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Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

purelymail.com

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Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#221

> 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.

It's bad enough that Google Drive/Docs notifications are treated as "external senders" so you have to open up your internal Google Groups to the world; then Google Groups flags them as spam anyway!

I'm guessing spammers may use Google Docs comments as a platform, but have never seen actual unsolicited Docs comments.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#222

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…

Fastmail is not for me because

a) it's expensive for multiple mailboxes (like even three or four mailboxes) and

b) it's right in the Five Eyes jurisdictions (which I try to avoid as much as I can)

but I do appreciate

a) Fastmail's work on JMAP and can't wait for it to become more widely deployed and

b) frank and straightforward responses (including for example in the threads on the Assistance and Access Bill in Australia)

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#223
post #216

> 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 m…

Do you/did you have feedback loop accounts setup for all of them? Yahoo, for example, sends a notification to sys@ (or whatever email you tell them to) when someone marks one of our emails as spam or when it thinks we're sending bulk email. They also have sender support. They did want me to set up something where we used the same connection to send email to them. I forgot

My "blacklisted" email company is Zoho because they consistently greylisted and blocked our correspondence with clients and have no one to contact to resolve email issues for senders.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#224
post #216

> 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 m…

Hi Wolrah

I'm starting a new company where email connection to my user base is essential. From time to time I also need to sen all users certain notifications which looks kinda like marketing email but isn't.

Could you contact me as I would like to ask your opinion on the configuration that I'm trying to set up. I would also like to discuss your experiences.

If isn't too much, you can reach me by email at jari@itsellesi.fi.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. And when there's no follow-ups, you just assume your mail has been delivered? I recommend actually measuring your deliverability before making claims about it.

Well either there's a bounce, or some other indicator in the postfix logs (collected by filebeat, with alertings in kibana).

If I'd still be getting blackholed with a "250 delivered" in my logs, then screw it.

I would even argue people hosting their small selfmanaged mail servers helps preventing monopolization, eg. "only allow mail from google".

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#226

https://mailbox.org I pay 1 euro per month. With calendar, contacts, file storage and DAV. With aliases and your own domain. Plus it's a well-known company.

But mailbox.org is also priced per mailbox by default. When I checked with Mailbox.org support a few years ago, there was no way to go beyond 25 aliases on a single mailbox (even when one is willing to pay).

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#227
post #193

> 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…

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

Age may be a factor. I ran email for my domain on my own server for a long time too and generally had no delivery issues.

When I got another domain a few years ago and ran it on the same server it had a lot of delivery issues.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#228

> 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…

> you will have constant issues getting mail delivered.

I run my own obscure mail server and have not had an issue in years, except for ATT[1]. I'm super low volume - I run mail for about 20 humans, a few mailing lists, and some other automation that does things with email.

I do things correctly - I mean, I run nearly the same stack/configuration (scaled way down) as I do professionally for my employer, which delivers 8 digits of messages a day all over.

But that doesn't explain why I don't have problems and others do - lots of people get this right and still have problems. And I think that comes down to the fact that mine has been on the net since the mid-90s. So, unfortunately, I suspect the answer to a lot of these problems is 'exist for long time' - until your MX is associated with a bias towards "not spam" in everyone's filters.

I can think of ways for existing mail servers to vouch for new ones, but I don't think there's any reason for established ones to want to do that, so it wouldn't work. I'm not sure what the answer is.

[1] And after many, many years of attempting to resolve it, they can bite me. I got annoyed enough that they get a custom bounce from me now on the rare occasions someone tries to spam me through them.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#229

> 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.

My emails from my domains to my Outlook account were going straight to spam.

I tried marking them as not spam, to see if it would learn. A dozen later--no change.

I tried replying to them, to see if it could figure out that if I'm actually regularly corresponding with someone they should not be marked as spam. No change.

I tried whitelisting the domain. No change.

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