All I wanted was a custom domain email

I wrote about a similar journey last year - with a different outcome. Always happy to share. Although some may wish I hadn't!

https://alexlance.blog/email.html

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! :)

Why does it say

> This post placed #4 on HackerNews

Did you want to talk about your custom email domain, or the meta game of the HN algorithm? It can't really be both

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.

Too bad the author didn't check Fastmail. It checks all the boxes and on top of that its, imho, the best finished product for mail / cal / contacts and by far.

It may even be my favorite tech product at all. Should I be able to pay for more storage space for the drive (options are very limited), it would approach the perfection.

Feels weird to ignore the largest players, e.g. Fastmail or Protonmail

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.

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?

Purelymail user for years now, failed me once for a few minutes in all the years I've used it. No complaints other than that. Recommended.

I've long wanted a service where every address is routed as a virtual folder as part of one shared domain level inbox for my personal domain. So I don't have to +alias so much or put up with the blocks some sites have on +aliases. E.g. if I shop at Safeway, I can give them <[email protected]>, if I log in with Google, I can make the Google account <[email protected]>, etc. Then I want the ability to create labels for actively used inboxes, for example if I have a Costco account, <[email protected]>, I could give it ans the Safeway email a shopping tag and have that is a secondary inbox, i.e. a hierarchy like <all mail>, then grouped boxes like <shopping>, then select individual inboxes, and finally a catchall inbox for any other inboxes.

I kind of have Google setup this way, but it's a friggin pain (and not really advised) to keep adding address aliases, or having to fight to +alias stuff. So it doesn't quite work.

Not sure why the cloudflare option to a personal gmail, and then setting up Send as in Gmail doesn't work for OP.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en

Fine for small needs.

And then when bigger pay $5 a month per email address to a decent provider. At that point, you're spending more energy to save money than it's worth.

I can recommend Fastmail. Reasonably priced, modern tech & features, good service. Never had any issues.

Why not using iCloud custom domains? Is the simplest option if you want apple mail compatibility

“Integration with Apple Mail” shy not just use iCloud with a custom domain?

MXRoute's lifetime plans (which they usually offer around black Friday) are a great option if you can get one. I paid $99 for mine five years ago. The service has only improved since then.

I use StartMail [1], which I believe ticks all of OP's boxes (I had similar boxes).

[1] https://www.startmail.com/

I just dealt with this due to the impending termination of .name email. I use a combination of gmail as my mail agent, CloudFlare for the domain, and SMTP2Go for low volume outbound with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. I don't have any Apple usage or requirements.

Oh, I just remembered that I send mail received by my CloudFlare domain to both gmail and zohomail, and use Thunderbird as the mail agent for the latter.

Protonmail has worked great for me. Never had any issues and I like the inclusion of docs + sheets (even though their apps are ridiculously slow to load)

I've got my domain at namecheap, and they just forward all mail to two different pre-existing mailboxes. I configure my mailreader to use my address at my own domain when sending mail, and that works perfectly fine. Sure, headers may show them going through different mail servers, but nobody ever looks at that anymore.

have a look at https://faivelo.com/ for unlimited addresses on custom domains and full email suite: meetings, contacts, drive and more

> At the limit. Once a month's received allowance is used, further mail is refused with a permanent error and the sender is told;

Consider that you may be losing email without knowing even on the cheapest paid plan for $44 a year limits incoming emails to 500 a month. Most people don’t get 500 emails a month, but there can be months when this happens and the emails aren’t even in a “hold” until you upgrade. They’re just completely lost.

I’d rather have unlimited incoming emails than 15 GB or whatever higher storage is offered.

Fastmail! Checks almost all of your boxes for US$100/yr. Also supports Apple Mail push. I think that's a good price for premium email and calendar hosting with custom domains!

> There was one annoying limitation. I had to submit a special request before I could send emails to new addresses that had not previously messaged me.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding but this sounds absolutely wild. What?

With Google sunsetting support for custom domain in Gmail (scheduled for Jan 2027) I am looking for solutions to sending email from custom domains. Amazon SES works well and is cheap for SMTP.

I want to continue to use Gmail for email storage--mainly because of the awesome search function, but also for longevity--while using a third-party app for pulling specific emails from Gmail and replying to them through my custom domain(s).

The solutions mentioned in this blog aren't that--they have their own storage.

I’d suggest cloudflare + resend + https://workspace.google.com/essentials/ (which is $0) + forwarding and alias to personal google account for gmail ui.

Big benefit of this combination is that you get "login with google", docs, drive, hangouts

In my experience with emails, if you're not comming from big services like Google, Hotmail etc. The big services will still sometimes flag you as a spam even if you have everything set up properly. They use the monopoly position tohold the email hostage. I think it's time to seriously consider developing and adopting a successor for email.

Possibly the only free soltuion: setup email forwarding in gmail using https://improvmx.com/about/.

Can even send email, although recipient sees that it has been forwarded.

I added my custom domain to my provider email. Yes, those still exist in places

I use zoho mail, works well.

cloudflare routing in + zoho free out works fine for me. just remember spf is one record, so both includes go on the same line

iCloud+ mail was definitely a better choice. I'll send my feedback through email.

I like Fastmail a lot

I can recommend Lark. Free tier does everything.

I've been very happy with MXRoute

Unpopular opinion, but I've used Google Workspace for years and I really like having my email via gmail. SSO and spam filtering and Google Docs. I thought about switching to Amazon Workmail but the price I pay for Workspace is worth it.

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