VPS - https://mailinabox.email/
I know it sounds a little scary at the start running your own thing, but so far it's been working out great - zero issues so far. I may turn off Zoho one day and go fully into self-hosted option.
But for $0.40/month I have not had any inclination to switch providers.
This removes risks from both seller and buyer. The seller is not afraid of an avalanche of free trial users resulting in a big cloud bill. The user is not afraid of surprise overages (cough recent Vercel scandals cough) nor has to think about usage patterns that fit into arbitrary quotas, nor about surprises that catch up to you if you use the service at scale.
This is the way to do small utilities that have a cloud cost; services of the 'save you the trouble of self-hosting' type, or the 'tool somebody writes once, and people might use occasionally for years' pattern.
Maybe not the way to extract maximum value and growth for an ambitious startus, but a good choice for the many modest niche services out there.
https://mailinabox.email/ https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox
To put things in perspective, I dare say that many large commercial organisations who rely on Office 365 are not backing up emails locally. They do likely have fancy retention holds preventing nefarious actors who compromise access to the account nuking things. I think Fastmail's backup is limited to 7 days. Outside that is a risk; it's one I'll take.
Maybe we have different perceptions of risk. But I think one can reasonably take the view it is unnecessary to have an independent copy in this scenario.
They don’t owe you a data download if they decide to terminate the business relationship which they can do at any time without notice or cause. You agree to this when you sign up.
Not having backups of important data in your own possession is just plain stupid. You’re paying them to be online 24/7 and speak IMAP/SMTP, not to archive your data in perpetuity.
Email hosting and backups are different services.
It's an easy statement to make: "just take a backup". But that requires me to dedicate time to implementing a secure and automated solution (and of course, routinely testing restoring it). I'm not doing that, because I pay the service to do that for me. If I'm going to that effort, I may as well self-host.
Why not just use a mail retrieval agent[1][2] to download mail via IMAP?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_retrieval_agent
[2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications/Intern...
If the loss of a set of data would threaten the existence of the company, that's mission critical. While having a sophisticated niche tech partner handle day to day operations of that data is one part of managing the risk of data loss, if one put all their eggs in only that one basket, that would possibly indicate one has a lack of experience with tech vendors and hasn't read anything about managing risk.
Every business should have at least one routinely tested, independent path for mission critical data recovery.
The broader question of whether it is appropriate to independently back up your own data in large scale cloud services need not be answered. It is simply sufficient to recognise the risks are far greater when dealing with a one man operation.
It happens all of the time.
Downloading your mailbox is trivial, comparing it to self-hosting is not accurate. (I do both.)
Essentially you just have to configure mutt on a *nix host to download your email once an hour. 10 minute set up time?
Miles different from managing your own email infrastructure.
Is it only email you don't back up or do you not back up any of your data that's stored on companies' servers?
> I don't agree with you. A key reason to host your email with a reliable cloud storage provider is to have backups handled for you.
Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935
Google users locked out after 15 years' use https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965432
I got locked out of my Google account for a month https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989146
Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42350245
Android user locked out of Google after moving cities https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13004369
Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22705122
Ask HN: Locked out of Google services with no recourse or explanation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17428707
ASK HN: Google account disabled. Oh what to do? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350968
Ask HN: Google just kicked me out of my account, no option to verify https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24709282
Man locked out of Google Drive and loses 9 year old photos after SIM Swap attack https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41915523
Ask HN: Locked out of Google Aps email with no recourse - advice? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9768593
When you get locked out of your Google account, what do you do? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31070914
Purelymail: Cheap, No-Nonsense Email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33058691 - Oct 2022 (4 comments)
Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27707857 - July 2021 (307 comments)
Purelymail: Cheap email with custom domains, 2FA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23567456 - June 2020 (1 comment)
Show HN: Purelymail (Beta) – extremely cheap custom domain email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19134881 - Feb 2019 (1 comment)
You can use gmail's own relay for sending but it won't DKIM sign which is a must even for Gmail itself.
for a more reliable solution use forwarding AND POP3 fetching with some provoder OR use https://gmailify.com which offers own relays too for ~$7 a year.
The usual ones like SendGrid or Mailgun are probably not great for personal email, but it could probably work. Personally, I’ve used Duocircle for a similar setup and it worked pretty well: https://www.duocircle.com/email/outbound-smtp
Proton also does end-to-end encrypted email and supposedly, your emails are never stored decrypted, they are decrypted in your browser and in ingress/egress out of their environment. They're also hosting in switzerland.
That said, like many, I also am looking for an alternative. I pay them too much to not care about their CEO's political commentary.
Storing encrypted makes only sense when keys are not in their hands. Plaintext password enters their system on each login which means they can have your decryption key at any point if needed.
smoke and mirrors marketing...
plaintext password does not enter their system. For example I still have to enter a second password for the in-browser decryption (although these days they use the same password). Most of security feels like theatrics, but small measures that add difficulty for a potential threat actor add up.
SMTP does not encrypt messages and they arrive at Proton's inbound relays unencrypted, are scanned in plaintext for spam etc. At this point they can Bcc anything to another relay/account and keep a copy of all inbound messages BEFORE anything gets encrypted.
Access to historical messages? One line of code for logging, and let's not forget GPG does not encrypt the metadata which is readily available. How about FTS indexes, are they also decrypted on the fly in the browser?
Email is complex and not many have the patience to understand the monster behind, but lying about it, as Proton does - I find it just insulting to our profession.
Also "Swiss neutral", this is even more offending. Swiss execute US orders regularly.
Translated: https://daslamm-ch.translate.goog/ueberwachungsoase-statt-da...
Original: https://daslamm.ch/ueberwachungsoase-statt-datenschutzparadi...
What we really need instead of such shams is a new mail system that does not depend on trusting providers and especially not a SINGLE provider.
Crypto AG was also based in Switzerland - that by itself mattered very little because it was owned by the CIA and the West Germany Intelligence service.
....means nothing. Unless you know something the rest of us don't?
However I am also curious and in awe : how did this company survive and acquire paying customers with so many well established competitors and so many free alternatives?
I am seeking inspiration!
Most users don't need all of those things, but there is a niche that does, and are willing to pay a little bit to get it.
Otherwise: for ~20 years now I've been able to just attach two imap accounts in thunderbird, and drag to move/copy everything from one to the other, and that'll just chug away until it's done. I've never had an issue doing that.
I have used Thunderbird for everything, set to download everything and never delete, so had my primary backup there. I take regular backups of the profile directory as secondary measure, which are kept on my NAS and offsite.
What I did was to just decide to do a hard break. I renamed the old IMAP accounts, added the Proton Mail accounts using the IMAP bridge, and then configured my DNS to point to Proton.
DMARC and all that was easily set up as well thanks to Proton having nice guides and active verification.
Now I still have access to my old mail in my old account folder, and I can use the Proton Mail app on my phone for new stuff.
I also migrated a secondary mail, which was not using my domain and which I've had for almost three decades. There I had to do the laborious task of changing any accounts tied to it, and notify people still using it. I've been keeping it operational for a year and still get the occasional mail, but at a point where I'll be retiring it soon.
Overall been very happy. It showed me it was easier than I feared as long as I have Thunderbird and mail accounts under my own domain.
Moving the mails was as simple as ctrl+a and dragging my mouse in thunderbird.
Between providers with a custom domain (zoho to mxroute) was easy. Just updating the DNS records and moving the emails.
If you are technically able (really just buying a domain and setting the DNS records the provider tells you) I would recommend getting a custom domain. It gives you the ability to move providers at will pretty easily, even if you did want to stick with a gmail for now.
Should be sufficient unless you lose your computer and your email account gets blocked at the same time.
This should be sufficient to implement a web client which does client-side decryption of the content, in which case they indeed could not read the contents.
And they do have the IMAP bridge, I've been using it for a year with Thunderbird without any issues so far.
[1]: https://proton.me/support/proton-mail-encryption-explained
Proton $10 per month Purely $10 per year.
I've been using it for a few years now and love it. Will gladly pay if they kick me off the free plan.
There's plenty of reasons to drop Google thought. They barely improve old products.
They probably try to force us to use their products: I think you can't use your own assistant with a wakeword. On my pixel watch 1, using a calendar other than Google's sucks. There is almost no useful wearos apps (sure, it's the devs jobs but Google could bribe them or something). A lot of great wear os apps would benefit everyone.
I'm still pissed that they want a monthly subscription for the sleep tracking with the Google home thing... That you buy with your own money.
Allowing anything shady, let alone incriminating in your email would be insane, whether it's a mailbox at Google or at Proton. Transactional emails from shady websites, like password reset, are best done with email services like mailinator, which offer zero access protection and destroy the received email in a few minutes automatically.
Avoiding "lofty ideals" resonates with me. That kind of marketing reeks of weird self-hyping. Like, the company is over-valuing its service and under-thinking its shortcomings.
There is absolutely a limit. If you don't think you have a limit, it's because you don't have your asshole building his too-clever, "mountable PurelyMailFS" project or whatever yet. So you have a limit, but you aren't telling us what it is, or you don't know what it is. And an unknown arbitrary limit is worse than an arbitrary limit.
EDIT: I WAS WRONG. They bill by storage size & queries if you use "significantly more than $10 in resources" -- which is still vague and arbitrary but probably not a lot of users in the murky grey area.
I've been with my unlimited backup provider for over a decade without any problems. They keep increasing their available fee but that's ok for how much I'm backing up (several terabytes).
It pays in life not to be too cynical.
FWIW Mailgun also has a receiving API (proprietary, unfortunately): https://www.mailgun.com/products/send/inbound-routing/
What is the story with FOSS calendar sync tools on the server end? Standardized? Reliable? Easy enough?
New company policy, if you need to save large files like 3d renders, please use email for storage.
$210.40 for storage, $4.00 in account fees, $112.89 for received email, $2.77 for received email bandwidth (GB), $46.53 for sent emails, $0.00 for sent email bandwidth (GB), and $0.05 in username fees.But this is a pretty good option for non-technical folks.
I use rspamd, which is supposed to be great. How are you dealing with spam?
Sure they have it for 500 mb , but there was a deal to get 5gb instead but I think (Okay so I don't have 5gb) but still 500mb is decent enough , like some others said , you could also export some emails locally and use syncthing but I don't know for me 500mb is decent
Fastmail is worth it though as it has a really good web client and can do other nice things (Calendar, rules, notes, store random files, etc..)
how about improvmx , it gives redirection for free , I have also discovered it right now in this thread though I think I had heard about it (I am not sure , I know of some email software where you pay one time and then you can self host or they host I am not sure)
imagine missing some important emails could cost you a lot.
That actually seems pretty good. Who's behind this?
If they had a minimal free tier which supports custom domain names I'd definitely give to a go. Gmail was great 20 years ago, but today it's disheartening to see many services restricting registration except from Gmail.com and Yahoo.com domain names.
> If they had a free tier I'd give it a go
Maybe these two things are related.