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Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

purelymail.com

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Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#91

Post by zubspace »

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 after long hours tinkering around with it...

So I started to look at other mail hosting offerings with custom domain. One thing I like is that gandi offers free mail hosting for a domain you order through them. [2] That's quite unique for a domain registrar.

Also, be aware that free 3rd-party mail hosting with a custom domain does not exist. I started out with the free plan at migadu, but they switched to a paid plan soon after. [3]

The same happened to postale.io after a while. [4] At least I could keep my free plan there.

Zoho is free [5], but their custom mail application and the countless other services they try to sell you completely put me off.

[1] https://mailinabox.email/

[2] https://www.gandi.net/en/domain/email

[3] https://www.migadu.com/pricing/#what-happened-to-the-free-pl...

[4] https://postale.io/faq#What%20happened%20to%20the%20free%20p...?

[5] https://www.zoho.com/mail/

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#92

Post by zephyr9 »

fastball wrote: post #60
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.

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

If you don't mind separating your mail from your CalDAV there is https://fruux.com

(I use a paper diary, YMMV.)

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#93

Post by Felz »

maxk42 wrote: post #82
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.

Hey Scott - tell me how you got the word out about Purelymail? Obviously you reached the right audience and they liked what they saw to post it here and generate so much interest. Consider me another subscriber!

Sum total of my marketing efforts: One time I mentioned it in HN comments on a post about Fastmail, mostly because I was going to make a comment about owning your own email domain anyway.

I am usually the classic "engineer who neglects marketing" archetype. Maybe at some point I'll overcome that.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#95

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

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.

One thing is not very clear: how many custom domains can I have? Can I use 30 domains with 2 users each (random number, but i do need 3 domains).

How is the mailbox on phone? My major problem with email hosting is the lack of a decent mailbox service that's available on. Windows, android, linux that's either. One-time-purchase or open source. A monthly fee is fine if for unlimited users (I have a family)

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#96

Post by Felz »

avipars wrote: post #90
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.

How do you deal with spoofing?

Depends on what you mean. Inbound email is checked for authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc) as part of the spam filter. For outbound email, we ask you to set up at least one of SPF or DKIM before you can send.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#97

Post by Felz »

stanislavb wrote: post #57
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.

Good job, Scott! This is Stan from SaaSHub. I'll be featuring Purelymail on next week's newsletter of SaaSHub. It's a good moment to verify the listing and improve the details.

Cool! I'll make a note of it on my task list (I think I still have the old task on there too, which is nothing against SaaShub, I was preoccupied).

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#98

Post by Felz »

brongondwana wrote: post #76
Felz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general yes I do contribute to open source, although there's not too much to contribute back to open source _yet_, so the main contribution has just filing Roundcube bugs. (The main mailserver code has diverged too much from Apache James to really be useful.) Some of the libraries I wrote are open sourced and on my Github account, e.g. the web framework: https://github.com/ScottPeterJohnson/shade

Hey cool - glad to see James being used as well. Hopefully the JMAP support that Linagora have worked on will mean that you can bring JMAP eventually too. I hope you don't find the pain of diverging from the mainline to be too great. We kind of cheated there with Fastmail and Cyrus IMAP by merging all our changes back to the mainline, since there wasn't much other development happening.

Yea, I do plan on adding in JMAP. It's so much nicer than IMAP, I really do hope it can overcome the adoption hump.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#99

Post by arp242 »

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…

> 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.

I had this issue with SendGrid years ago: long story short, after discussing with support and eventually an engineer it turns out they weren't just looking at the status codes, but at the status messages. I don't recall the exact patterns they used, but they will retry if the message matches a fixed set patterns, and otherwise it would just discard it.

There was some back-and-forth over this, because our customer just had greylisting with the "wrong" error message. To be fair, they did turn it off for a few hours and took the conversation serious (none of this "we have passed it along", never to be heard from again) but they got back to us they turned it back on again "because the queues got too large". I mean .... okay.... Seems rather curious to break a fundamental aspect of email because "muh queues". Not having to worry about this sort of stuff is exactly why we're using SendGrid in the first place :-/

My experiences with MailGun were also not exactly stellar. At the time at least, these people literally did not understand how encodings worked and would mangle e.g. Greek or Hebrew emails in ISO-8869-7 or -8. Why? Well, turns out that "emails should be in ASCII or UTF-8 and there is no way for us to know which encoding is used". Ehh ... there is literally a header telling you... I sent a nice detailed email explaining this: no reply. Some follow-ups over the course of a few weeks: no reply. A not-so-nice snarky email inquiring whether the entire MailGun team was suffering from a horrible debilitating disease and if there was anything I could do to help: "well, we just didn't know what else to do as there is no way to solve this"...

I'm hardly an "email purist"; I understand there are practical concerns and the RFC isn't a stone tablet from the mountain. But this was just ridiculous. There are a bunch of other cases both SendGrid and MailGun are actually quite bad at.

Dealing with email providers is always a frustrating experience.

Re: Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email

#100

Post by npteljes »

toastal wrote: post #27

I recently switched to Posteo from a few years with ProtonMail. Reading from Purelymail's docs and with price being within $3 annually of one another (Posteo is €12 annually) Posteo pros: comes with calendar and contacts via WebDAV, not registered in the US (Germany is part of 14 Eyes, but not 5 or 9, and the EU is better about privacy), cash payment option Purelymail pros: more storage @ $10, custom domain support,…

Posteo also runs on FOSS and is being endorsed by the FSF - if that matters. They also do 2FA, via TOTP (which many apps support). They offer a migration tool that downloads email from your other accounts.
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