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

Ideally that'd be more the norm, but unfortunately it's significantly more hassle than would be ideal. Uptime is an issue, though most senders should retry through brief outages. Management/security updates of course aren't negligible, though in principle fairly manageable. Probably the big issue is deliverability to the big players like Gmail. They're as bad at support and opaque there as everywhere else, if you don't know someone and/or aren't big enough regardless of what boxes you check you can have email just vanish into the ether which is generally unacceptable.

One solution might be to use a decent commercial SMTP relay service to proxy that part (ie., Amazon SES/Mailgun/Postmark/SendGrid etc). Those tend to be aimed at commercial operations doing high volume but can start low enough to be worth considering. But all in all it's hard to do well despite email being so old and undemanding anything made in decades can run it fine. The foundations just aren't there to cheaply autoscale around abuse. Like, ideally we'd have secure DNS to depend on, that in turn would allow standards for just having a CA root cert for a domain put right into the domain's DNS records, in turn allowing distributed signing/encryption and making spoofing of email addresses non-trivial. No sending of any kind allowed without having it signed by something in the domain CA's trust chain. Remaining abuse after that could managed far more easily, reliably, and perhaps most important deterministically.

No such luck though! Leaving us stuck paying ludicrous amounts and dealing with a lot of crap for a service that an RPi is already has orders of magnitude more power than it should need for :(.

It makes administrating and backing up an email server a breeze. Only real requirement is that you have your own domain name, and know how to generate API keys for a few services (really easy). Helps ensure you have all the important mail settings (SPF, DMARC, etc) set up.

I use BuyVM for the VPS because I can set up one of the mail settings, but you could easily use another provider (Hetzner might be good if you need a lot of space).

Also... you could host Nextcloud and OnlyOffice on the Cloudron box under the free plan as well... which is pretty much like hosting One Drive and Microsoft 365. A little more complexity to manage, but still very easy.

Now one thing to keep in mind... you still have a single point of failure in your domain name provider. It they don't act responsibly, there's not much you can do.

The pricing is hard to beat, but the service is sort of no frills. It's been 100% reliable since I began using it, but the UI, documentation, and process for setting up domains with LetsEncrypt SSL and DKIM/SPF is...unrefined is a good way of putting it. Once you find the appropriate documentation (it exists, it's just not always where you'd first look for it) everything is straightforward.

I pay for 40GB of storage (I think I pay ~$25/40GB, but it's low enough that I literally don't recall), and from there I can host as many domains, email accounts, aliases, and my choice of webmail services incl. Rainloop, Squirrelmail, Roundcube, and MXLogin. Recently they've even added an option for Horde along with a slew of other groupware products such as Nextcloud, OpenOffice, and MatterMost--any/all can be deployed under any of my registered domains with little more than a few clicks. As long as I don't exceed my storage quota, my annual bill is always the same.

It's white label, so I can brand all of the relevant client-facing endpoints and products with logos, color themes, and custom URLs with LetsEncrypt SSL. Things like spam control are nothing to write home about, but my philosophy is to pay someone like MXRoute to handle the actual Dovecot/Postfix/DNS/security and then I can self-host or integrate the other features I want/need like spam control, sieve routing, and proxies. That's everything I can think of to define my experience with MXRoute. Mostly positive, albeit unrefined. I haven't had any cause to seek out their customer service, but I wouldn't expect anything too stellar, just given how their website's account management and documentation is setup, and the relatively little effort I have seen in maintaining communication for things like upcoming invoices. To be fair, I've not had any bad experiences with them, but the reports you mention don't strike me as surprising either.

Bottom line - MXRoute is a solid choice for flexibility and affordability, but only for a specific type of user.

It is suitable for:

- People who are typically self-sufficient, and are looking to strike a middle ground between total DIY/roll-your-own solution and a walled-garden hosted service like Microsoft or Google.

- Someone who is comfortable managing things like domain registrations, DNS, and DKIM/SPF/DMARC records, and who can seek out and parse sometimes spotty documentation without requiring hand-holding from customer support.

- Orgs that need/want the option to resell basic hosted email/groupware services to clients. Just bear in mind, you are the customer support for anyone you are reselling services to.

- Orgs that might need a lot of accounts/addresses, but don't consume excessive amounts of raw storage space for emails.