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Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

purelymail.com

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Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#201

Post by mike-cardwell »

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…

/me looks at his work gmail account that regularly spam filters emails from github, and emails from his work google apps domain that pass DMARC, DKIM and SPF.

Nobody can send emails to Gmail with any certainty. Not even Google.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#202

Post by mk89 »

franga2000 wrote: post #177
mk89 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree, it's just that you're not the average user. I am also surprised to see the spam folder surprisingly empty all the time, almost as if my email addresses were unknown to the world (which I am pretty sure they are not).

The average user probably sees this full spam folder as something he/she is doing bad, or the service itself is bad.

It's not just google or microsoft. I think most email providers do this, I might be wrong though.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#203

Post by f1refly »

bambax wrote: post #134
Felz wrote: post #30

Oh cool, my project is on HackerNews! I was wondering about the sudden uptick in user signups, and then I checked HN... I'm Scott, feel free to ask me anything about the service.

Slightly OT, but what is the best practice to store (archive) email locally after they have been read from a remote imap server? 3 Gb is plenty for a few months of "live" email but after that what should we do to keep those emails -- and still have them searchable if need be?

Thunderbird has "local" accounts, you can move emails there and have them removed from your imap server. You can also export emails to .eml files, throw them wherever you like and grep for contents if you like.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#204

Post by baobabKoodaa »

layer8 wrote: post #193
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…

> 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. That’s hyperbole. I‘ve been running my personal mail server on a VPS for the past 20 years and never had any delivery issues. It may depend on the hosting provider you use, and nowadays you probably need to have DKIM etc., but there are a lot of people running their ow…

> That’s hyperbole. I‘ve been running my personal mail server on a VPS for the past 20 years and never had any delivery issues.

No email server in the world can deliver 100% (not even Gmail). Here you are claiming to have done that for 20 years straight. Well, it's not true. In fact, I'll venture as far as to guess that you've never even measured your deliverability.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#205

Post by toomanybeersies »

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…

My personal email is on a .xyz domain and I used to use Gandi webmail as it was free with the domain name.

When I was finding a new job last year, every time sent recruiters an email with my resume (attached as a pdf), I had to ring them afterwards to check if they had actually received it.

I ended up switching to Google Workspace, just so that my emails actually had a chance of not landing in the recipients spam folder.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#206

Post by ZWoz »

cedilla wrote: post #192
ZWoz wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in HN are weirdly afraid running own mail server. Thats not that hard. If you are web developer, who is capable setting up linux+varnish+nginx+php-fpm+redis+mariadb stack, then I would say that functional mail server has less moving pieces. I think most horror stories are related to trying run own server in bad neighborhood, in some cheap VPS service. Now entire IP block has bad reputation and indeed there is…

It's not that weird. Mail is the only critical thing most people run for themselves, really; and if the proverbial excrement hits the fan, mail is useful in fixing the fallout. Sure, I would be able to acquire the skills to run a mail server, and I know how to monitor it all, and I know about what the moving parts are. But why go through all that hassle to save 10-40 dollars a year?

There isn't much breaking usually, I really don't remember big issues in my 15+ years self-hosting time. I have changed colocation place several times, some places have been offices with average office internet (without redundant links or BGP peering).

I can see issues, if you over-engineer and try build some microservice farm in some cloud provider, but simple physical server with DC grade disks in RAID and backup (tested and out of server) is pretty reliable.

Of course, when you really don't want to do it, then paying for someone else is reasonable, no issue with that. But its not fair to make mail self-hosting look like something very complicated and dangerous, I would say that modern web service stacks are more complicated and fragile. Lots of guys here are writing own internet facing software, handling customer data. Compared to that, using pre-existing mail server software isn't that hard.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#207

Post by corobo »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #201
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…

/me looks at his work gmail account that regularly spam filters emails from github, and emails from his work google apps domain that pass DMARC, DKIM and SPF. Nobody can send emails to Gmail with any certainty. Not even Google.

Whenever I'm expecting YouTube emails (pass reset or whatever) I check gmail's spam first haha. At least they don't play favourites I guess.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#208

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

ZWoz wrote: post #206
cedilla wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that weird. Mail is the only critical thing most people run for themselves, really; and if the proverbial excrement hits the fan, mail is useful in fixing the fallout. Sure, I would be able to acquire the skills to run a mail server, and I know how to monitor it all, and I know about what the moving parts are. But why go through all that hassle to save 10-40 dollars a year?

There isn't much breaking usually, I really don't remember big issues in my 15+ years self-hosting time. I have changed colocation place several times, some places have been offices with average office internet (without redundant links or BGP peering). I can see issues, if you over-engineer and try build some microservice farm in some cloud provider, but simple physical server with DC grade disks in RAID and backup (…

i wrote how i used "mailinabox" https://mailinabox.email/

this makes it stupid easy to set up your server. you have to do little config and you are up and running.

I decided to do miab because i had a necessity of "email aliases" in hundreds. none of these low cost email providers allowed that, unless i went with google workspace or 365 if i remember correctly.

rolling my own solved this issue and for the same price plus the "management headache" which i saw as a personal challenge more than a chore. so i am very happy with the results.

gmail has given me headaches in the start but if i send more than a few emails with attachments to gmail, they still flag all emails as spam so that is a recurring problem but not something i cannot live without

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#209

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

cedilla wrote: post #192
ZWoz wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in HN are weirdly afraid running own mail server. Thats not that hard. If you are web developer, who is capable setting up linux+varnish+nginx+php-fpm+redis+mariadb stack, then I would say that functional mail server has less moving pieces. I think most horror stories are related to trying run own server in bad neighborhood, in some cheap VPS service. Now entire IP block has bad reputation and indeed there is…

It's not that weird. Mail is the only critical thing most people run for themselves, really; and if the proverbial excrement hits the fan, mail is useful in fixing the fallout. Sure, I would be able to acquire the skills to run a mail server, and I know how to monitor it all, and I know about what the moving parts are. But why go through all that hassle to save 10-40 dollars a year?

its not always about saving a buck. i spend more in hosting +domain than i would if i went with fastmail or zoho or whatever. what it feels like is going from google to zoho. when you own the server, you own the backup on s3, you know you can just switch servers if need be. your addresses and everything comes with you.

i see this as a hobby if nothing else. maybe others have the same idea

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#210

Post by vgeek »

layer8 wrote: post #193
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…

> 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. That’s hyperbole. I‘ve been running my personal mail server on a VPS for the past 20 years and never had any delivery issues. It may depend on the hosting provider you use, and nowadays you probably need to have DKIM etc., but there are a lot of people running their ow…

https://www.mail-tester.com/ is a useful tool for testing.

Gmail is hit or miss, even when dkim/spf/dmarc are setup correctly. It may work 70% of the time, but it becomes a constant guessing game if you inboxed or went to spam. If you're using DO/Vultr/Linode, there may be issues with noisy neighbor IPs, but it still sucks that you may get penalized for no fault of your own. It seems like there is no incentive for Gmail to play friendly with small mail servers.

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