I self host pretty much everything, but one of the services I find makes more sense to not self host is an email server.
I’ve got a few domains I’d like to have emails for, and usually I’d go for Tutanota or protonmail. But in this instance I’m looking for something dirt cheap. These domains are for a hobby club so I’m much less concerned with privacy like I usually would be. Anybody got any recommendations?
So far namecheap seems like my best option for under $8/month. They would bundle with my domain registration and I’m assuming having both on the same service would make things pretty seamless to set up.
Not crazy concerned with privacy for these particular accounts. Namecheap or similar is reputable enough.
Migadu micro tier is $19/year. Great service and has a great privacy policy. Basically unlimited domains. Ive been very happy with them.
Migadu is so great. I really want to see more services like that, with so much focus on just being honest and good.
Our admin panel won’t win any beauty contests and that’s a good thing. It’s built to be obvious and efficient.
I’m in love.
I ended up going with migadu. Seems great so far. Already up and running with 3 domains and dozens of aliases.
Have a look at “pattern rewrites” too if you use lots of aliases. It’s sort of like catch-all aliases with wildcards.
https://mxroute.com/ currently offers “lifetime” with 10GB combined storage, unlimited mailboxes, unlimited domains, for $129. I bought it a year or so back, no complaints.
Damn, nice idea to spare 10GB for investment. With how cheap storage is, I think that model is indeed a win win. I mean, how often do you receive 100MB+ attachment?
That was my thought process when I got it, and it was only $99 when I purchased. As long as the host (one man show unfortunately) remains, I’ve got a reliable email system in place. And he does an amazing job of keeping off spam lists.
I also have a ton of domains that I wanted to be able to receive email on. In my case, I was the only recipient so I just needed a provider that let me setup aliases.
Fastmail is pretty affordable. All plans except the business basic plan allow you to setup 100 custom domains which you can the forward to your mailbox.
Their mail app is pretty solid. I particularly like that it lets you receive notifications for email that’s been moved to another folder. Which I’ve had troubles with on other emails apps. I also really like that I can use a custom domain for random masked emails.
That’s my setup. I like selfhosting, but leave email to other services. I got tired of being on blacklists.
That said, namecheap email servers are still on blacklists. I’ve locked horns with tech support a couple times because legit email gets dropped. Unless you pay for a vps or something more expensive, you’re thrown in with the spam and scum class.
It works for the most part for my needs.
I emailed Microsoft to get my domain removed from their blacklist and it worked within 48 hours. Aslong as my domain has it’s correct security settings I no longer go to spam. Gmail didn’t seem to care as much.
Zoho mail has a domain hosting platform for email. About £60 pa in dollars for my setup. Pricing varies on the number of accounts not the number if domains. I have two accounts, personal and business, and a control admin account. The domains I host vary according to the businesses I run. I funnel each domains email to one of the two accounts and reply with the appropriate domain easily. Personal email is masked with Addy.io mostly.
They deal with the email very well. There was a time that they really didn’t and the system went up and down like a tarts knickers.
The front end is ok. They play with it a lot and there are many screens pushing some shit or other before you actually are allowed to get to the inbox. The inbox setup is excellent with all the expected functionality and toys and many toys appearing monthly.
Typical of Indian continent companies, as a Brit who has spent much of his life frustrated on the phone to “Dave” from Mumbai with a really really thick accent, Zoho don’t really seem to understand concepts properly, so their passkeys setup doesn’t work with Bitwarden. TOTP 2FA cannot be just pasted in (from Bitwarden again) because they’ve tried to be flash with the input field and one has to click on a specific place first. The support team try really hard, but their ability to grasp the problem and fix it is lacking before some other buzzword catches marketing’s attention and they add yet another screen to click through or subvert the problem somewhere else. Their help knowledge base is enormous, well documented but unorganized and they don’t archive stuff that has been superceded, so be careful.
That said I’ve been using them for well over a decade and have no plans to change.
Running your own mail server ceased to be a hobby thing when RBLs came in. Use a provider with the resources to do the hard/cumbersome stuff.
I’d give Zoho mail an easy 7/10. And it’s cheap. Zoho invoice is great too.
Was about to suggest Zoho myself. I have a couple of personal domain email hosted there and they’ve been very reliable until now
Been trying out Zoho for my martial arts club and it works great. Want to convince my partner to move our home business away from office 365 to it as I have no end of trouble with Microsoft’s offering. Just this week she couldn’t access our main inbox because of a known issue with shared mailboxes. No solution but to wait it out. Great feeling to rely on something like this for your income…
I hosted my email on a home Exchange server last century before finally settling on Zoho so can sympathise!
I should also say that my setup is backed with Google cloud DNS.
I can’t honestly say that I’ve had any problems with Zoho collecting/sending email for years. It’s the general admin side that causes consternation - adding a domain, forwarding, lists, where the f I set up an email address!
Hosting domain email for other customers is really easy too should the need arise.
The free version should be more than enough. I’ve been using them with my family domain for 2 years, and I no regrets, and no payments 😍
Zoho will give you 5 email addresses (users) for free with your own domain. You won’t be able to use IMAP or POP3, but it’s well worth it at 0.00
Have you looked into Purely mail? This is what I use for my custom email needs. I don’t remember all the pros and cons, but the big one that scares most people off is it’s run by one guy. So if something happens to him, you’re potentially SOL. You could probably migrate to a new service, but could potentially be a huge pain.
Would be a pain, but you can’t beat the cost. For sending out email where you don’t care about retaining, it works VERY well.
If need unlimited cheap accounts: MXroute. Sometimes he does lifetime promos. For webmail he has a custom version of roundcube with some paid plugins that have a Gmail like skin or another paid webmail like crossover. He used to offer afterlogic webmail but then stopped “because nobody’s using that and it’s hard to set for alias domains”. Pity because I liked the aesthetic. Can set forwarding from unlimited aliases to Gmail but this is monitored. If you receive (and forward) too much spam or use it to send thousands of useless activity notifications, he’s going to block or throttle that because he wants to keep his sender reputation high. For example he doesn’t forward any email from Facebook or Wordfence notifications
If need a single inbox: Zoho mail. Can set a catch all on unlimited alias domains that goes in the same inbox. And if a specific address needs to be blocked, for example you signed up to temu using temu@example.com and then they’re bombarding you with endless spam and ignoring your stop requests, you can set to reject all emails directed to that temu@ account. Emails can be forwarded but only if you set a custom filter in the web mail, it’s a bit limited
I am paying for both, monthly for Zoho and a lifetime for mxroute (lifetime = mxroute it’s a single man operation, so it’s not my lifetime rather… *KNOCKS WOOD*)
https://mxroute.com/ or https://www.fastmail.com/
I picked up a cheap lifetime account on mxroute a while back and have been pretty happy with it.
PurelyMail is popping too
One of these days I’ll get around to setting up my own email server, but in the meantime I just take advantage of introductory offers on shared hosting plans. I purchase the 3-year plans and end up paying about $3-4/mo (CAD). When the plan is nearing expiry, I take my data and move on to the next web host. Been doing this for about 28 years now.
mailbox.org is 3€/month or 30€/year if you bring your own domain.
Migadu has been amazing. It “”just works,”and there’s no reason to deal with any of the crap that comes with hosting email.
They are affordable, and provide exactly what they claim to provide.
Email is not - IMHO - worth the trouble to self host. There are too many hard stops where email is required as login, etc to bother.
I enjoy hosting and using a variety of services. But I’ve no desire to bother with something I can ship out to folks who live and breathe that particular service.
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Is it transactional emails, one-to-many, or like a message board where people get email notifications? I’m not sure I’ll have a good answer but I suspect that context would change some answers.
Forwarded mail but it may be two way in the future so it would probably be smart to just go that route from the beninging.
