Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue

That would be a terrific quote on the website. Totally sells me

Any plans to allow forwarding mail to a webhook instead of via SMTP? A lot of residential ISPs block port 25, which prevents running a self-hosted mail server... but a web server is fine. By delivering messages via a webhook, a service like 33mail could act as a “mail relay”. A 200 response would mean the message was delivered successfully; 4xx or 5xx would queue the message for retrying. Use nicely structured JSON (“to” and “cc” arrays comprised of one or more name/email keys, “date”, “subject”, etc., a “headers” dict for all the other/less-important “X-“ headers, then “text” and “html” keys for the body) to make it easy to parse and process...

As a data point: I pay Google $5/month to accomplish essentially the same thing.

I pay for Google Workspace, have a handful of domains configured, a single "real" user account and a catch-all rule that forward all mail to that real account.

Other than inertia and pricing (I have >10 domains, so I'd fall in the enterprise tier), there's one key feature that keeps me from switching: I can set up custom routing rules.

For example, when I RSVP'd for a wedding last year with a plus one, I set up a custom rule for that alias so that my plus one also got any updates.

I suspect you could build a significantly better UX around that, where someone could link additional recipients to an alias with some sort of special reply to the email, see that those other recipients are included when receiving messages (as a reminder they're "linked" to the alias), etc. I'm probably over thinking it, but I'd love to be able to somehow react to an email with "+friend@example.com for 2 hours". (Example use case: you place a food delivery order for a group of friends and want them all to get the rest of the confirmation emails until the meal is actually delivered.)

Random ideas:

It'd be interesting to have an easy way to "bind" aliases to a domain/sender. Most of the time when I invent a new alias, I only expect it to be used by whoever sends the first message to it.

It'd also be interesting to be able to have a "snooze" feature for an alias. I use this a lot on social media (e.g., Facebook makes it easy to say "don't show me anything from this person for 30 days") when I don't want to totally unfollow someone. I think I'd do that with some merchants' emails.

Maybe these could take the form of message headers that get added? That way, it's easy to configure a client-side skip-the-inbox rule (or mark it as low priority or whatever), so it's not in your face, while ensuring you can still search for stuff you think you might have missed.

Love the idea, I'm sure I'm not the only person who's thought about this pain point and somehow didn't come up with the elegant solution you did.

Right now I have an O365 account that lets me create unlimited (I think) aliases, the issue is how annoying it is to create them and then manage them. Yahoo has a similar service, but again you need to create the alias first, your solution of accept all, deny later is much smarter.

My only question about price brackets is I don't have a great understanding of how much bandwidth I use monthly, or even how many emails I'd funnel through your service, not to mention we're kinda at the mercy of the senders, if they send a lot/ or send large emails, we end up needing to move up a bracket. On avg do your Premium users get close to the limit?

Which brings me to my next question: what happens if I do indeed use up my entire bandwidth allotment for the month? do emails just get bounced? do I just get upgraded automatically?

I get where your coming from by charging for bandwidth, from your perspective you're aligning your costs with the price.

When I tried to sign up, the username I wanted was taken, but the error message wasn't obvious and I was left wondering what happened until I saw it above the signup button. For the record I had ublock enabled and it was blocking 15 things, so it's possible it caught something... you might wanna look into that.

I created a similar service, https://idbloc.co

However I’m probably going to pivot away to email infrastructure because:

A) The market for paid users is tiny (when we had free users we had 1000s of sign ups, but they were mostly setting up spam accounts and would never convert)

B) Most companies will mark you as a temp email address and block sign ups, effectively making it useless

It’s frustrating as it’s a great idea. I think the best implementation is Apple IDs version, as they don’t need to care about A and have the reputation to solve B.

Great job getting to 8k MRR and good luck. I think 33mail (or idbloc) would be awesome if integrated with a password manager, might be a good place for you to find new growth.