I used to run my own mail server, and that very nearly cost me a career-changing job at Microsoft. My reply to a hiring manager for a team I really wanted to work on went into Microsoft's bit bucket because (I'm guessing) their spam detectors didn't like my own domain and my own instance of Exim sending out my emails. When a recruiter (thankfully) followed up and scheduled me for on-site interviews, that manager mentioned that he never got a reply when he emailed me. That was the point where I realized that email had gone the way of fiefdoms, and if I wanted really important emails to make it through, I'd need to choose which castle I wanted to handle my email.
Wait...your mail was a reply to a mail they sent to you, and it went to the bit bucket? Their spam handling is not sophisticated enough to special case replies to mails that they have sent?
Google does this as well - neither a history of emailing back and forth nor a same-day reply will keep incoming email safe from being classified as spam if it's being sent by an ordinary mail server.
Hell, Google even manages to classify emails as spam that are sent from one address on a GSuite account to another address on the same account.
Do you remember what sort of validation you had setup (if any)? e.g. SPF, DKIM, IP from reputable block, etc. I'm curious to what degree this can potentially be mitigated.
I use Gmail for personal mail and Yandex mail for my domains. I tried SendGrid but when I tested with Gmail, Outlook.com and Yahoo, most mails got into spam folder.
It's best to test when you set up email, whether you use your own server or use a provider.
Most of the times, sending mail from your own server will guarantee your mail gets into spam folder.
I agree $3/month is reasonable for email, but since the encryption backdoor laws passed in Australia in Dec 2018, I've been avoiding Australian software.
Would the Australian encryption laws impact Fastmail that much? AFAIK their emails were never encrypted at rest to begin with so someone with a warrant could always have gotten in.
While the legislation introduced by the Australian government is certainly worrying and should never had been enacted, I've always operated under the assumption that if any government agency around the world really wants to get to my encrypted data or traffic, they'll likely be able to use/abuse some sort of loophole in their current processes and laws anyway.
I am very surprised a "one man show" was the author's final choice here: What if the one man gets hit by a bus? FastMail is probably worth the increased cost to avoid that concern alone.
But in general, I am excited to see anyone moving to their own email domain, decentralized is how email was always supposed to be.
EDIT: A huge terms issue with PurelyMail is "The Company may, at its sole discretion, terminate service without cause or notice." FastMail can terminate for violations of the terms or non-payment, PurelyMail could terminate you because Scott just doesn't like you anymore.
Hi! I am the "Scott" from Purelymail in question. In the hopefully unlikely event I'm hit by a bus, I do have friends who could step in to keep it running for a while. One of my infrastructural goals is also to have it run itself without manual intervention, where feasible. It's not 100% there yet, though. (Hence the beta.)
As to the terms of service, as far as I know the clause you quoted is fairly standard cover-your-ass. I've probably seen it in a few other service terms. Presumably, Fastmail words it as they do because they've covered all the reasons they might want to do so in their terms already, and have decades of legal experience.
Hey! I feel like ensuring you clarify you'll only shut down an account if they break the rules you set out is a really good practice and there are examples, like FastMail's, you could borrow from. I know the standard boilerplate is to give a service the right to do whatever it wants, but as a small indie service operator you can be better than the fairly standard! ;)
Your service running itself is a good idea for avoiding you doing a lot of work, but if you got hit by a bus it is likely someone would shut off your credit cards that pay for services your services depends on and even if it's a box in your house it will end up unplugged. I'd strongly advise some business continuity involving a very trusted friend or family member who can be your second in managing the service at minimum, who has access to everything and knows what to do already.
I hope you don't take my comments as too much of a knock, what you're building is hard and worthwhile, and I wish you success with it. I'm on FastMail but that doesn't mean I always will be, and I like to have good options by good people.
Hey Scott, Purelymail looks like a really nice service! Out of curiosity: how are you handling deliverability/avoiding spam filters? From my experience, hosting my personal email, any messages I send almost always go to spam (unless it's a direct reply to an email I've received). (I've set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, a PTR record, etc) Is it just a matter of building up enough email volume?
Seeing this thread prompted me to sign up - I've been procrastinating over ditching gmail and consolidating on one IMAP provider for ages.
I shelved my one main doubt (I don't think much of Roundcube) and started the process today. Seems like you've done a really good job. Recipients have been getting all my emails, and I have found the integrated migration tool invaluable in getting set up.
Zoho Mail only costs $2 more per year vs PurelyMail (it's shown on PurelyMail's website along with other competitors) and also avoids the "one man show" problem.
I'm not sure saving $2 a year is worth using a self-proclaimed (according to its website) beta service. Then again Gmail was in beta for many years.
Indeed. I honestly would never go cheap on email again. People have traditionally expected it to be free, but it's the most crucial point of my online presence: I need to be able to rely on it and it needs to be good.
In my opinion, the fact that people would pay more for Netflix than their email provider is kinda crazy, when you think about their relative importance.
Last I checked, Zoho was per address; This guy specifically looked for domain support (meaning, potentially hundreds of addresses).
PurelyMail seems to charge by storage, not mailbox address; and AFAIK so does Migadu (which, up until reading this post, I thought was unique in that).
Fair comment, but all of those concerns are mitigated if you:
1) use your own domain(s)
2) take frequent backups
so, even if the purely mail dies, you have access to historical emails and since you own the domains you can migrate to another provider pretty quickly and again, since you own the domain any accounts that are connected to that email address/domain combo are not impacted.
How many people are actively backing up their email on their own? Backing up email seems much simpler than running your own email server, but it's still going to require some technical know how.
To me, the comment that you can just manage your own backups suggests that the service isn't right for anyone nontechnical or technical people who are too busy to backup a hosted service.
The bus factor is a potential issue. Legal terms & conditions probably aren't as the corrupt civil law systems of nearly all polities make legal redress unavailable or hopelessly impractical to all but the wealthy (who probably aren't looking at $10 pa mail). Ordinary people don't read legals, partly out of laziness, but partly from a (correct) judgement that they are irrelevant to them.
I think it's very important for customers to be able to trust the business though. This means the business relationship should have clearly defined terms and both parties should be expected to follow them. Unfortunately, the trend is for services to have take it or leave it terms and to essentially be written to hold them blameless while letting them do whatever they want.
A legally sound strategy, but not one that embodies trust. And I'd argue being able to trust your email provider is very important.
I'm more worried that PM is still fairly new and in beta. These hobby businesses come and go, and changing one's email is a huge pain. What's saying that PM will be around for 10+ more years, like Gmail has?
This is mostly because changing your email address is a huge pain. Once you're using your own domain, changing email providers is like changing web hosts or domain registrars: Some work but not a big deal.
There is definitely still an upside from Gmail: The author can redirect his email address to any other service on a whim and all his inbound email comes with. So as long as his archive is backed up he does have a good strategy to restore access.
> Another reason because of which I'm leaving GMail is because it's kinda slow. A full load with an empty cache takes about 20 seconds on my desktop (good specs, wired Internet connection). Loading a folder with 184 emails takes 2.5 seconds.
I don't understand how Gmail managed to get to this point. One of the original selling points of Gmail was the snappy interface. And it's regressed massively. And it's not like the interface is complicated.
Indeed, but that's an engineering failure. I even think that Gmail makes sense an SPA. It should be JavaScript. They've just overcomplicated their implementation.
I heard that GMap is also getting slow, and so is Chrome (although I don't use them personally). I'm curious how the company's culture has shifted over year. Or maybe it hasn't shifted, and there's always a push for feature creep. I don't know. It'd be interesting to hear someone who know how this could happen.
That's absolutely standard for a webapp though (and really old devices are only supported through the "Basic HTML" view). There's no reason why wide device support should cause it to be slow.
Unaffiliated, I found migadu (https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html) to be extremely easy to set up and having a nice ui to work with. Gives you only the basics but that's all you need.
As they say, storage space is not an issue in the 21st century, so the only differentiator between plans is the only thing that matters: the number of outgoing emails. You can have as many domains, as many aliases and as many addresses as you want, that's not a technical problem so there's no reason it should be a financial distinction.
I used migadu for a couple of years and they were great initially but over the past 4-5 months, I've experienced really degraded service when accessing email and setting tags, deleting etc.
Over the last month, I started getting login timeouts and that was the last straw. Recently I noticed that they put up an announcement saying that they are running at very high loads due to the COVID-19 situation. I'm not quite sure how people working from home affects normal email (I guess people are emailing a bit more?) but anyways once the announcement went away, I still kept experiencing issues so I migrated my primary email over to fastmail.
They were shuffling services around and I think they had a notice in Feb on their portal to the effect but, yeah, they definitely need to start using a status page and twitter for updates; most customers just want a heads up and be informed of what is happening.
Service is reliable, considering the cost, but communication isn't their forte esp for an email company. :)
They did a full UI update and have a bunch of new features. Some are still buggy but support is responsive. Some of the new cool things they have are identities: different logins to send and receive all to the same mailbox, but externally looks different.
I would caution everyone considering Migadu. My biggest issue revolves around support — they don’t have a public status page so when the service goes down it’s impossible to know if the issue is on my end or on theirs. They're averaged one big outage (~24 hours) a year over the past 3 years, not counting smaller outages, so this isn’t a generic thought experiment. They don’t respond to most of my emails to support, either. Do not recommend.
In my case, they have always replied to my emails. I think it would be much better if they were actively using their twitter account in order to keep us informed.
I've been using Migadu for a year now. Multiple aliases, works well.
Only problem so far: a service interruption of a few hours "due to the COVID-19 situation" apparently. I haven't lost any e-mails but, to be honest, since I'm paying, I don't know if I'll accept a second interruption for a service I'm paying for.
The company is based in Switzerland and is French speaking. Any chance "AdVite" means something different in French?
Apart from that, their website states pretty clearly their privacy policy [1] and other terms [2]. It doesn't look like there is anything shady going on here.
I don't personally use Migadu but I've had it bookmarked as the "service I would probably use if/when the day comes".
I have been on a similar journey to distance myself from Google and my Google account for a little more than a year now. It's taken longer than I thought to get to where I am now, and now I'm skeptical that I'll ever be completely Google free. My steps so far have been:
1. January 2019: Bought a domain name and registered for FastMail.
2. Progressively over the following months: Every time I got an email sent to my Gmail address, I'd either unregister for that service or change it to my new FastMail powered email address.
3. Early summer 2019: Logged out from my Google Account in Firefox, and created a Firefox Container where I am logged into my Google account in case I would need it
4. Deleted Google Maps app from my phone
5. Logged out from my Google account on the Gmail app on my phone
A few tips I can share:
* If you have this email address registered at FastMail: foo@bar.com, emails sent to x@foo.bar.com (where x can be anything) will be forwarded do foo@bar.com. I found this very useful when using it to sign up for various services.
* You can register as many aliases as you want in FastMail. For example I have my personal email address be firstname@domain.com. I also have inbox@domain.com registered as an alias, so if I sign up for some online service I can use service@inbox.domain.com as my email address.
The things that I've found hardest to migrate are:
* iMessage. I've used my Gmail address as the primary iMessage handle, so that's what people have been sending messages to. Not sure what'll happen if I remove it from my Apple ID.
* GitHub. I've used my Gmail address as my email address in Git for years. Removing the Gmail address from my profile in GitHub removes the connection between those commits and my profile. For now I have it as a secondary email address (or whatever it's called on GitHub) for this sake.
* YouTube. I want my viewing history, channel subscriptions, etc. Maybe I should create a new Google Account just for YouTube?
> A full load with an empty cache takes about 20 seconds on my desktop
Looking at the typical Amazon concern that "longer load times cost millions in sales" that you hear, it's crazy to think that gmail doesn't measure the uncached load time (or they do and are happy with 20 seconds).
Anecdata: I mostly use my phone for email, so most of the time I load the gmail web interface the cache is cold and it takes this long. It bothers me the one a month I load it.
I imagine the logic is that people usually keep Gmail open in a tab which might be reloaded once per day. So people aren't likely to switch email providers because of 20 seconds a day.
That said, I've found Gmail to be pretty sluggish even after loading, so I use it via email clients with my other accounts.
My Gmail tab that I leave pinned regularly loses connection and stops updating. It seems more and more these days Google things just break when you don't use Chrome. Using Gmail with Firefox hasn't felt fast in a long while.
Readit News
Hell, Google even manages to classify emails as spam that are sent from one address on a GSuite account to another address on the same account.
It's best to test when you set up email, whether you use your own server or use a provider.
Most of the times, sending mail from your own server will guarantee your mail gets into spam folder.
I can highly recommend Yandex as a mail provider.
Dead Comment
Fastmail has continued to make significant improvements, while keeping the interface lean and functional.
It seems to me like $3/month is worth it for a service as critical as email.
[1]: https://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/ and discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069944
Deleted Comment
And they are making open standards (JMAP) and contributing to the Cyrus IMAP server.
Moreover, they will soon have labels :) (currently in beta).
But in general, I am excited to see anyone moving to their own email domain, decentralized is how email was always supposed to be.
EDIT: A huge terms issue with PurelyMail is "The Company may, at its sole discretion, terminate service without cause or notice." FastMail can terminate for violations of the terms or non-payment, PurelyMail could terminate you because Scott just doesn't like you anymore.
As to the terms of service, as far as I know the clause you quoted is fairly standard cover-your-ass. I've probably seen it in a few other service terms. Presumably, Fastmail words it as they do because they've covered all the reasons they might want to do so in their terms already, and have decades of legal experience.
Your service running itself is a good idea for avoiding you doing a lot of work, but if you got hit by a bus it is likely someone would shut off your credit cards that pay for services your services depends on and even if it's a box in your house it will end up unplugged. I'd strongly advise some business continuity involving a very trusted friend or family member who can be your second in managing the service at minimum, who has access to everything and knows what to do already.
I hope you don't take my comments as too much of a knock, what you're building is hard and worthwhile, and I wish you success with it. I'm on FastMail but that doesn't mean I always will be, and I like to have good options by good people.
I shelved my one main doubt (I don't think much of Roundcube) and started the process today. Seems like you've done a really good job. Recipients have been getting all my emails, and I have found the integrated migration tool invaluable in getting set up.
Good luck with the venture.
"could" or "would"? Is there something in place, and have they agreed to this?
Dead Comment
I'm not sure saving $2 a year is worth using a self-proclaimed (according to its website) beta service. Then again Gmail was in beta for many years.
In my opinion, the fact that people would pay more for Netflix than their email provider is kinda crazy, when you think about their relative importance.
PurelyMail seems to charge by storage, not mailbox address; and AFAIK so does Migadu (which, up until reading this post, I thought was unique in that).
1) use your own domain(s)
2) take frequent backups
so, even if the purely mail dies, you have access to historical emails and since you own the domains you can migrate to another provider pretty quickly and again, since you own the domain any accounts that are connected to that email address/domain combo are not impacted.
To me, the comment that you can just manage your own backups suggests that the service isn't right for anyone nontechnical or technical people who are too busy to backup a hosted service.
My argument is that people really should use POP3 (not IMAP) for this reason.
POP3 by design creates a continuous local "backup" that contains the entire history. IMAP doesn't.
A legally sound strategy, but not one that embodies trust. And I'd argue being able to trust your email provider is very important.
A bit tongue in cheek, but always have a back up strategy and move on whatever seems best to you, not to someone else.
I don't understand how Gmail managed to get to this point. One of the original selling points of Gmail was the snappy interface. And it's regressed massively. And it's not like the interface is complicated.
Yeah, I'm shocked how much slower Chrome is than Firefox here in 2020. Never expected this.
That said I do practice inbox zero, so it might just be spending time on loading a lot of mail?
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049
seduction makes everyone do its best, over time you rot
time for a new challenger ?
As they say, storage space is not an issue in the 21st century, so the only differentiator between plans is the only thing that matters: the number of outgoing emails. You can have as many domains, as many aliases and as many addresses as you want, that's not a technical problem so there's no reason it should be a financial distinction.
They have full DNS capabilities and very nice UI (minimal JS, loads super fast).
Over the last month, I started getting login timeouts and that was the last straw. Recently I noticed that they put up an announcement saying that they are running at very high loads due to the COVID-19 situation. I'm not quite sure how people working from home affects normal email (I guess people are emailing a bit more?) but anyways once the announcement went away, I still kept experiencing issues so I migrated my primary email over to fastmail.
Service is reliable, considering the cost, but communication isn't their forte esp for an email company. :)
This sounds like an advertising company. A person's inbox is the holy grail of info about them.
I don't think I want to use this company for my email. Change my mind?
Apart from that, their website states pretty clearly their privacy policy [1] and other terms [2]. It doesn't look like there is anything shady going on here.
I don't personally use Migadu but I've had it bookmarked as the "service I would probably use if/when the day comes".
[1]: https://www.migadu.com/en/privacy.html [2]: https://www.migadu.com/en/terms.html
1. January 2019: Bought a domain name and registered for FastMail.
2. Progressively over the following months: Every time I got an email sent to my Gmail address, I'd either unregister for that service or change it to my new FastMail powered email address.
3. Early summer 2019: Logged out from my Google Account in Firefox, and created a Firefox Container where I am logged into my Google account in case I would need it
4. Deleted Google Maps app from my phone
5. Logged out from my Google account on the Gmail app on my phone
A few tips I can share:
* If you have this email address registered at FastMail: foo@bar.com, emails sent to x@foo.bar.com (where x can be anything) will be forwarded do foo@bar.com. I found this very useful when using it to sign up for various services.
* You can register as many aliases as you want in FastMail. For example I have my personal email address be firstname@domain.com. I also have inbox@domain.com registered as an alias, so if I sign up for some online service I can use service@inbox.domain.com as my email address.
The things that I've found hardest to migrate are:
* iMessage. I've used my Gmail address as the primary iMessage handle, so that's what people have been sending messages to. Not sure what'll happen if I remove it from my Apple ID.
* GitHub. I've used my Gmail address as my email address in Git for years. Removing the Gmail address from my profile in GitHub removes the connection between those commits and my profile. For now I have it as a secondary email address (or whatever it's called on GitHub) for this sake.
* YouTube. I want my viewing history, channel subscriptions, etc. Maybe I should create a new Google Account just for YouTube?
Looking at the typical Amazon concern that "longer load times cost millions in sales" that you hear, it's crazy to think that gmail doesn't measure the uncached load time (or they do and are happy with 20 seconds).
Anecdata: I mostly use my phone for email, so most of the time I load the gmail web interface the cache is cold and it takes this long. It bothers me the one a month I load it.
That said, I've found Gmail to be pretty sluggish even after loading, so I use it via email clients with my other accounts.
Controlling the address is key to switching services and not being shut off for ToS violations.
I wrote about it more here https://meagher.co/own-your-email/