I was very interested until I learnt that you use AWS to host your services. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple etc. are parasitic tech companies that try their best to access and mine our personal data. Privacy conscious techie individuals try their best to avoid the services of these companies. Please consider hosting your email elsewhere.
Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
241–250 of 316 posts
Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
#242> 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…
From 23 years of running my own email (and for about a dozen other domains), this is a pretty good summary.
One domain has a small mailing list of about 200 users. The @yahoo.com addresses (and related, Yahoo-handled domains like old @att and @sbcglobal domains) are often just dropped.
Gmail addresses frequently go to spam, especially newly-added domains. I have found that having multiple @gmail users mark them as “not spam” tends to help, but not always.
My email server has had the same IP address for over 18 yrs, fwiw.
Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
#243> 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…
I've been operating my own mail server on the same IP for the last 10 years, so not as long as yours and I also don't have problems. I also disagree with one of the parent comments that you will never know what happens to email: Gmail supports DMARC, and will give you stats and tell you what happens. You can also sign up to various sender services and domain whitelist sites and so on. I've also seen mail providers do fun things like 'permanently defer' email as a means of blocking and this actually notifies you, albeit in a disruptive way, by leaving the email permanently in your outgoing queue.
I do agree however IP reputation matters. If you share an IP with other hosters, or your IP has been recycled from a bad reputation IP, or you have a residential IP or have found your way onto any of the email spam lists recently, or been reported for abuse or marked as spam enough times by freemail service users, you may have trouble getting to 'inbox' and eventually even getting delivered. Reporting systems like DMARC should let you know, however, before it becomes serious.
I don't think running your own email is a high maintenance activity that some suggest (especially for small servers) but it is definitely more effort than outsourcing it to someone else. I'm glad services like this exist, if only to prevent email becoming a Microsoft-Google walled garden.
Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
#244You are charging additional for shorter email addresses? Why?
Note that it's only for shared domain names, not your own (custom) domain. There's a good chance people want and reserve shorter email addresses on shared domains. e.g. subhro @ domain.tld vs subhro7783 @ domain.tld (or in this case @ purelymail.com)
Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
#245Earlier 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)
> bear
Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
#246Founder could add "officer" to his titles. Much like USA school admins inflate their egos ... Chief Learning Officer.
As far as the service goes, grow and grow fast.
Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
#247Speaking personally, it's not worth the hastle to save a little bit of money per year. I'll stick with Fastmail as it never gets in the way and always works.
Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
#248Isn't Google free? Perhaps with certain limitations... I know I never paid for email.
Early editions of Google Apps for Business (aka G Suite aka Google Workspace) included a free version which included support for custom domains and catch-all email. Those accounts got grandfathered (i.e. stayed free) when Google discontinued them. The cheapest plan seems to be $72/year per user.
Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
#249Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing is not very clear: how many custom domains can I have? Can I use 30 domains with 2 users each (random number, but i do need 3 domains). How is the mailbox on phone? My major problem with email hosting is the lack of a decent mailbox service that's available on. Windows, android, linux that's either. One-time-purchase or open source. A monthly fee is fine if for unlimited users (I have a family)
You can have as many domains/users as you want. (Unless it's like five billion and breaks the service or something.) Generally phone access is third party through IMAP. On Android I personally use K-9 mail, but you can use anything that supports IMAP anywhere, which is a pretty good number of options for any platform.
Thanks for the response, suddenly this makes it very interesting!
I wish K-9 had snooze-email, it's the one feature (non-standard) I use a lot