I self host pretty much everything, but one of the services I find makes more sense to not self host is an email server.
I’ve got a few domains I’d like to have emails for, and usually I’d go for Tutanota or protonmail. But in this instance I’m looking for something dirt cheap. These domains are for a hobby club so I’m much less concerned with privacy like I usually would be. Anybody got any recommendations?
So far namecheap seems like my best option for under $8/month. They would bundle with my domain registration and I’m assuming having both on the same service would make things pretty seamless to set up.
Not crazy concerned with privacy for these particular accounts. Namecheap or similar is reputable enough.
Migadu micro tier is $19/year. Great service and has a great privacy policy. Basically unlimited domains. Ive been very happy with them.
Migadu is so great. I really want to see more services like that, with so much focus on just being honest and good.
Our admin panel won’t win any beauty contests and that’s a good thing. It’s built to be obvious and efficient.
I’m in love.
I ended up going with migadu. Seems great so far. Already up and running with 3 domains and dozens of aliases.
Have a look at “pattern rewrites” too if you use lots of aliases. It’s sort of like catch-all aliases with wildcards.
https://mxroute.com/ currently offers “lifetime” with 10GB combined storage, unlimited mailboxes, unlimited domains, for $129. I bought it a year or so back, no complaints.
Damn, nice idea to spare 10GB for investment. With how cheap storage is, I think that model is indeed a win win. I mean, how often do you receive 100MB+ attachment?
That was my thought process when I got it, and it was only $99 when I purchased. As long as the host (one man show unfortunately) remains, I’ve got a reliable email system in place. And he does an amazing job of keeping off spam lists.
I also have a ton of domains that I wanted to be able to receive email on. In my case, I was the only recipient so I just needed a provider that let me setup aliases.
Fastmail is pretty affordable. All plans except the business basic plan allow you to setup 100 custom domains which you can the forward to your mailbox.
Their mail app is pretty solid. I particularly like that it lets you receive notifications for email that’s been moved to another folder. Which I’ve had troubles with on other emails apps. I also really like that I can use a custom domain for random masked emails.
That’s my setup. I like selfhosting, but leave email to other services. I got tired of being on blacklists.
That said, namecheap email servers are still on blacklists. I’ve locked horns with tech support a couple times because legit email gets dropped. Unless you pay for a vps or something more expensive, you’re thrown in with the spam and scum class.
It works for the most part for my needs.
I emailed Microsoft to get my domain removed from their blacklist and it worked within 48 hours. Aslong as my domain has it’s correct security settings I no longer go to spam. Gmail didn’t seem to care as much.
Zoho mail has a domain hosting platform for email. About £60 pa in dollars for my setup. Pricing varies on the number of accounts not the number if domains. I have two accounts, personal and business, and a control admin account. The domains I host vary according to the businesses I run. I funnel each domains email to one of the two accounts and reply with the appropriate domain easily. Personal email is masked with Addy.io mostly.
They deal with the email very well. There was a time that they really didn’t and the system went up and down like a tarts knickers.
The front end is ok. They play with it a lot and there are many screens pushing some shit or other before you actually are allowed to get to the inbox. The inbox setup is excellent with all the expected functionality and toys and many toys appearing monthly.
Typical of Indian continent companies, as a Brit who has spent much of his life frustrated on the phone to “Dave” from Mumbai with a really really thick accent, Zoho don’t really seem to understand concepts properly, so their passkeys setup doesn’t work with Bitwarden. TOTP 2FA cannot be just pasted in (from Bitwarden again) because they’ve tried to be flash with the input field and one has to click on a specific place first. The support team try really hard, but their ability to grasp the problem and fix it is lacking before some other buzzword catches marketing’s attention and they add yet another screen to click through or subvert the problem somewhere else. Their help knowledge base is enormous, well documented but unorganized and they don’t archive stuff that has been superceded, so be careful.
That said I’ve been using them for well over a decade and have no plans to change.
Running your own mail server ceased to be a hobby thing when RBLs came in. Use a provider with the resources to do the hard/cumbersome stuff.
I’d give Zoho mail an easy 7/10. And it’s cheap. Zoho invoice is great too.
Was about to suggest Zoho myself. I have a couple of personal domain email hosted there and they’ve been very reliable until now
Been trying out Zoho for my martial arts club and it works great. Want to convince my partner to move our home business away from office 365 to it as I have no end of trouble with Microsoft’s offering. Just this week she couldn’t access our main inbox because of a known issue with shared mailboxes. No solution but to wait it out. Great feeling to rely on something like this for your income…
I hosted my email on a home Exchange server last century before finally settling on Zoho so can sympathise!
I should also say that my setup is backed with Google cloud DNS.
I can’t honestly say that I’ve had any problems with Zoho collecting/sending email for years. It’s the general admin side that causes consternation - adding a domain, forwarding, lists, where the f I set up an email address!
Hosting domain email for other customers is really easy too should the need arise.
The free version should be more than enough. I’ve been using them with my family domain for 2 years, and I no regrets, and no payments 😍
Zoho will give you 5 email addresses (users) for free with your own domain. You won’t be able to use IMAP or POP3, but it’s well worth it at 0.00
If need unlimited cheap accounts: MXroute. Sometimes he does lifetime promos. For webmail he has a custom version of roundcube with some paid plugins that have a Gmail like skin or another paid webmail like crossover. He used to offer afterlogic webmail but then stopped “because nobody’s using that and it’s hard to set for alias domains”. Pity because I liked the aesthetic. Can set forwarding from unlimited aliases to Gmail but this is monitored. If you receive (and forward) too much spam or use it to send thousands of useless activity notifications, he’s going to block or throttle that because he wants to keep his sender reputation high. For example he doesn’t forward any email from Facebook or Wordfence notifications
If need a single inbox: Zoho mail. Can set a catch all on unlimited alias domains that goes in the same inbox. And if a specific address needs to be blocked, for example you signed up to temu using temu@example.com and then they’re bombarding you with endless spam and ignoring your stop requests, you can set to reject all emails directed to that temu@ account. Emails can be forwarded but only if you set a custom filter in the web mail, it’s a bit limited
I am paying for both, monthly for Zoho and a lifetime for mxroute (lifetime = mxroute it’s a single man operation, so it’s not my lifetime rather… *KNOCKS WOOD*)
Have you looked into Purely mail? This is what I use for my custom email needs. I don’t remember all the pros and cons, but the big one that scares most people off is it’s run by one guy. So if something happens to him, you’re potentially SOL. You could probably migrate to a new service, but could potentially be a huge pain.
Would be a pain, but you can’t beat the cost. For sending out email where you don’t care about retaining, it works VERY well.
Migadu has been amazing. It “”just works,”and there’s no reason to deal with any of the crap that comes with hosting email.
They are affordable, and provide exactly what they claim to provide.
Email is not - IMHO - worth the trouble to self host. There are too many hard stops where email is required as login, etc to bother.
I enjoy hosting and using a variety of services. But I’ve no desire to bother with something I can ship out to folks who live and breathe that particular service.
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https://mxroute.com/ or https://www.fastmail.com/
I picked up a cheap lifetime account on mxroute a while back and have been pretty happy with it.
PurelyMail is popping too
If you use Namecheap for email domain(s) you may want to consider also splurging for their PremiumDNS to keep your domain(s) off spam blocks at other email providers.
I help maintain some emails at Gmail/Google Workspace but the domains themselves are at Namecheap. For a while there were complaints that some emails never landed in other people’s inboxes… this led me to talk about the issue with one of the email provider recipients based in the UK & apparently they were null routing anything coming from Namecheap since they felt a lot of spam came from them. But after some experimenting I figured out their system (& probably others) were figuring out they were Namecheap domains via the default FreeDNS they use. On a hunch I switched those domains over to PremiumDNS and after that all our emails were landing in other inboxes correctly. I guess maybe it makes sense, a typical spammer buying a cheap domain at Namecheap isn’t going to splurge for the higher end DNS service for it.
I’m not saying all email providers treat Namecheap domains as spam but just be warned there definitely ones out there that do.
I don’t understand how this could be the issue.
If you’re using Google Workspace, Google will give you the appropriate DMARC, DKIM and SPF records to add to your DNS. The NS themselves should resolve the records and provide the recipient server with the values you’ve entered, thereby ensuring delivery.
Does the free DNS on NameCheap no longer allow certain types of records? Aren’t those mail specific DNS records all just TXT/CNAME records now (no more weird legacy SPF record type), which are fairly basic and typical?
If you’re using Google Workspace, Google will give you the appropriate DMARC, DKIM and SPF records to add to your DNS. The NS themselves should resolve the records and provide the recipient server with the values you’ve entered, thereby ensuring delivery.
Sure. But why would that matter when you’re dealing with hostile 3rd party email providers that intentionally want to blackhole all email domains at Namecheap? But yes, just to clarify I do configure DMARC/DKIM/SPF and that works great for most cases.
I’m just describing what worked for me though in truth I don’t know exactly how these hostile email providers actually determine the domain is hosted at Namecheap. My hunch is that they are using a lookup & finding the nameserver for the domain & have already blacklisted Namecheap’s default free nameserver IP addresses. For whatever reason those same hostile email providers don’t seem to be blacklisting Namecheap’s paid nameserver but I think that sort of makes sense…
The larger issue is that Namecheap is known for cheap domains that scammers/spammers tend to buy in bulk & then use to spam with. Those same scammers/spammers aren’t trying to spend extra money so they only ever use the default free Namecheap nameservers.
No it does not make any sense. There are literally thousands of domain registrars out there; almost every single last one of them will offer free DNS service with registration. Also, more specifically speaking, DNS provider host provider look up is not even part of email delivery flow.
The most well known spam registrar is GoDaddy as they spam ads everywhere, and everyone and their third cousin’s dogs know about them. NameCheap is a large registrar but isn’t that big of a fish comparatively speaking. But, regardless, blocking any registrars that size the way you’re describing would break way more businesses and hurt the recipient provider’s own reputation. This honestly starting to sound more and more like a smear campaign as opposed to anything grounded in actual technology.
But, regardless, blocking any registrars that size the way you’re describing would break way more businesses and hurt the recipient provider’s own reputation.
Yeah I thought that too but when speaking with the email admin that was blocking Namecheap while figuring this out they had already decided it wasn’t worth trying to allow the 1% of valid emails vs the 99% spam emails they felt they received via Namecheap domains.
This honestly starting to sound more and more like a smear campaign
Smear against whom? I’m a Namecheap customer, just relaying my own experiences using them. Besides that quirk I like them fine as a registrar… I know it sounds dumb but I even renewed my domains there even after those email issues.
It’s fine, you don’t need to believe me as I said it’s just my own experience using Namecheap domains for emails. But you could just google around, you’ll see plenty of people discussing Namecheap & looking for solutions to block them (or solutions to successfully send emails with hem)… it’s not something I randomly made up if that’s what you’re implying.
e.g.
https://community.spiceworks.com/t/blocking-emails-based-on-registrar/816565
https://tacit.livejournal.com/608386.html
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/05/why-do-scammers-love-namecheap/
https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/13t6fvm/namecheaps_private_email_is_blacklisted_by/
https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/wlb6vp/namecheap_making_it_too_easy_to_register_domains/
https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/tz4mkb/my_emails_are_always_going_in_the_spam_folder_of/
https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/ye358x/i_am_getting_a_ton_of_spam_scams_from_namecheap/
etc.
The name servers themselves is not part of the equation. The commonality in all those linked are sending emails from Namecheap’s shared hosted email/website, not name servers. Sending email from shared hosted email/website is asking for trouble, doesn’t matter who you’re hosting with, because those IP range are always abused, especially with the larger providers, simply due to a larger exposure. The detection mechanism here is really simple and observable via raw mail headers by checking the
Received:line. Filtering emails from this information here is a typical part of the anti-spam model. A typical implementation would be via DNSBL providers such as Spamhaus, Sorbs and alike. The solution is always to use trusted transaction email services to deliver email from the website instead.That, however, is a very different problem than the dedicated email services like Google Workspace Gmail, because you’d not be sending from your web server’s IP address, but rather via Google’s dedicated range. As such, the
Recevied:line is much less likely to yield a match in DNSBLs. Validation for these are then done via the SPF/DKIM/DMARC records on your domain, checking if your configuration permits delivery from server at theRecevied:line (look forReceived-SPF) and whether or not you have the appropriate signing (look forAuthentication-Results:and bits about the various stages of DKIM and DMARC).
One of these days I’ll get around to setting up my own email server, but in the meantime I just take advantage of introductory offers on shared hosting plans. I purchase the 3-year plans and end up paying about $3-4/mo (CAD). When the plan is nearing expiry, I take my data and move on to the next web host. Been doing this for about 28 years now.
mailbox.org is 3€/month or 30€/year if you bring your own domain.
