Ask HN: Migadu? Postale? Mxroute? Or any other mail services using this model?

  >I guess they don't scan your email automatically but when someone brings to their attention that you're using the service for "unacceptable things" 

Maybe they don't. But, as I said in another comment, I'd prefer not to depend on what I think they mean, when they might actually mean something else.

Besides, as I said in the original post who decides what is 'socially acceptable'? It's not too long ago that being gay or trans might have been construed as 'socially unacceptable'.

Who decides what's 'Nazi'? Vlad the Mad seems to think he's liberating Ukraine from Nazis. The west seems to think he's the goose-stepper. A sizeable number of commenters on HN have been accused of being Nazis, coz they disagreed with someone else.

Who decides what's immoral? That's probably the vaguest one of the lot. Morality is an individual thing. I'm sure there are things I'd consider immoral that you wouldn't and vice versa.

Nope. I don't care what the mechanics of the censuring process are. But I know I don't want to trust my correspondence to a company which sets itself up as an arbitrator of social acceptability and morality.

Imagine if your snail mail postman opened your letters and refused to deliver any he didn't approve of.

My name has an accented character in it. It also begins with a lower case letter. Zoho's sign up form force-capitalised the name and also told me to 'only use letters and underscores' when I entered my name. I should make clear this was when trying to fill in my real name on the sign-up form, not the email username [I know they can't have accented chars]

Similarly with Runbox. It allowed me to enter my name properly when signing up. But in the name part of the 'from' field of the test emails I sent, it replaced the accented character with a � as in my email 'from' line rendered as F�rstname Lastname ---like something from the 1980s!

I've used migadu and worked really well. I also have some domains using lunanode - great deal if you have other vps with them but have subjectively experienced more downtime.

Migadu just added master password support so can now dsync easily with another dovecot server (ie backups, move, etc). My next config will probably be migadu + selfhosted vps.

I'd advise against MXRoute: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225685

Maybe you will have a better time than I, but MXRoute is more opinionated than I'd like my mail provider to be. If you are ruling out Migadu, you might rule out MXRoute on the same grounds.

I've used Migadu for several years after switching from Google Apps. Technologically, I've been pretty satisfied. I have a lot of custom domains that I may want to use different users/mailboxes on and Migadu's pricing model makes that pretty easy.

In 2020, there was some turmoil with Migadu where they nearly (or completely) doubled their prices and didn't communicate it well. I was paying 45/yr then abruptly started paying 90/yr on the same/equivalent plan. They also took away a couple of features purported to be the cause behind some performance issues they had. During that time, their service was strained. Many users, me included, didn't realize there was an issue until no e-mail was received for days. Support just said "sorry" and that there was a post about it on their website. I think this situation soured a lot of users. You can read about it, including some of Migadu's response, if you search this site, reddit, and lowendtalk.

I agree with you that their speech codes in the TOS are sketchy, ambiguous, and trite. I'm not sending or receiving any e-mail like that, but I don't trust contemporary definitions for those topics. I've been considering another provider when my subscription is due for renewal because of the price change.