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.)
Fastmail isn't entirely faceless either :p But we're definitely not still the 3-man show that we were before the Opera years (up until 2010). Obviously, I think Fastmail is worth the extra for the multi-copy redundancy & backups, new features, contributions we're making to the standards world, and not being dependent on a single person - the past few years in particular we've been focusing on not only being able to s…
Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
231–240 of 316 posts
Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
#232Earlier 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.
I have the same problem, but they fixed it. I opened a issue and a kindly guy did some checks and then removed the ban.
Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
#233I have a question: if this is hosted on AWS, what (and I'm sure there's something, I just don't know what ) is stopping Amazon from accessing my mail and using it for whatever?
Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
#234> 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 deliver…
Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
#235> 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…
Biggest mistake of my life.
Just as you say, I have no idea if my emails get through. The number of times I’ve had people tell me they found my email in a spam folder or just not at all is unacceptable. And you’re right, this is most prominent on outlook and gmail users but not exclusive to them.
How would you like your accountant or lawyer to miss your emails? It happens to me all the time now. These are not emails with cat pics.
I’m scared to move back, fearing an IMAP migration will cause me to lose a year of emails sent and received.
I don’t know what to do.
Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 Di…
IMHO there’s never a reason for Microsoft or Google to drop mail silently if it’s deliverable. Let me decide if I want to do that, but don’t force it on me.
Google is awful too. Accounts locked for “suspicious activity” stop accepting incoming mail. I’ve seen people lose a day of email over a weekend before noticing ta false positive account lock.
What it really comes down to for me is that I don’t think either of them could act that negligently in a fairer market with better competition.
Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
#237This is huge. This is one of those features that just gets omitted by many email hosts (especially inexpensive ones) and has been holding me back from switching away from a very old, grandfathered, free Google Apps for Business plan.
Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
#238> 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 deliver…
There are other factors like IP reputation of the email server sending the email. And if you’re using a hosted service, there’s no way to control those IP addresses.
Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
/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
#240This looks great! Sign up for the free trial was pretty slick. I'm not sure how well known Klarna is outside of Europe (I know they launched in the US), but that would be my preferred method of payment. Or.. anything but Paypal (and giving my CC information)