Hey everyone, I implemented many of the suggestions you made on our last post and thought I'd give this another go. As always, criticism is welcome and Happy Halloween!
Nice website and interesting option of email provider. However, I haven’t been able to find much information about the company providing the service beyond “Mango Mail is an American company based in the state of Florida”. That (i.e, the limited information about the company, not the location) could be a deal breaker or, at least, a cause for concern for some people. It would be for me.
Some small providers are completely transparent about how small they are and share the information about the company. See, for example Purelymail https://purelymail.com/about .
Edit/note: To be clear, the point I tried to make has nothing to do with the location of the provider but about the lack or limited information about the company.
> That could be a deal breaker or, at least, a cause for concern for some people. It would be for me.
Why is that? Are you saying it's something to do with the US state of Florida itself, or something more general about the lack of company info on the website?
I explained that better adding a note to my original message. Nothing to do with Florida or any other location in the US or any other country.
What I meant was that before I make the decision to move email providers I would like to see more information about the company (the usual stuff. I suppose I could ask directly but being able to find that information on the website would be nice.
I don't understand this obsession with avoiding American providers. I actually would prefer my vendor to be located in the USA and the contract be subject to US law and knowing my information is located in the United States.
I really doubt the US government is interested in my email and if they are, I'm sure they can read it other ways.
I hope the note I added to my original message is enough to explain that my comment wasn’t about the location of the company but about what I think is very limited information about the company. I copied the quote from the website to illustrate what I meant by limited information. That was all.
I don’t live in the US, I don’t follow US politics and I have literally no idea about what's going on in Florida.
I'm glad someone finally said this. There is so much concern for "The government is spying on me" but the truth is, if you're doing something illegal, I don't even want you using it. The government only cares when you do something and they are forced to step in.
Just chiming in with my one data point of personal experience: I've primarily used Gmail for all of my email needs. I heard about Migadu several years back and decided to migrate over and give it a try. I was shocked at how completely inundated with spam my inbox was. They had a spam filter with a tunable threshold and no setting on that filter worked well for me. Even on the highest protection level some spam was still getting through, and tons of my actual mail was winding up in spam; which made wading through my spam folder multiple times a day a requirement. Compare that to when I was using Gmail, I didn't even really think about spam. My non-spam email almost never ends up in the spam folder, and I basically never get unwanted email in my inbox.
So after about 6 months of dealing with spam, I went back to Gmail. It's a minor ordeal to move email providers. I'd be scared to move providers without being able to see how well their spam filter works.
As an aside, that would be a nice capability (no idea if it's possible): a way to have your email mirrored to another service to test it out.
Your mail service looks cool though! If I hadn't already been burned I would be more inclined to give it try.
Can you elaborate more on the feature you would like? I have no problem building a solution from scratch if it comes in handy.
Also we use Bayesian filtering, rbls, dbls, rate checks, the whole 9 yards. We haven't had much complaint about receiving spam. Ik you said you've been burned but I'd love for you to give us a shot so I can see what happens and possibly improve.
I don't know if what I'm imagining is technically possible. But it would be cool to be able to have my email mirrored to two different services. One email address, email shows up in Mango Mail and my Google Apps email. Then I can evaluate Mango Mail's spam performance against Google's to see if it's good enough for my needs.
If I get up the courage to try again, yours will be my first choice :)
I would not trust a company with my email that does not even publish its full name and/or address on their website. It's not even clear under which jurisdiction they fall. This is an absolute non-starter for me. I will stay with Migadu who are very clear about these details.
One minor bit: the font sizing on some of the headlines on the front page are almost the size of my laptop screen. I know it's a design choice, but it's actually really jarring as I'm going through - it takes me a second to piece together what each section is actually trying to showcase.
Not saying make it much smaller, but maybe a slight adjustment would be helpful.
> Every 5 seconds a spammer sends something to a bunch of random letters @ your domain
In my experience, this is an exaggeration of the truth. I've been using catch-all addresses for something like 15 years. And yes, there are times when I'll get dozens of spam over the course of a day sent to random letters. But that's a pretty rare occurrence.
I default to allowing any <string>@<mydomain.tld>, and then uses aliases to block offenders. My <string> is often a domain name where I'm using the email address, which means I know who either willingly spams me, sells my email address, or otherwise allows my email address to be leaked. At any rate, I'll throw addresses used for spam onto a disabled account as an alias, resulting in bounces.
The biggest advantage here over aliases is that I've used hundreds of aliases, but didn't have to manually track and add each and every one to my email address. Since most of the time, my email is not used for spam, I only have to manually add the bad ones.
- Business: Legit customers sometimes guess e-mails like support@, abuse@, sales@, jobs@, careers@, info@, and other language variants of these words, you may not want to set up mailboxes for all of these.
- Personal: Plus addressing doesn't work with many services but you sometimes want a single-use e-mail address to purchase something from a website and still have the receipt.
I generate one-time only email aliases to virtually every service I use. Some sort of a poor-man's hide my email from iCloud. If that email is compromised, or I start receiving spam for it, I know where it came from. This has become a vital part of my workflow, and not having it is a show stopper to me, unfortunately.
Hey, I like the low price. I want to make a SaaS with a low price but sadly with something like Stripe for example at 1.50 per month 23% of your revenue goes directly in merchant fees. Braintree is the same.
Do you use another provider or do you just accept the fact that it's gonna be one of your main costs ?
Yea it's unfortunate that we lose so much to Stripe and definitely it's something to be weary of when creating your prices. That said, Stripe does provide an excellent service. However, I never put all my eggs in one basket. You will notice that our system doesn't use any of Stripe's fancy features. The fine print will show that they'll take extra cuts for each and every thing. We built everything from scratch and only use Stripe for the final payment processing. That way, if we ever decide to switch, it would be quick and painless ;)
It's too bad how one of the interesting promises of crypto currencies was to facilitate micropayments. That clearly hasn't been delivered in any sensible form yet.
Well, the Pay-As-You-Go pricing has a base fee that's way over Stripe's price and the percentage is greater too. I'm curious how low they can reach but they'll need to be almost half their normal price to make any sense.
For 1.50 it's going to cost 57.5 cents, which is 38%.
How does this work? Do you just limit what gets shown to me, say I get 250 emails sent to me in a day, I can only view 200 of them, or do you bounce the extra 50?
No we don't bounce your mail. If you really did go over, we'd let it slide. However, if it becomes a blatant overage, the sender will be informed the mail cannot be delivered to you because you're over the quota. You will be warned several times before this happens though.
I thought the slogan was pay for the "data you use" in which case I'd expect something like no limits on how many in/out per day but e.g. first 1GB in/out is free and $0.10/GB after that with no limits as long as you pay. Or something like that.
Being a mail provider, most of the things we do are to protect users and the servers. The in/out per day are really to prevent spammers and abuse. Also, I don't like charging people for overages. It never sits well.
Mango Mail is $18 a year for 5GB. Purely mail leaves the limits and specifics up in the air. Purelymail is a bit weird with the pricing. "If you use significantly more than $10 a year in resources, you may need to switch to advanced pricing". That sounds like a makeshift system. No offense, but it doesn't seem like the most serious provider.
Readit News
Some small providers are completely transparent about how small they are and share the information about the company. See, for example Purelymail https://purelymail.com/about .
Edit/note: To be clear, the point I tried to make has nothing to do with the location of the provider but about the lack or limited information about the company.
Why is that? Are you saying it's something to do with the US state of Florida itself, or something more general about the lack of company info on the website?
Edit: saw your edit, got it!
What I meant was that before I make the decision to move email providers I would like to see more information about the company (the usual stuff. I suppose I could ask directly but being able to find that information on the website would be nice.
I really doubt the US government is interested in my email and if they are, I'm sure they can read it other ways.
I don’t live in the US, I don’t follow US politics and I have literally no idea about what's going on in Florida.
Dead Comment
So after about 6 months of dealing with spam, I went back to Gmail. It's a minor ordeal to move email providers. I'd be scared to move providers without being able to see how well their spam filter works.
As an aside, that would be a nice capability (no idea if it's possible): a way to have your email mirrored to another service to test it out.
Your mail service looks cool though! If I hadn't already been burned I would be more inclined to give it try.
Also we use Bayesian filtering, rbls, dbls, rate checks, the whole 9 yards. We haven't had much complaint about receiving spam. Ik you said you've been burned but I'd love for you to give us a shot so I can see what happens and possibly improve.
If I get up the courage to try again, yours will be my first choice :)
I have never moved from Gmail (yet) but it must be sure difficult if you have a large mailbox.
They have strict rates on their API or IMAP so it takes time and a good software that accounts for the errors.
Didn't you have this experience
One minor bit: the font sizing on some of the headlines on the front page are almost the size of my laptop screen. I know it's a design choice, but it's actually really jarring as I'm going through - it takes me a second to piece together what each section is actually trying to showcase.
Not saying make it much smaller, but maybe a slight adjustment would be helpful.
However, we do have all of the following:
- subdomain addressing - plus addressing - aliases
Can you tell me what you use case for catch-all is? I'm open to rethinking it.
In my experience, this is an exaggeration of the truth. I've been using catch-all addresses for something like 15 years. And yes, there are times when I'll get dozens of spam over the course of a day sent to random letters. But that's a pretty rare occurrence.
I default to allowing any <string>@<mydomain.tld>, and then uses aliases to block offenders. My <string> is often a domain name where I'm using the email address, which means I know who either willingly spams me, sells my email address, or otherwise allows my email address to be leaked. At any rate, I'll throw addresses used for spam onto a disabled account as an alias, resulting in bounces.
The biggest advantage here over aliases is that I've used hundreds of aliases, but didn't have to manually track and add each and every one to my email address. Since most of the time, my email is not used for spam, I only have to manually add the bad ones.
- Personal: Plus addressing doesn't work with many services but you sometimes want a single-use e-mail address to purchase something from a website and still have the receipt.
Do you use another provider or do you just accept the fact that it's gonna be one of your main costs ?
For 1.50 it's going to cost 57.5 cents, which is 38%.
How does this work? Do you just limit what gets shown to me, say I get 250 emails sent to me in a day, I can only view 200 of them, or do you bounce the extra 50?
I thought the slogan was pay for the "data you use" in which case I'd expect something like no limits on how many in/out per day but e.g. first 1GB in/out is free and $0.10/GB after that with no limits as long as you pay. Or something like that.