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Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

purelymail.com

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Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#161

Post by Fnoord »

toastal wrote: post #27

I recently switched to Posteo from a few years with ProtonMail. Reading from Purelymail's docs and with price being within $3 annually of one another (Posteo is €12 annually) Posteo pros: comes with calendar and contacts via WebDAV, not registered in the US (Germany is part of 14 Eyes, but not 5 or 9, and the EU is better about privacy), cash payment option Purelymail pros: more storage @ $10, custom domain support,…

Another alternative to Posteo is Mailbox.org [1]. Personally, I use Soverin [2], but that's mostly cause I get it for free with Freedom Internet plus its hosted in The Netherlands. And I can always leave.

[1] https://mailbox.org/en/

[2] https://soverin.net/

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#162

Post by vogon_laureate »

techsupporter wrote: post #46
rolleiflex wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great work, and as somebody who self hosted my own email from 2013 to 2021, I don’t envy you. What broke me down was Google starting to spam my emails that were replies to conversations that I did not start — even with a stellar domain reputation and DKIM, SPF, reverse DNS, greylisting, everything set up right. I hope you have personal contacts on the Gmail team at Google, much as I’d like for this to be a joke.

I had this exact same problem. When I finally got hold of someone who worked for Google (via a friend of a friend on a mailing list) and with the ability to check whatever their logs were claiming, I was informed that my domain's reputation was "too recent" or something like that. My domain is a year older than Google itself and has been in continuous use for e-mail that whole time. The IP addresses it is on haven't…

I really enjoyed the whole process of running my own mail setups, configuring Postfix or OpenSMTPd to do clever aliases and transports, setting up CARP failover relays, managing DNS records, experimenting with different SPAM-filtering techniques, SSL, IMAP, mailing lists, the works. It taught me a lot about networking and security and everything a good sysadmin should know.

I find it sad that that‘s pretty much a waste of time now for most use cases.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#163

Post by donmcronald »

brongondwana wrote: post #150
donmcronald wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your custom domain pricing is weird. Is it really important to squeeze the extra $20/year out of the first user? It ends up being $50/year for the first user vs $12/year at Zoho. Why not just put custom domains in the basic tier? DMARC reporting could be a huge value add if you could build something in. That whole industry is a massive ripoff and too expensive for small businesses.

Over 1/3 of our staff are support agents, and support is one of our largest costs, so yes - custom domains do add additional support challenges, and we do need to cover that cost. Thanks for the suggestion with DMARC reporting. It's not something we're going to work on straight away, but I'll add it into the suggestions for the domain features. Definitely we'd only look at building something pretty basic and low-touc…

Minimal DMARC reports would be useful. The problem that I see for small businesses is the cost keeps them from even trying it, so they can have problems that never get surfaced.

As an example of where I think the current value propositions are bad, DMARCian charges $240/year for the most basic plan that includes 100k compliant messages in a month. Most small businesses won’t do half that in a year. You probably have good stats to grok that.

I get it on the support thing. I pretty much never use support, so I guess that’s why I always feel like everything is too expensive. I’m always stunned to see how many employees at smaller tech companies are support. Sometimes I feel like I’m subsidizing users that are too lazy to learn.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#164

Post by johnchristopher »

shaicoleman wrote: post #125
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #111

> An honest list of drawbacks I appreciate putting up a list like this. That said, I want to comment on one of the listed drawbacks: > Occasionally, obscure email servers will block emails sent through us I have a few years of experience running my own email server and I can tell you this is a major pain in the ass. When you send your email via a small email server (a server that sends a low volume of email), you wil…

> Occasionally, obscure email servers will block emails sent through us The worst offender is Microsoft and their email services (hotmail.com/live.com/outlook.com/etc.). They reject all emails from my server, because it's on DigitalOcean. They are ignoring all requests to unblock my IP address. They don't mark it as spam, they just outright block emails, so you can't even workaround it by checking the spam folder.

What's Microsoft's rationale ? Has an explanation ever been given ?

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#165

Post by cryptos »

I consider the usage of Roundcube for the UI a downside. I've tried Roundcube myself and was not really satisfied. It is difficult for to describe what exactly is wrong with the UI but somehow the usability is not really good. Outlook (web), GMail, or Yahoo Mail all feel better to me.

What I'd really miss would the integration of an external adress book (Google), because I wouldn't want to duplicate all my addresses.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#166

Post by baobabKoodaa »

johnchristopher wrote: post #164
shaicoleman wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Occasionally, obscure email servers will block emails sent through us The worst offender is Microsoft and their email services (hotmail.com/live.com/outlook.com/etc.). They reject all emails from my server, because it's on DigitalOcean. They are ignoring all requests to unblock my IP address. They don't mark it as spam, they just outright block emails, so you can't even workaround it by checking the spam folder.

What's Microsoft's rationale ? Has an explanation ever been given ?

I've tried reaching Microsoft by phone, email, automated tools for email administrators, and their web forms for requesting whitelisting in email deliverability. Microsoft didn't provide any rational why they are filtering email from small email providers like this, nor did they provide any opportunity to mitigate their filtering.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#167

Post by ripdog »

rplnt wrote: post #151
chin123 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GMail has ads. It's free because you are the product, not the customer. Google's customers are the advertisers. The money has to come from somewhere.

I'm not talking about gmail. This post is about hosting an email with your own domain.

Google workspace isn't free.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#168

Post by mk89 »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #166
johnchristopher wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's Microsoft's rationale ? Has an explanation ever been given ?

I've tried reaching Microsoft by phone, email, automated tools for email administrators, and their web forms for requesting whitelisting in email deliverability. Microsoft didn't provide any rational why they are filtering email from small email providers like this, nor did they provide any opportunity to mitigate their filtering.

Probably it's more convenient for them to trust X big players rather than checking one by one. And somehow an empty spam folder looks better than a full one, as it gives the user the feeling that the service itself doesn't receive spam or does a very good job at preventing it.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#169

Post by sersi »

techsupporter wrote: post #46
rolleiflex wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great work, and as somebody who self hosted my own email from 2013 to 2021, I don’t envy you. What broke me down was Google starting to spam my emails that were replies to conversations that I did not start — even with a stellar domain reputation and DKIM, SPF, reverse DNS, greylisting, everything set up right. I hope you have personal contacts on the Gmail team at Google, much as I’d like for this to be a joke.

I had this exact same problem. When I finally got hold of someone who worked for Google (via a friend of a friend on a mailing list) and with the ability to check whatever their logs were claiming, I was informed that my domain's reputation was "too recent" or something like that. My domain is a year older than Google itself and has been in continuous use for e-mail that whole time. The IP addresses it is on haven't…

I ended up doing the same for the exact same reason. And even when using fastmail, my email still sometimes gets blocked.
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