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Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

purelymail.com

191–200 of 316 posts

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#191
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 into the developer console, find out what's running etc.

Just completed my signup. I am going to check if the domain that failed to work with forwardemail.net[1] will work with your service.

If it does, then I'll say goodbye to my $36 and hello to your service.

Update: While setting up, I noticed:

- Ownership record content in `code.codebox` does not fit in the content area and extends entirely too far to the right. I had to inspect and copy out of developer tools.

- In general, UI elements seem not properly aligned, contained.

These are not deal breakers to me. The site might actually benefit from going more old school. Trying to fit everything in a narrow box with large font sizes and padding is hard.

Update: I had already clicked on CloudFlare instructions. It's the friendly stuff that has the problems I mention above. The actual information at the bottom of the page is actually displayed the way I would have expected.

Update: After creating the DNS records, I noticed the checks were still failing. So, I replaced the actual IDN in the textbox with punycode and the DNS checks worked. It would be a better user experience if the punycode conversion step was handled by the UI.

Update: Created a new user on the custom domain. Login box does not accept IDN either but the email composer does show the from address using IDN instead of punycode.

Update: I was able to exchange email with a Gmail user. Did not go to SPAM. But, in my reply, Gmail did give a scary warning about the IDN. To be clear, there is nothing the email provider can do about that :-)

I'll try out a few more custom domains and very, very likely switch. Thank you and good luck.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27523038

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#192
post #156

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…

It's not that weird.

Mail is the only critical thing most people run for themselves, really; and if the proverbial excrement hits the fan, mail is useful in fixing the fallout.

Sure, I would be able to acquire the skills to run a mail server, and I know how to monitor it all, and I know about what the moving parts are. But why go through all that hassle to save 10-40 dollars a year?

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#193

> 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…

> 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 own mail server without issues.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The holy grail for me would be an email service that lets me set up catch-all, with the ability to send/reply with any address I want. I have this with fastmail. *@my.tld all gets shoved in my inbox and I can send from whatever@my.tld.

Do you need to set up each *@my.tld address manually, or can you just seamlessly reply to emails send to neverusedbefore@my.tld?

The latter, which often makes for an interesting conversation at medical offices and shops when I jot down their-business-name@mydomain.com. The FastMail mobile client makes replying to those emails without “breaking character” easy.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#195
This might be just what I need. I used to run my own email server but don’t have time for that anymore. I run small sites with low budgets and finding a simple email server that costs next to nothing has been pretty hard, specially if I have more than one user. I use AWS SES free tier for sending emails from these sites but unfortunately forwarding email received at SES is not as straight forward.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think Microsoft blocking you is bad? They ACCEPT mail and drop it afterwards.

Pretty close! They accept the mail returning a "250 OK"ish code, but they delay it for days (or even months) not respecting the SMTP protocol. I actually recevied the emails on Outlook after many many days I have sent them :/ Gmail seems good, I never had issues with Gmail.

No, not close, it's exactly what they do.

Delays are fine by the protocol, it's not a violation, it's not IM.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#197

Looks good. Fair pricing. I hope it works out for them. I started out with self-hosting mail-in-a-box [1]. If you really want to self-host, I can highly recommend it. Would be the cheapest option. At some point I decided to let go of it, because maintenance and configuration can still be a bit cumbersome. There was one thing (DMARC or DNSSEC?) which I never was able to set up properly for some unknown reason, even af…

> Also, be aware that free 3rd-party mail hosting with a custom domain does not exist.

I believe two of them still exist in Russia.

* Yandex even has a page in English: https://360.yandex.com/business/tariff

* Mail.Ru has a page only in Russian: https://biz.mail.ru/mail/#tariffs

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#198
post #134
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.

Slightly OT, but what is the best practice to store (archive) email locally after they have been read from a remote imap server? 3 Gb is plenty for a few months of "live" email but after that what should we do to keep those emails -- and still have them searchable if need be?

Are there any open-source projects similar to Barracuda’s Archiver product?

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you need to set up each *@my.tld address manually, or can you just seamlessly reply to emails send to neverusedbefore@my.tld?

The latter, which often makes for an interesting conversation at medical offices and shops when I jot down their-business-name@mydomain.com. The FastMail mobile client makes replying to those emails without “breaking character” easy.

[deleted]

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#200

> 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…

> Occasionally, obscure email servers will block emails sent through us The worst offender is Microsoft and their email services (hotmail.com/live.com/outlook.com/etc.). They reject all emails from my server, because it's on DigitalOcean. They are ignoring all requests to unblock my IP address. They don't mark it as spam, they just outright block emails, so you can't even workaround it by checking the spam folder.

I have the same problem, but they fixed it. I opened a issue and a kindly guy did some checks and then removed the ban.
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