Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

purelymail.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 316 posts

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#171

Post by mvolfik »

deadbunny wrote: post #131
jobarion wrote: post #114

When using subaddressing (e.g. example+tag@purelymail.com), can I also send from that address? The holy grail for me would be an email service that lets me set up catch-all, with the ability to send/reply with any address I want.

> The holy grail for me would be an email service that lets me set up catch-all, with the ability to send/reply with any address I want. I have this with fastmail. *@my.tld all gets shoved in my inbox and I can send from whatever@my.tld.

With improvmx.com you can point a domain at them, and then set catch-all forwarding to e.g. Gmail. Sending is possible thanks to most providers (incl. Gmail) allowing sending from different address after verification, and if you set DKIM and SPF it shouldn't cause any issues.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#172

Post by mcintyre1994 »

donmcronald wrote: post #107
techsupporter wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have a legacy GSuite account. Google filters email from Facebook and Microsoft sometimes. Hell, I think I might have even seen them filter their own mail once. It’s a clown show. The opaque filters are just an excuse to engage in anti-competitive behavior IMO.

To be fair Facebook used to send an enormous amount of spam emails, at least to me. Years ago when I used it somewhat regularly they used to constantly shuffle their contact preferences and the effect was that I was constantly opted back in to an insane amount of emails. Eventually I just started marking them as spam until Gmail blocked everything they send. I've seen family Email addresses fairly recently full of Facebook junk too so I assume they still default to sending a lot.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#173

Post by carlosfvp »

Avamander wrote: post #155
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.

You think Microsoft blocking you is bad? They ACCEPT mail and drop it afterwards.

Pretty close! They accept the mail returning a "250 OK"ish code, but they delay it for days (or even months) not respecting the SMTP protocol. I actually recevied the emails on Outlook after many many days I have sent them :/

Gmail seems good, I never had issues with Gmail.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#174

Post by EveYoung »

zerof1l wrote: post #19
zephyr9 wrote: post #3

I've been using Purelymail as my sole mail provider for over a year now (previously with Fastmail) and it has been my best email experience. It's a one-man enterprise, which may frighten some people, but I prefer boutique internet companies to the faceless monoliths. (I'd like more of the internet to be made of these small corner bodegas.)

From the FAQ > Occasionally, obscure email servers will block emails sent through us. Maybe it's good for personal use or as a throwaway email, but it is not good for main business email. Certainly not a replacement for Gmail or Fastmail kinds. Because you expect the email service to have 24/7 availability and near-perfect email delivery and receiving. > It's a one-man enterprise A person can get sick or just wish to…

For me, this would be a major issue for personal emails as well. Even if an undelivered email wouldn't cause a monetary loss it still could have significant consequences, such as upsetting friends or family or missing the signup deadline for your kid's sports team. Personally, I don't mind paying the higher Fastmail prices to not have to worry about this.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#175

Post by herbst »

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…

I ran a kinda similar platform years ago I and I fully agree. It was a constant fight against blacklists, random spam filtering and weird attacks on my server looking for postfix missconfigurations.

If I learned anything in that time is that email is not simple, and should be run by a qualified dedicated team, because there are so many pitfalls

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#176

Post by jobarion »

deadbunny wrote: post #131
jobarion wrote: post #114

When using subaddressing (e.g. example+tag@purelymail.com), can I also send from that address? The holy grail for me would be an email service that lets me set up catch-all, with the ability to send/reply with any address I want.

> The holy grail for me would be an email service that lets me set up catch-all, with the ability to send/reply with any address I want. I have this with fastmail. *@my.tld all gets shoved in my inbox and I can send from whatever@my.tld.

Do you need to set up each *@my.tld address manually, or can you just seamlessly reply to emails send to neverusedbefore@my.tld?

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#177

Post by franga2000 »

mk89 wrote: post #168
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's just the thing: "doing a good job preventing spam" means throwing a lot of stuff in the spam folder. I think everyone would agree that silently dropping emails is bad, even if you're really sure it's spam.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#178

Post by lazyweb »

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…

> 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 will have constant issues getting mail delivered. Also, most of the issues will not be with obscure email servers, they will be with Outlook and Gmail. When you send email, you will never know if your email will be delivered to inbox, delivered to spam folder, or blackholed entirely.

I tend to disagree, due to my experiences with running a private mail server [1]. I've had one exactly one issue with Outlook/Hotmail servers over the years. My server is quite low traffic, but it's been delivering mail reliably. How do I know? When I send mails, there's usually follow-ups.

[1] https://jschumacher.info/2021/05/running-a-private-mail-serv...

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#179

Post by stef25 »

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 ?

You can create anonymous servers on DO with go-betweens like Bithost, allowing you to pay with cryptocurrency. This is a pretty easy solution for people with bad intentions (bots, scraping, black hat ...)

I run my own VPN on DO and almost always get hit by ReCaptcha. Even Google.com will put up a "we've noticed some unusual traffic from" page. Some sites like Zalando completely block me with just a plaintext error page.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#180

Post by brongondwana »

donmcronald wrote: post #163
brongondwana wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Heh, yep - you are subsidising users that don't know how to do everything - and they are subsidising you by paying for the engineers to build robust and reliable systems with 24/7 operations support, and developers, and standards authors improving the system for the future... along with the support team.

Anyway, I've already filed the DMARC request internally, and linked to this thread.

Post reply on HN