Why Custom Domain Email Is a Surprisingly Deep Rabbit Hole
All I wanted was a custom domain email
After two years of searching for a cheap custom domain email that works with Apple Mail, I tried Cloudflare Email Routing, self-hosted Mailflare, and Purelymail before settling on Foundermail. Receiving mail is easy; sending it reliably is the hard part. Foundermail offers SMTP/IMAP, verified sending, and multiple addresses at a price that makes sense for a personal domain.
The bigger lesson for me is that custom email is surprisingly complicated. Receiving mail is easy. Sending it reliably is the hard part.
- adospace
Hi Jacob, Ado here, from FounderMail. I'm really glad you ended up on-boarding with us, and I wanted to reach out to thank you for the review and feedback.
The manual approve to outbound sending helped a lot to keep spammers out of the platform.
We ensure that domain exists and you're the owner, the website is legit, etc, making impossible for a bot to operate throughout our channel.
And is working, almost 4 weeks in, no complaints, less than 0.1 bounce rate.
You know, having an high reputation is vital to ensure the emails we send on behalf of our customers are reaching the inbox not the spam folder.
Said that, you continue to be right: it's annoying. We're working to reduce the pain autoapproving it for cases like your.
Thank you again (I hope you'll never find a reason to leave us! :)
- ryandrake
Interesting that self-hosting isn't on his list. It hits every one of his checkboxes and only costs you an old Linux server collecting dust at home (or at most, a $5/mo VPS), which you can also use to host other things.
It's never been easier to self-host, but it feels like, in general, when faced with "I want to do X with a computer," people are more and more reaching for paid, hosted services rather than DIY anymore.
- EwanToo
Feels weird to ignore the largest players, e.g. Fastmail or Protonmail
- zie
I use Migadu(migadu.com), but Apple's iCloud email hosting is basically tailor fit to your expectations, so I don't have any idea why you don't use it.
But you can host your own email too. It's not the easiest option, but it can be done, and there has been some newer email server software written that tries to make it easier.
- ruuda
The shared hosting package that I bought with my domain 20 years ago from a local hosting company comes with all of these, it cost I think €12/year originally. They got acquired some time ago by a large hosting company who charges more than €120/year for the same package. Then I switched to another local mail provider who charge €40/year (but with more storage). Aren't there many such providers?