Ask HN: What email service(s) do you use for your side projects?

I was plodding through the steps to set up a mail servicer on my Hetzner instance when I realized I was about to sink a ton of time into a subject I know nothing about that would earn me no money.

So I did the reasonable thing and signed up for Zoho. It's cheap and I don't have to worry about having a zombie spam server because I misconfigured something.

+1 for mxroute. Works great for anything but spam or marketing email. Those get a quick ban and a downgrade from valued customer to scum of the earth.

I’m also curious about this, because we have clients whose back office web services just use sendmail and for the most part, we don’t have trouble.

I remember looking into mailbox providers sometime ago and wanted to resell Zoho because they seemed like the best provider on the market at the time but their reseller contacts are a waste of my time. Awful sales channel. They willingly don’t understand plain English.

[1]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h4hgdBFEgOt7XQaTAR7Q...

It's a mix. I use my registrar's (Porkbun) email service for human communication (name@, support@, etc). Added those accounts to my personal Gmail inbox so I can send/receive using Gmail instead of logging into the registrar's webmail. Eventually will move to something like Google Workspace most likely, which is a bit more expensive.

I use AWS SES for transactional emails (mostly send, but making use of the receive capability as well). Nice and cheap. And finally using MailerLite for marketing emails. Just surpassed their free tier so may look again, but not too bad pricing-wise.

One advice I've seen is not to mix transactional and marketing providers (and ideally domains). If you get a high incidence of unsubscribes or "this is spam" responses, don't want your app to be dead in the water for transactional stuff if the marketing provider suspends your account temporarily (can happen even if you're legit).

You can self host email. There are plenty of how-tos, prepackaged packages, even books:

https://mwl.io/nonfiction/tools#ryoms

I'm writing my own how-to which includes finding suitable Internet providers and includes setting up smarthosting in case you can't get a good address for yourself.