Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email
> 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 will have constant issues getting mail delivered. Also, most of the issues will not be with obscure email servers, they will be with Outlook and Gmail. When you send email, you will never know if your email will be delivered to inbox, delivered to spam folder, or blackholed entirely.
Related:
> We're not a suitable platform for sending marketing emails (although you should use a dedicated marketing platform anyway).
Please explicitly ban people from using your platform to send "marketing email". Clients like that are going to ruin deliverability for your other clients.
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.
I've been using Purelymail as my sole mail provider for over a year now (previously with Fastmail) and it has been my best email experience.
It's a one-man enterprise, which may frighten some people, but I prefer boutique internet companies to the faceless monoliths. (I'd like more of the internet to be made of these small corner bodegas.)
Thank you for making this service available. For entrepreneurs who like to launch new ideas with custom domains, pricing models like the one here is a HUGE savings over pay-per-account (or domain) pricing found at most major email providers. Further, it's not easy making much money charging just $10/year, even if the business gets quite popular... so again, thanks for making it available.
These tiny services are cool. I have the cheapest account on Migadu[1] for all my random custom domain emails.
Screenshots of the mail UI would be awesome.
On the drawbacks blurb, it mentions potential deliverability issues and says they’re usually resolved in a day or two. Through blog entries by mailchimp, I've read this is an extremely hard problem to solve and like playing whack-a-mole. How true is that? For example, I’ve read that trying to host your own email on digital ocean is pointless, which is understandable because of the amount of spam likely coming out of their subnets. Is this service downplaying the issue?
https://mailbox.org I pay 1 euro per month. With calendar, contacts, file storage and DAV. With aliases and your own domain. Plus it's a well-known company.
I'm not sure price is the parameter to compete on for email services, at least for me. Email is extremely important to most businesses, and if I'm already paying for a domain, and running a business, even the $70 for a Workspace solution is a drop in the bucket. What I need, however, is deliverability, strong privacy and security, good spam filtering, and support when I need it.
I'd encourage you to try doubling or tripling the price so you can afford to hire more people and grow the business :) I suspect the rate of signups will stay the same.
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.
[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...?
> We're not trying to bamboozle you with glossy images, or sell you a lofty ideal.
I appreciate the dig at psuedo-righteous slogan-eering like "Don't be evil.", "Bring the worked closer together". Just fucking email.
When using subaddressing (e.g. example+tag@purelymail.com), can I also send from that address?
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.
From the LLC I'm assuming this is based in the US. I'm not hosting my e-mail with a company based in the US. Other than that, I love everything about this.
> Support for custom domains at no additional charge. You may have as many users on as many custom domains as you like. Custom routing rules are supported, including catchalls to capture any email sent to your domain.
This is huge. This is one of those features that just gets omitted by many email hosts (especially inexpensive ones) and has been holding me back from switching away from a very old, grandfathered, free Google Apps for Business plan.
I would love to have more options in this space but email is to foundational to leave to a beta service that doesn't have 24/7 support, may have black-hole delivery issues and doesnt' have a calendar solution. Charge more and address these drawbacks, or get out of the business. You're offerring 1/2 the required features instead of focusing on the core requirements.
This looks great! Sign up for the free trial was pretty slick. I'm not sure how well known Klarna is outside of Europe (I know they launched in the US), but that would be my preferred method of payment. Or.. anything but Paypal (and giving my CC information)
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, security key 2FA (though unclear according to docs if this is WebAuthn/FIDO2 or Yubikey vendor lock-in)
Neither: cryptocurrency payment option
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 much of a hassle, every few months you have to update the install script and thats it
I've been using this service for the past year or so and it's perfect for my needs:
- Just works
- Minimal downtime
- All features of email supported
- No frills
- Fast support response
- Dirt-ass cheap. I use "advanced billing" and last month's fees were $0.58.
I consider the usage of Roundcube for the UI a downside. I've tried Roundcube myself and was not really satisfied. It is difficult for to describe what exactly is wrong with the UI but somehow the usability is not really good. Outlook (web), GMail, or Yahoo Mail all feel better to me.
What I'd really miss would the integration of an external adress book (Google), because I wouldn't want to duplicate all my addresses.
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.
I tried Purelymail and though I trust the service, Runbox's web interface left much to be desired. I also have mail went to spam with Fastmail that makes me paranoid and always BCC my gmail account for every important email.
One thing that I don't like with Microsoft and Google's mail service is the need to create new account to have a custom domain mail.
This looks good for the price. I've been looking for a service I can throw up under my domain simply to receive email under that official domain, but the site doesn't make money so most other services are far too expensive.
Tbh idunno why Cloudflare doesn't just do this. People will use domains under google because it provides domain email.
The price is right, but the polish isn't.
FYI: your pricing calculator is incorrect. If you choose more than 1 year, it multiplies the "price per year".
I am using migadu after recommendation from drew devault. It's nice if you have a couple domains you want mail for.
"We host our servers through Amazon Web Services"
As long as you outsource the hosting to another company -- an American company in particular -- then you're not really in the business of secure e-mail.
Secure from other users? Sure. Secure from the hosting company and the government it answers to? Never.
Some other possibilities which offer more features and are cheaper: https://blog.m5e.de/post/comparison-of-email-hosting-possibi...
I like the idea but you should consider offering something more than just the Roundcube. If I pay for an email service I expect a better webmail and Android/iOS apps. MXroute offers all of this and I don't see a reason why I should migrate. Best of luck anyway!
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Whether we wish to switch or not (I'd be inclined to consider it but I am quite happy with Fastmail and am not super worried about a saving a few bucks a month):
Is there a generic solution for moving over IMAP inboxes from one provider to another?
$10/year is not bad but I already have more email addresses than necessary.
This seems great, would be pretty popular through a tor service I imagine.
I have a question: if this is hosted on AWS, what (and I'm sure there's something, I just don't know what) is stopping Amazon from accessing my mail and using it for whatever?
Well Well, I've just gone through the setup with fastmail and currently trialing their platform, for a new domain of mine, otherwise if I know this earlier, I should have tried it first...
I have used purelymail for about a year, moved almost all of my correspondance to it (custom domain) and am very happy with it. Good and speedy support when needed. I recommend it.
My first thought was that this was a great advertisement for Zoho
Speaking personally, it's not worth the hastle to save a little bit of money per year. I'll stick with Fastmail as it never gets in the way and always works.
Founder could add "officer" to his titles. Much like USA school admins inflate their egos ... Chief Learning Officer.
As far as the service goes, grow and grow fast.
Where is this hosted?
Spam filtering is by SpamAssassin. How is it these days?
I guess purelymail is used for contact@purelymail.com itself. But I see only one my record, does this service has mx backup servers for the customers?
The left out porkbun's mail service for $24.00/year, still more expensive than their solution but not much.
I was very interested until I learnt that you use AWS to host your services. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple etc. are parasitic tech companies that try their best to access and mine our personal data. Privacy conscious techie individuals try their best to avoid the services of these companies. Please consider hosting your email elsewhere.
Isn't Google free? Perhaps with certain limitations... I know I never paid for email.
this is great, services that actually does what they where supposed to at a low cost instead of ad spamming/tracking/spying on me for additional cash i wish you luck my friend!
You are charging additional for shorter email addresses? Why?
well he lists there also Zoho for 12USD, so what exactly is benefit over Zoho which offers 5GB for 10.8EUR and 10GB for 13.5EUR?
This looks like a good deal. We could use this at https://fabform.io our web forms "google forms alternative" platform.
purelymail is based
Switching emails every N years would really piss off my cutomers. I need one email for as long as the company exists, you see.