Ask HN: What email service(s) do you use for your side projects?

I have a couple side projects that I use for my friends, family, and myself. I'd like to have both an email such as team@mysite.com to send and receive emails that I might want to type out. I'd also like to be able to send transactional emails, password reset ... I would think that I'm not the only one with this problem. What do you all use to achieve this?

rijavecb · a year ago

Zoho is pretty cheap and not bad. They also own Zeptomail [1] that is meant for transactional emails, also cheap and you can even buy credits in advance. Haven't tried it yet though.

[1] - https://www.zoho.com/zeptomail/pricing.html

snozolli · a year ago

I was plodding through the steps to set up a mail servicer on my Hetzner instance when I realized I was about to sink a ton of time into a subject I know nothing about that would earn me no money.

So I did the reasonable thing and signed up for Zoho. It's cheap and I don't have to worry about having a zombie spam server because I misconfigured something.

jrblo · a year ago

I've found Mailgun's services to be pretty good. Admittedly I haven't tried many of the alternatives in recent years, but we use Mailgun to send a few hundred thousand transactional messages per month at my day job and they have been good. For my personal side projects, their free plan has been sufficient enough that I've never paid for usage.

icelancer · a year ago

Mailgun is great. I keep coming back to it after trying many alternatives.

romanhn · a year ago

It's a mix. I use my registrar's (Porkbun) email service for human communication (name@, support@, etc). Added those accounts to my personal Gmail inbox so I can send/receive using Gmail instead of logging into the registrar's webmail. Eventually will move to something like Google Workspace most likely, which is a bit more expensive.

I use AWS SES for transactional emails (mostly send, but making use of the receive capability as well). Nice and cheap. And finally using MailerLite for marketing emails. Just surpassed their free tier so may look again, but not too bad pricing-wise.

One advice I've seen is not to mix transactional and marketing providers (and ideally domains). If you get a high incidence of unsubscribes or "this is spam" responses, don't want your app to be dead in the water for transactional stuff if the marketing provider suspends your account temporarily (can happen even if you're legit).

FlyingAvatar · a year ago

This is exactly how I handle my mail as well.

jimsmart · a year ago

We use Migadu for everything.

There's no extra cost for extra domains, on everything but their smallest account — and as we already have an account for all of our other domains, using Migadu for side projects as well is a no-brainer.

dabbz · a year ago

+1 on Migadu. Service has been rock solid. Pricing is very reasonable. The few times I've needed customer support has been helpful.

geoah · a year ago

+1 for migadu as well

ensignavenger · a year ago

PurelyMail (purelymail.com) has been great for me! And very affordable.

snapplebobapple · a year ago

I love those guys. I send around 30k emails a month programatically to our o365 domain (bunch of different users sending a bunchof different things) and it just works great.

PaulHoule · a year ago

SES from AZMN. Also mailgun. Even out of the free tier I see these as a good value for low volumes of mail (less than 10k per month)

SparkyMcUnicorn · a year ago

Others have mentioned Fastmail, and it really is great. But I don't think it's the final stop if you want transactional emails.

Decided to try out Cloudflare email routing[0], and have it routing to Fastmail and/or Gmail. I'm not using email workers for much yet, but it's a pretty cool feature.

I'd definitely recommend it as a super easy way to just get email working for a domain, and just route the emails to/from your existing email accounts.

[0] https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/email-routing/

EDIT: removed CF MailChannels integration note. Apparently it's been axed.

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/mailchannels-end-of-life-...

andrewmcwatters · a year ago

I’m also curious about this, because we have clients whose back office web services just use sendmail and for the most part, we don’t have trouble.

I remember looking into mailbox providers sometime ago and wanted to resell Zoho because they seemed like the best provider on the market at the time but their reseller contacts are a waste of my time. Awful sales channel. They willingly don’t understand plain English.

[1]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h4hgdBFEgOt7XQaTAR7Q...