All I wanted was a custom domain email
jacobg.co
jacobg.co
The manual approve to outbound sending helped a lot to keep spammers out of the platform.
We ensure that domain exists and you're the owner, the website is legit, etc, making impossible for a bot to operate throughout our channel.
And is working, almost 4 weeks in, no complaints, less than 0.1 bounce rate.
You know, having an high reputation is vital to ensure the emails we send on behalf of our customers are reaching the inbox not the spam folder.
Said that, you continue to be right: it's annoying. We're working to reduce the pain autoapproving it for cases like your.
Thank you again (I hope you'll never find a reason to leave us! :)
Somewhat ironic, given your entire website is AI generated.
Overall looks like a great tool that I'll look into for my next projects.
RIP
If you don't care about your website, why should I?
sounds even more insane, completely unusable service, I mean if the client sends me automated emails from their system on behalf of the PMs, I would need to submit request to reply to each PM with their individual address? insanity unless they meant domain which would be a bit more sensible
It's never been easier to self-host, but it feels like, in general, when faced with "I want to do X with a computer," people are more and more reaching for paid, hosted services rather than DIY anymore.
Email receivers (be it Gmail or your local council) don't differentiate if you're self hosting or a business. So long as small businesses can manage (who have like one part-time sysadmin that also manages a ton of other IT stuff; email doesn't take much of their time), so can you. If you set up the usual suspects like SPF and DMARC, the domain is not a known spammer, and the IP not in a blocked address range, it's mostly hands-off (source: I self host my email)
If you need it to really be super reliable, yeah, you need to send through one of the big companies who have not just a dedicated sending IP address but entire ranges dedicated to email sending, as well as staff that will respond to delivery issues 24/7. Microsoft rejecting email from Google and vice versa isn't unheard of, so there aren't guarantees anywhere, but that would be your best bet. For my personal use, that extra nine of reliability isn't needed
Even if you don't actively monitor your server and only notice there's a problem after three days of not getting any mail, odds are you'll still receive most of them after fixing the issue.
Also, my understanding is that Google, Outlook and other major email services have been implementing as many roadblocks for self-hosted setups as possible to the point where it's a constant battle and difficult to keep up with.
But agreed that mass-mailing (even account registration style emails) seems a lot less reliable because of those spam filters.
all complete bullshit; they arbitrraly occasionally block to protect their moat raping privacy. e-mail is the most rewarding self-hosting capability. like anything, there is a learning curve but at the end of the day: it's easy, stable, a pleasure to host. there are solutions that ease the learning curve. after a while, all the e-mail do make it through.
i'm so happy that my communications are not indexed by these hyperscalers.
stop listening to these pussies claiming how difficult it is. they're projecting their limitations.
There's little to no incentive for providers to ever de-escalate.
At my day job, we use Gsuite. I never used it for any non-work purpose, and it wasn't publically published, so any "spam" it got was false positives. Emails I actually needed were being buried below the fold in the spam folder. It turns out there is no obvious way to 100% disable spam filtering (at the time I got the first false-positive at least) so I had to try to just allowlist things that should be left alone.
The cost of something like AWS SES or Postmark is so low as to make it almost not worth it, but it worked; not that I'd trust "real" email to it - but I was surprised that Wordpress setup emails were getting through with little config.
1. Deliverability: "the email mafia will flag your emails as spam"
2. Complexity: "configuring and maintaining a mail stack is a technical nightmare".
3. Network blocks: VPS providers and residential ISPs frequently block outbound mail ports (like port 25) entirely or in their terms of use.
I decided we should try self-hosting because some issues with their reliability cost us very expensive problems. The experience was frustrating anyway, as the weird restrictions on providers caused our setup to be quite bad on some regards -- most notably being forced to use the provider UI to manage some things, which took time and is a non-transferable useless skill, not having users for things that should have had one, etc.
MailCow made the technical setup trivial, blowing objection #2 out. For #3, we could not rely on stable electricity/internet, so we just spun it up on a reliable VPS provider after a small research. As for the biggest fear, the IP reputation and deliverability mafia (#1), it is easily solved by routing outbound mail through a simple SMTP relay like SMTP2GO. You pay based purely on sending volume rather than a flat service fee, and their free tier completely covers small setups. And how much time did it take? Less than half a day, before AI could do everything for you.
Most paid services charge absurd per-user or per-domain fees for basic features that do not cost them anything. After 2 years of bad service on paid providers followed by 2 years of flawless self-hosting, there is absolutely no going back.
I've been very happy with it. I have a perfectly normal email service, over which I have full control. MailInABox handles all the necessary DKIM etc. I had minor hassles, when I first started, with sending to google and microsoft, but these were reasonably easily managed by following microsoft's advice. (And I have a good ISP.)
The only hassle is that, because MailInABox uses greylisting, initial account-validation emails are sometimes delayed. But because I have control of the service, I can whitelist anything important :)
I self hosted my email domains for 15+ years. Finally got fed up with the constant trickle of the maintenance and got a service for everything.
Not quite happy with that as they don't even do SRS (implying they do), but i guess I'll just migrate elsewhere.
The upside is I've got more time for myself and have less CVEs to worry about.
Self hosted apps migration in progress; I guess I'll leave media, book and file server only, off the internet, and that's it.
> This post placed #4 on HackerNews
Did you want to talk about your custom email domain, or the meta game of the HN algorithm? It can't really be both
But you can host your own email too. It's not the easiest option, but it can be done, and there has been some newer email server software written that tries to make it easier.
I am definitely engrossed in the Apple Ecosystem™ though so I can't speak to how it would fit any other setup that isn't almost entirely Apple-based.
This is because like most other vendors, they do price discrimination based on number of users. Which is no doubt why the other large vendors were also ruled out.
One vendor who doesn't do this is Migadu. I don't use them as they lack 2FA support, but they are one of a small number of businesses who make their proposition easy to evaluate quickly, as opposed to making you swipe through a pitch before you get to the facts. This is so unusual that I remember them despite evaluating them multiple years ago.
That makes emails forwarded from, say, PayPal or ebay marked as scam/phishing in Gmail, AND makes it impossible to report actual spam that comes through.
With a well set up SRS all these emails are recognised correctly. SimpleLogin does some naïve forwarding which messes it up.
I'm migrating out of them exactly for this reason - if I could do it on my hobby server for my personal domains, THEY should be able to do it as well.
I can't find that in his list of requirements. He said he wants unlimited addresses, but I'm not able to spot any mention that he wants to send from all those addresses. A catch-all will work just fine for receiving mail, so it may be an option for him.
Although to be fair, I welcome competition, and I like seeing people end up with other solutions. I would hate it if Protonmail and Fastmail were the only viable services offering this.
An example of a company that does exactly what I pay them to do and respects me as a customer.
It may even be my favorite tech product at all. Should I be able to pay for more storage space for the drive (options are very limited), it would approach the perfection.
Email is one service that should be accessible from any machine.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en
Fine for small needs.
And then when bigger pay $5 a month per email address to a decent provider. At that point, you're spending more energy to save money than it's worth.
You aren’t told something has been filtered and it doesn’t go to spam. It’s just deleted with zero recourse. The sender isn’t notified either.
https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/icloud-mail-what-to-do-when...
I had this happen as recently as June 2026 when my current provider was up. It happens on @mac.com @me.com @icloud.com and custom domains.
I kind of have Google setup this way, but it's a friggin pain (and not really advised) to keep adding address aliases, or having to fight to +alias stuff. So it doesn't quite work.
Here is my script:
require ["fileinto","imap4flags","variables","regex","mailbox"];
## A catch all filter designed to automatically organise emails sent to a catch-all address into a folder based on the receiving address e.g amazon@example.com --> INBOX.Amazon ## If the folder doesn't exist it is automatically created
if exists "X-Delivered-To" { if header :regex "X-Delivered-To" "([^@]+)" { set :upperfirst "prefix" "${1}"; fileinto :create "INBOX.${prefix}"; stop; } }
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591053-Plu...
Support helped a lot when I tried to set this up. They initially said it wasn't possible, then came back a while later with a correction.
It never made sense to me that you need to pay for storage per email account, if you use a custom domain. It I use 10GB why should it matter than I have it split over two email accounts?
Looks really interesting, thank you.
Oh, I just remembered that I send mail received by my CloudFlare domain to both gmail and zohomail, and use Thunderbird as the mail agent for the latter.
If you run your personal mail on this and not automated notifications it's basically free, but how many spam lists are this kind of services on?
In the mean time I’ve checked them (smtp2go) a bit and apparently they do work on having a good reputation and allow you to add them as a smart host to your own smtp server so looks like I’ll give them a try.
Consider that you may be losing email without knowing even on the cheapest paid plan for $44 a year limits incoming emails to 500 a month. Most people don’t get 500 emails a month, but there can be months when this happens and the emails aren’t even in a “hold” until you upgrade. They’re just completely lost.
I’d rather have unlimited incoming emails than 15 GB or whatever higher storage is offered.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but this sounds absolutely wild. What?
I want to continue to use Gmail for email storage--mainly because of the awesome search function, but also for longevity--while using a third-party app for pulling specific emails from Gmail and replying to them through my custom domain(s).
The solutions mentioned in this blog aren't that--they have their own storage.
Big benefit of this combination is that you get "login with google", docs, drive, hangouts
Can even send email, although recipient sees that it has been forwarded.
Not that unpopular. I've used it since way before it was called "Google Workspace" and it Just Works [TM]. Also once you pay for it, suddenly they pick up the phone if you ever need support.
A shitload of SMEs are using Google Workspace to get their own domain and all the Google suite.
I know it's cool to hate on Google on HN but for my part I'll forever be hating on Microsoft and Meta. I tolerate Google.
This and them sunsetting Exchange EWS (which enabled push) was the straw that forced me into looking at other options (the other being them forcing you to pay for Gemini even if you have it completely disabled in your Workspace)