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Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

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Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#211

Post by black6 »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #205
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 fol…

I've run into this same issue communicating with potential employers via GANDI mail--more often then not when I make a followup call my email is in their SPAM folder.

My sister-in-law's employer's mail service (k-12 school district) ALWAYS bounces back email from myself and my wife, and their sysadmin always says "Nope. Not a problem on my end."

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#212

Post by ZWoz »

vzaliva wrote: post #45
2Gkashmiri wrote: post #29

can anyone explain what benefits are to a managed email service over rolling your own on a vps server with stuff like mailinabox? you use your custom domain anyways and it allows s3 or backblaze backups so data retention is not an issue. you use your custom domain so in case something stupid happens to your vps provider, you can just restore and be done with it? and its not like managing your own vps email server is…

because of spam many systems agessively block email delivery from IP addresses which do not known to belong to well established mail providers with millions of users. And it is very tedious to unblock it on case by case basis. This is the reason I've stopped running my personal mail server 10 years ago.

If you have new IP and that IP don't have bad history, then your main issue is hotmail and Office365. There is little bit rate limiting over next 24h period, but if you host yourself and don't send unsolicidated bulk messages, then you don't see those limits. Some anti-spam services graylist you, that causes usually 5 minute delay for delivery.

90% spam score comes from message, sending server isn't that relevant (if you base configuration is reasonable: PTR is right, server knows it's hostname and don't EHLO himself as localhost and so on). You can look at SpamAssassin default rulebase[1] for common rules.

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[1] - https://spamassassin.apache.org/old/tests_3_3_x.html

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#213

Post by johnklos »

donmcronald wrote: post #153
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.

> They don't mark it as spam, they just outright block emails, so you can't even workaround it by checking the spam folder. And there’s no reason for them to do that IMO. They should dump it into the quarantine as high confidence spam. I wonder if the drop shows up in the mail flow logs. I deal with a lot of small businesses and more than once I’ve seen bad spam filtering or silent drops cost people money (upset cust…

There is a reason - DigitalOcean. A more appropriate name would be DigitalCesspool. They allow anything, so long as you pay them. I'd block email from their networks, but there are already plenty of ways that spam servers on their networks screw up (bad EHLO name, broken reverse DNS, SPF for all IP addresses), so that email is not accepted anyway.

Microsoft sucks for rejecting email without recourse, but you're on DigitalOcean, so can you really blame them?

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#214

Post by massung »

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.

Scott, nice service! Two notes:

1. I don't know if it's the social media kiss of death at work, but I'm getting lots of SSL errors trying to load your site. It's a crap-shoot whether it works or not right now.

2. Seeing this post, I posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27711124. If you don't already (did I miss it?) it might be worth tossing up a page or an item in your FAQ teaching people about how they can go about migrating their email address to another/your service. I don't know how easy/hard it is (hence my AskHN post), but the perception is that it's nigh impossible to do.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#215

Post by baggachipz »

I've been using this service for the past year or so and it's perfect for my needs:

- Just works

- Minimal downtime

- All features of email supported

- No frills

- Fast support response

- Dirt-ass cheap. I use "advanced billing" and last month's fees were $0.58.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#216

Post by wolrah »

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…

> 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.

In my personal experience, over five years of running my own business and personal email entirely and another decade and counting since of running PBXes that directly send voicemail messages, Gmail has only explicitly blocked me once, and that was 100% legitimate because the site the PBX was located at had an infected PC. It occasionally will filter messages to the spam folder, but that almost always means one of the users actually flagged a message.

I could send an email to myself from a bogus address via raw SMTP over Telnet to port 25 and I'd be willing to bet my week's pay that Gmail delivers it. They might mark it as spam, but they deliver reliably.

Microsoft on the other hand is a massive pain in my ass. They usually work, but about 4-5 times a year they seem to randomly pick one of my systems to treat as suspicious and block emails from. The process listed in their block message always works, but it's annoying to have to deal with regularly, especially with no rhyme or reason.

Yahoo is the worst, they straight up block everything I do with no recourse. I have one user who insists on using his Yahoo email and I basically had to tell him we don't care that Yahoo won't accept messages.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#218

Post by indigodaddy »

bigshell wrote: post #159
Gaelan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS us-east-1, it looks like: $ dig mx purelymail.com ;; ANSWER SECTION: purelymail.com. 86400 IN MX 50 mailserver.purelymail.com. $ dig mailserver.purelymail.com ;; ANSWER SECTION: mailserver.purelymail.com. 60 IN A 18.204.123.63 $ whois 18.204.123.63 OrgName: Amazon Technologies Inc. https://awsips.co for the region information

For some stupid reason I can't bare to see that done in 3 lines. whois $(dig +short A $(dig +short MX purelymail.com | head -n 1) | head -n 1)

I stopped using -n X for head/tail in favor of just -X (eg -1 or -10 or whatever). Save a few keystrokes, plus certain unixes (eg Solaris) only work with -X and don’t the support -n switch.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#219

Post by indigodaddy »

Lex-2008 wrote: post #197
zubspace wrote: post #91

Looks good. Fair pricing. I hope it works out for them. I started out with self-hosting mail-in-a-box [1]. If you really want to self-host, I can highly recommend it. Would be the cheapest option. At some point I decided to let go of it, because maintenance and configuration can still be a bit cumbersome. There was one thing (DMARC or DNSSEC?) which I never was able to set up properly for some unknown reason, even af…

> Also, be aware that free 3rd-party mail hosting with a custom domain does not exist. I believe two of them still exist in Russia. * Yandex even has a page in English: https://360.yandex.com/business/tariff * Mail.Ru has a page only in Russian: https://biz.mail.ru/mail/#tariffs

I’ve been using Yandex for probably the last 6-7 years. Never had any issues or problems with them.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#220

Post by newscracker »

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.

I looked at your About, Security and Privacy pages. I see that you're using AWS, but which region/country/jurisdiction is that located in? Is it safe to presume that since the company is an LLC, the company as well as the AWS country are the U.S.?
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