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Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

purelymail.com

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Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#261

Post by kureikain »

wolrah wrote: post #216
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 m…

I can totally echo this(running my email forwarding service [0]) so I deal with it at high email volume too.

Outlook/Hotmail is kind of stupid in this sense: if the first time, a new domain send an email they are very likely to flagged as spam. But if the user simply reply or send to that email, the moving forward hotmail won't flagged it. In other word, hotmail rely stringly

- is this domain new? - is this ip address start to send email new? - if I interact with this sender in the past

Seems thing with icloud and their proofpoint spam filtering.

gmail in other hand, has the best delivery rate, clear error message, great rate limiting and cool down period.

gmail is very smart, if we accidently send spam(due to our failure to filter out spam), gmail won't blocklist the whole IP, but hotmail/icloud does.

And the process to delist from them homail/icloud are just absurb. I'm unable to contact their team.

---

[0] https://hanami.run

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#262

Post by kureikain »

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…

This isn't actually Gandi fault.

The amount of spam come from .xyz .top .cam etc are too hight and sysadmin usually factor domain tld into spam scoring.

so using a .com may increase your chance hitting inbox actually.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#263

Post by generalizations »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #257
Brian_K_White wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

IMAP synchronizes with the server, but keeps a local copy. Compare to POP, which moves the mail off the server entirely.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#265

Post by oarsinsync »

berkes wrote: post #259
creeble wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, do…

I share your confidence that lots of providers blanket drop mail from IP ranges owned by cheap VPS providers.

The cost of swtiching IPs within those providers is low, so spammers have already abused that, and made life worse for the rest of us as a result.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#266

Post by cyborgx7 »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #253

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.

>Charge more and address these drawbacks, or get out of the business.

Why? It seems like this is meeting plenty of people's needs just fine. Not everything has to meet your needs.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#267

Post by oarsinsync »

generalizations wrote: post #263
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IMAP synchronizes with the server, but keeps a local copy. Compare to POP, which moves the mail off the server entirely.

> IMAP synchronizes with the server, but keeps a local copy.

The local copy is client dependent. Mail.app on your iPhone will not keep a local copy of all your emails if you have a large number of emails spanning a long period of time. Other clients may vary.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#268

Post by devwastaken »

This looks good for the price. I've been looking for a service I can throw up under my domain simply to receive email under that official domain, but the site doesn't make money so most other services are far too expensive.

Tbh idunno why Cloudflare doesn't just do this. People will use domains under google because it provides domain email.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#269

Post by e12e »

c0l0 wrote: post #56
rolleiflex wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great work, and as somebody who self hosted my own email from 2013 to 2021, I don’t envy you. What broke me down was Google starting to spam my emails that were replies to conversations that I did not start — even with a stellar domain reputation and DKIM, SPF, reverse DNS, greylisting, everything set up right. I hope you have personal contacts on the Gmail team at Google, much as I’d like for this to be a joke.

FTR, directed at those who valiantly continue to self-host mail/SMTP: Greylisting is not sound any more in this day and age, because the largest mail services will rarely, if ever, use the same MTA instance to retry delivery upon a soft bounce. The good news is that if you have postfix, using postscreen with an informed choice of blocklists is enough to deal with 99%+ of inbound spam. You can strap in rspamd or spama…

I haven't used DCC, but it looks like an interesting anti-spam toolkit:

https://www.dcc-servers.net/dcc/

It appears to support "weak" IP matching:

> All or part of the IP address of the SMTP client can be optionally ignored by DCC clients as far as the greylist triple is concerned. This feature may be useful for legitimate mail systems that shuffle messages among SMTP clients between retransmissions. See the dccm and dccd man pages.

https://www.dcc-servers.net/dcc/greylist.shtml

It doesn't quite sound like it does a job of 100% "same email, same sender, different mx in same domain" -but I suspect it works well enough in practice?

> Usually the DCC greylist system requires that an almost identical copy of the message be retransmitted during the embargo. If weak-body is present, any message with the same triple of sender IP address, sender mail address, and target mail address ends the em-bargo, even if the body of the message differs.

> If weak-IP is present, all mail from an SMTP client at an IP address is accept after any message from the same IP address has been ac-cepted.

https://www.dcc-servers.net/dcc/dcc-tree/dccd.html#OPTION-G

I can't recall what I used for greylisting last -possibly greylistd.

Anyway, the smart play these days might be to whitelist/greylist via SPF - I'm not sure if spammers (of the variant caught by greylists) generally have SPF?

See: https://poolp.org/posts/2019-12-01/spf-aware-greylisting-and...

https://github.com/poolpOrg/filter-greylist

Ed: although if service providers like mailgun simply ignore rfc and only "sometimes" retries... wwell that's a problem.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#270

Post by 725686 »

nanis wrote: post #191
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.

When signing up for a trial, the page says: > To activate a trial account, you will need a reasonably modern browser and a phone number that can receive SMS texts. It makes no mention of the use of a "hashwall" ... It gives no indication of what the user's browser is going to do ... Just a progress meter with a note saying it will take about 3 minutes. This feels fishy. Especially if a user doesn't know how to get in…

I clicked for a trial... after a while I entered my phone, received an SMS, and no indication of what to do with the code I received. No place to enter the code in the web page, nothing.

Second attempt, and I got a place to put the code. Then, while I was filling up the registration data, the page refreshed and started all over.

Third attempt finally worked...

Not the best on-boarding experience, but hey it really is cheap!

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