Sorry, this has been brought up a number of times obviously, but I figured I’d still give it a shot. I’m not self-hosting email, because it sounds like a huge PITA. I was looking for a decent email provider, but coming up short for now, wonder what people here are using. My requirements:
- support for a custom domain,
- support for hooking up my applications via SMTP (just to send, like, update notifications, nothing spammy),
- (optional, but would be good to have) nice apps for Android/iOS.
Things I’ve tried (all paid subscriptions):
- Fastmail - felt excellent until I tried actually using it and found that 1) my SMTP messages are lost/delayed by a few hours. 2) SMTP-sent messages are not in the Sent folder, which makes things really hard to track. More details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/fastmail/comments/181tnuf/experience_with_fastmail_as_a_new_user/
- Proton Mail - doesn’t have SMTP support, wat.
- Purelymail - feels a bit hackish to me, and I don’t want my wife to input weird IMAP settings on her phone.
Any good recommendations? Thanks a lot!
Why not look into alternate methods of getting alerts? Like Gotify or ntfy?
MXroute
MXroute has just released their Black Friday offer
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/190301/mxroute-black-friday-2023-email-hosting-that-spammers-crave-but-cant-have/+1 for MXRoute. I got their Lifetime Plan and never looked back.
It would be remiss of me to not point out that up until somewhat recently they had a gaping wide security hole (for presumably years) that allowed any customer to send email as any other and fully pass their spf and dkim checks (due to shared keys and having no way of ensuring their users could only send mail from domains under their own account).
When this was disclosed they abused the reporter, kicked him off their service without giving him time to back up his mail, tried to discredit him, lied that their bad practices were commonplace throughout the industry (narrator: they weren’t) before finally going around removing all traces of the discussion. I was lucky(?) enough to see the reddit side of it as it unfolded and I’ve never seen such pseduo-tech bullshit being thrown around and well as nasty attacks on the reporter.
So yeah, they’re cheap but they also seem pretty poor technically (or at least were) and seem like horrible people. YMMV of course.
Beware that they allow a maximum outbound of 300 mails/hour. In case your “update notifications” etc. are exceeding this limit.
After running my own server for a few years, I got tired of the maintenance. I used ProtonMail for a while, and I didn’t mind using their app on my phone and the Bridge on my computer, but my parents kept forgetting to check and update it so Thunderbird would lose connectivity once in a while.
I have since migrated to Infomaniak. It’s based in Switzerland as well, you can use your own domain and it’s cheap (€1.50 per month for 5 addresses with unlimited storage). I haven’t tried their smartphone app (I use the one from Apple on my iPhone), but I’ve heard good things about it.
Infomaniak
Wow, I’ve never heard about this one before. Thanks, I’ll check it out!
Little spoken about, but the one I use is postale.io. Found it to be reliable and cheap!
Looks intresting; thank you! I’ll check that out.
I self host Mailu and don’t have issues with it being blocked… If it’s configured correctly you won’t have issues.
I’ve thought about creating a blog on how to build it but haven’t. Any interest in this?
I self host too, using modoboa The issue with many VPS is they block outgoing port 25 Cant selfhost at home because ISP didnt give public ip For now im just relay outgoing via sendgrid
Just curious why not go with gmail business?
surprised no one has mentioned migadu.com yet
I use a provider called Imageway (), and they seem to offer really good email hosting. They are non-Microsoft based, and offer just about every major open email based protocol (IMAP, POP, SMTP, CalDAV, CardDAV) available. They also have features you won’t find anywhere else like support for 2FA that works with IMAP/POP. Lastly they don’t charge per email account like most of the other providers listed, instead they use a shared storage concept.
Brevo formerly sendinblue, free plan will be enough for sending transactional emails using smtp or api. 300 emails per day on free plan.
I am using smtp2go to send out emails from my own services. The free plan allows 1k emails per month.
You can set up your domain and it sends fine.
For my own mail I use Fastmail and it is great. If the smtp from apps is the only issue then smtp2go might be solution?
How about lark suite, I haven’t tried, but have been meaning to, I’d you’re happy with Gmail, Zoho, I’d say it’s equivalent.
I like infomaniak with their UI, although if you are not in Europe it’s hard to sign up and I’d love to finally sign up to purely mail, but Cloudflare email forwarding covers what I need.
Here’s an outdated list. https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuitelegacymigration/s/xsimVL9oJA
i have been using fastmail for about a year now, never had any issues with smtp delays or mails not showing up in ‘sent’
i also use protonmail. for smtp (or any 3rd party client) you need to upgrade your account and install the bridge. this is because you need something to handle pgp.
I’m using Zoho after years and years of self hosting. Never looked back :) I’m on the free account wish my custom domain btw.
Zoho has been solid for me as well.