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Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

purelymail.com

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Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#251

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

vgeek wrote: post #210
layer8 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Gm…

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

This is great! Thank you!. I scored 2.7 out of 10. I'm using NameCheap's Private Email service. What a waste!

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#252

Post by koselig »

chaz6 wrote: post #126
Felz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Basically what nine_k said. It's kind of a trivial point most of the time- honestly might be a bit overpriced right now. 2. Not at the moment- IPV6 support is a little dicier for mailservers because the scarcer IPV4 address is often used as a antispam signal.

But if I am using my own domain, what difference does it make if it is more "valuable"? Sadly the lack of IPv6 is a deal breaker for me.

Oh I think there's some confusion here: for your own domains it doesn't cost anything extra, so go nuts with addresses.

Purelymail also has some domains you can use like I can get "koselig@purelymail.com" and then I'm charged in the 7 letters tier for it.

At least that's how it's been for me as a happy user of PM for the past year and a half.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#253

Post by skeeter2020 »

I would love to have more options in this space but email is to foundational to leave to a beta service that doesn't have 24/7 support, may have black-hole delivery issues and doesnt' have a calendar solution. Charge more and address these drawbacks, or get out of the business. You're offerring 1/2 the required features instead of focusing on the core requirements.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#254

Post by Brian_K_White »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #235
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…

I moved my custom email domain from gmail to NameCheap’s Private Email about a year ago. I wanted to free myself from the possibility that Google might arbitrarily ban me one day, as we’ve seen happen to people for various Google products for no reason and with no appeal. 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 ema…

I think all you really need is to own your domain.

If you manage your domain and point your mx at google, and some ai decides your drive contents look bad or some non-official youtube app violates some api access rule and they kill your whole account, you just point your at any other service provider.

That will be an annoying few days, but you don't lose anything too important. Maybe for a day or so you can't receive password emails, but you will, just after the switch shakes out.

In the mean time, you're enjoying the convenience of a big mail service, and playing the odds that it's probably not going to happen to you, and it's ok to live with that risk because if it happens, it's just an inconvenience not a disaster.

As for losing old emails, I use thunderbird on my laptop, and that ends up getting a copy of all my gmail even though I also read those same emails on my phone. If google kills my account, I still have all my old emails even without my own domain.

I don't know if google even offers domain regisration to individuals, but if they do, I just wouldn't use them for the registrar. All other services can tolerate that risk as long as you use someone else as registrar (namecheap is good).

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#255

Post by pwned1 »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #235
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…

I moved my custom email domain from gmail to NameCheap’s Private Email about a year ago. I wanted to free myself from the possibility that Google might arbitrarily ban me one day, as we’ve seen happen to people for various Google products for no reason and with no appeal. 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 ema…

Don't go with namecheap, the biggest hive of scammers and spammers on the planet. Move your private domain to a reputable provider, like Fastmail.

I've had my main personal domain with them for a decade and never had a problem.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#256

Post by malinens »

Felz wrote: post #71
fastball wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will sign up in a heartbeat as soon as you have CardDAV / CalDAV support!

We do have CardDAV support, and hope to develop CalDAV soon :)

I would recommend using some existing opensource tool for that and not roll your own implementation

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#257

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #254
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved my custom email domain from gmail to NameCheap’s Private Email about a year ago. I wanted to free myself from the possibility that Google might arbitrarily ban me one day, as we’ve seen happen to people for various Google products for no reason and with no appeal. 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 ema…

I think all you really need is to own your domain. If you manage your domain and point your mx at google, and some ai decides your drive contents look bad or some non-official youtube app violates some api access rule and they kill your whole account, you just point your at any other service provider. That will be an annoying few days, but you don't lose anything too important. Maybe for a day or so you can't receive…

Thanks for the reply. I thought IMAP servers keep the messages on the server, not on the client. Is that incorrect?

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#258

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

pwned1 wrote: post #255
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved my custom email domain from gmail to NameCheap’s Private Email about a year ago. I wanted to free myself from the possibility that Google might arbitrarily ban me one day, as we’ve seen happen to people for various Google products for no reason and with no appeal. 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 ema…

Don't go with namecheap, the biggest hive of scammers and spammers on the planet. Move your private domain to a reputable provider, like Fastmail. I've had my main personal domain with them for a decade and never had a problem.

Thanks for the reply. Fastmail is indeed nice (I've used them before but not hosting my own domain). But at this point, I'm not willing to risk moving to another player besides MS or Google.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#259

Post by berkes »

creeble wrote: post #242
wolrah wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 “n…

My emailserver runs at linode. It delivered fine for some 10 years, then I started getting blackholed (at Microsoft live, hotmail, 365, outlook). This IP does only mail. Server is secure, up to date and has all the DKIM/SPF nonsense.

It's impossible to reach humans that can help. It's impossible to unlist. So I'm now on my third IP, my last one running mail for 4+ years, from Digital Ocean. Only now, occasionally, does an email get through.

I'm almost 100% confident that Microsoft just blanket blackholes or punishes anything from Digital Ocean or Linode.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#260

Post by npteljes »

ZWoz wrote: post #156
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…

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…

Email is different from a website, in a way that if the website doesn't load, I can fix it, reload, and go on with the day. After fixing my email stack though, I can't exactly make the sender retry their email. If I miss it, then that's on me, it's a ship that sailed, and often I don't even know about this.
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