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If anyone's considering moving their email addresses over this, please take the time to get your own custom domain to host email on. That way you can switch pro

• jchw 8y ago
  Yandex offers custom domains similar to G Suite, for free. So if people want a free option, even just to try this concept out, I can say that is a formidable option.
  • rgbrenner 8y ago
    If you have a problem with AU's law, I don't see how moving it to Russia is an improvement.
    • x0x0 8y ago
      Russia is unlikely to cooperate with the US government for the foreseeable future.
    • jchw 8y ago
      Valid concern, but I'm mostly pointing this out in the context of the parent comment. Emphasis on the fact that it's free, and may be a decent stepping stone for those interested in custom domain email.
    • webmobdev 8y ago
      Well, you can be sure that Russia won't share your data with the US or UK unlike the Aussies! ;)
• fvargas 8y ago
  I only took a brief look, but I like the premise. The service seems far from something I would trust with handling my email. I still trust Fastmail (for reference). But I strongly welcome more alternatives to Gmail and services which prioritize user privacy. The attempt at monetization strikes me as extremely premature, given the competition. But I hope to see more.
  • frutiger 8y ago
    Paying for GSuite (as you are for Fastmail) would also equally respect your privacy.
    • techsupporter 8y ago
      The problem is the level of trust. I don't trust Google, as an advertising company with a side business of technology, to keep its paws off of user data even in "anonymous" form. That's not malice; it's just temptation. There's way too much to gain, from Google's perspective, and comparatively little to lose by not keeping that wafer-thin wall intact. FastMail, et al, alternatively aren't primarily engaged in the advertising business so they'd see a very small return from violating that trust and massive losses, so the gain/loss relationship is inverted.
      • gaadd33 8y ago
        Do you think that Google would intentionally violate their contracts with various huge companies (Broadcom, BBVA, Colgate-Palmolive, etc) gain a little bit more advertising revenue? If nothing else the personal lawsuits for securities fraud against executives would be a huge deterrent.
        • larkeith 8y ago
          I strongly doubt that they would, but it should be noted that them doing so would be extremely difficult to prove, and even harder to identify in the first place.
        • deleted 8y ago
• anotherevan 8y ago
  Some DNS providers, along with things like HTTP forwarding, provide email forwarders as well. To you can set-up yourname@yourdomain.com to forward to your 'real' mailbox address. I've done this for years, with it forwarding to my gmail account. I never actually send an email of the @gmail.com variety.
  • Sendotsh 8y ago
    But you can't send "from" your address with that method. Replying sends from your Gmail.
    • anotherevan 8y ago
      Yes you can. You have to jump through a couple of hoops to get there, but you can. Look for "Send Mail As" under "Accounts and Import". If you have to put in SMTP details, put in gmail's own SMTP server.
      • PakG1 8y ago
        I think that's the point. People who don't trust Google don't want their emails going through Google's mail servers.
        • anotherevan 8y ago
          Sigh. I think we're drifting off topic. Back to my original comment, some DNS providers offer mail forwarding as a service for your domain. It can forward to any email account/mailbox. e.g. Fastmail or ProtonMail or whoever. I just happen to use to to forward to a gmail account. I think mentioning that was my mistake given the current sentiment as it distracted from the point I was trying to make. @Sendotsh then pointed out what he thought was a limitation in using Gmail this way, which I responded to, and here we are. :-)
      • OkGoDoIt 8y ago
        This is the exact same setup I have. Main downside is if I use a third-party email client like Outlook or iPhone’s built-in mail app, I can’t select the from address. Which means I have to use Gmail‘s horrible iOS app which doesn’t seem to work offline or cache anything locally. Still the best overall setup I’ve found, but far from perfect.
• rovyko 8y ago
  https://purelymail.com/signup/ https://purelymail.com/signup/ Am I missing something? The domain dropdown has no options and all usernames are taken.
  • erinnh 8y ago
    It says the following on that page: >You can add more users (and any domains you own) later if you need them! >If you later add custom domains, you can reset your account with those too!
  • Felz 8y ago
    Yup, I completely messed up there. I just bought a couple of cute domain names, but apparently completely forgot that the production database is not the development database. It's fixed now, sorry.
• bravura 8y ago
  So I'm in the market for this, but what if you shut down while I'm on vacation and not checking my email? I know that fastmail will be in business in two years, but I'm not so sure about you. If you offered some sort of auto-backup option, so that even if you went down I could take my mail elsewhere, that would be more compelling.
  • gaadd33 8y ago
    Does Fastmail offer an auto-backup option? Or any other email provider?
    • brongondwana 8y ago
      You can auto-download from just about anywhere that provides standard IMAP access!
      • ascar 8y ago
        Even POP3 should suffice for backups. It downloads the complete emails by default anyway :)
        • brongondwana 8y ago
          POP3 is tricky when you use server-side rules to file emails into multiple folders. You can use + login to fetch each folder individually, but IMAP is definitely nicer to work with. And of course JMAP is coming!
      • ocdtrekkie 8y ago
        Bron, I do (kinda) take backups of my FastMail account via an Outlook sync occasionally, but I'd really much rather you also had a Takeout-esque "one and done" download that included calendar and contact data and all. For my major online accounts, I like keeping an archive of these, compressed and dated. Is there any chance FastMail will implement this anytime soon?
    • dannysu 8y ago
• brongondwana 8y ago
  As Fastmail, we also recommend that people get their own domain. Being able to move is prudent regardless of how good any one host is! Own your own namespace :) We would rather keep people because we're good, not because they're locked in.
  • duiker101 8y ago
    For what it's worth, it's been a few years since I started moving from gmail to Fastmail and I couldn't be happier.
    • brongondwana 8y ago
      Thanks for that :) We appreciate you!
      • setquk 8y ago
        Another happy customer here! Incidentally this does not worry me as I don't use email for any secure or private communications and I don't think anyone ever should. At best any warrants will get a list of crap I've bought on Amazon and Aliexpress.
        • mediocrejoker 8y ago
          I get that email was not originally designed to be secure, but do you really not want to keep your amazon account, with your credit card number and home address, secure and private?
          • setquk 8y ago
            My amazon account has 2FA enabled on it.
      • tigroferoce 8y ago
        Me too. Custom domain on FastMail. I'm not (too much) worried about AU's search warrants. My original move from gmail was because I got annoyed by the Google approach to everything. This said, if you happen to move the servers in a more privacy-friendly country I'd not complain.
• OkGoDoIt 8y ago
  It’s awesome that you’re providing an affordable service for custom email domains, but it’s worth pointing out that Zoho has free email for custom domains. There’s plenty of good reasons people choose different email providers, but if cost is your main concern, then you’re competing with free.
  • Tor3 8y ago
    According to Zoho's web site they don't have a free option. The cheapest one is one euro/month per user - not expensive, but not free.
    • dpfu 8y ago
      There is a free plan on their pricing page [0], but this free tier is web access only. [0] https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html
      • newscracker 8y ago
        And because it's web access only, portability of email data is impossible (or crude and cumbersome).
    • r3bl 8y ago
      Scroll a bit down and you'll see a "free plan" (above the FAQ). It's not that easy to find, but it's there. As long as you don't care about using third-party clients (free plan has IMAP/SMTP disabled), it's a viable option. I've used it for a year or two before I've switched to FastMail and it worked fine.
  • ams6110 8y ago
    I once spent an evening trying to establish an account on Zoho. It never worked. Free is not free if it requires hours of your time and causes frustration.
• ascar 8y ago
  I'm a little bit skeptical, because you present very little information. Maybe it's all in the signed-in area? 1. I don't see anything about DMARC (DKIM, SPF) setup for your users. Do you provide DMARC? 2. Do you use shared ip's for all your users? If yes, how do you make sure my emails don't land in spam-filters, because of other users behaving badly? 3. Do you have a system in place and already experience to behave differently to different email hosters (e.g. send emails differently to gmail, yahoo or gmx)? 4. Do you provide spam-filters for incoming emails? 5. Do you provide support for email encryption and signatures (might be trivial, because it's part of the client, not sure about this one)? 6. What are your availability and reliability guarantees? What is your average/90%/99% delivery time and how often do you eventually drop an email? Will you inform me, when that happens? 7. How do you store my emails? Is strong encryption in place? These are questions that I would want to have answered before signing up for such a service and they are the things that distinguish you from simply self-hosting emails for that money. It's also the reasons why I sometimes have to get emails from friends using their own domain from the spam-filter. Sending emails is way harder than most people think (source: have worked in email infrastructure of a company sending billions of emails per month). Problems come especially, because email response codes are used differently across email hosters and it gets especially tricky when multiple independent users send emails over the same ip.
  • Felz 8y ago
    1. We require SPF, but don't have DKIM/DMARC yet. DKIM as far as I can tell doesn't actually... do... anything, but I need to look closer. 2. Same way anyone does it, I'd assume. Shared IPs, rate limits on sending, banning users who send spam emails. I'll likely need to hone exact approaches more. 3. Not that I know of? The mailserver I'm using might handle that. 4. Yea, fairly generic Spamassassin setup that I'm tuning. 5. I think signatures work through Roundcube, and maybe clientside encryption too. 6. I don't have SLAs yet (it's a beta!). My architecture allows for continuous deployment with no planned downtime, though. Delivery from gmail -> my servers and back seems to take about a minute as far as I know, but I can't answer the delivery time metrics without more data. You should get a bounce email on final delivery failure, which should take a maximum of about 208 minutes. 7. They're stored encrypted and compressed in S3, with an encryption key based off of a derivative of your password. Specifically: The encryption is AES/GCM with a per-message key encrypted by a libsodium crypto box, whose private key can be retrieved with a derivative of the user's password. The bucket also has AES-256 encryption in place. Good questions! I'm going to work on documentation tomorrow. And yea, I realize that sending emails is going to suck.
• csomar 8y ago
  For $50, FastMail gives you 25 Gb. That would cost $14 on your service. But they do not charge for sending/receive emails (which I think is stupid). So we are looking at 14 + 4 +1 = $19 before you even send/receive emails. I just did a quick look and it looks like I receive around 6000-7000 email a year. Most of it is advertising and notifications (that doesn't count SPAM emails which are countless and I hope you don't charge for). That's an extra 1.4 bucks. I send around a thousand emails a year. That might seem much but it is actually very low. It is only 3 emails per day and you can do much more if you use email for personal and work. That's an extra 4 bucks. So total is $24.4 assuming you stop your billing there. That's half of FastMail offering for a beta product which from the looks of it offer not interface. I might come off as rude but I think you need to remove the pay-as-you-go billing and just bill something reasonable for a whole year. Plus offer something more than "Just Email"; like have a differentiating feature like security or privacy.
  • Felz 8y ago
    The thing about actually using Fastmail's 25 GB for $50 is that if you go even slightly over, you're going to need a $90 plan. Most users aren't going to use anything near that amount, especially since our compression is pretty good. (I'm not sure if Fastmail's 25 GB count is compressed or not.) You're right that I need to add more value. My planned direction is more along the lines of utility than security/privacy, which I think Protonmail covers pretty well. There's a lot of interesting value-add to be done in email. The pricing is more that we offer honest pay-as-you-go pricing, with caps to make sure you don't actually get a ruinous charge, in direct contrast to "billing something reasonable for a whole year". If you'd rather do the former, then yeah! You're really well covered in the email space already. But I think people are getting subscription fatigue, where every service imaginable wants its $5/month cut of the pie.
    • sundvor 8y ago
      I have a currently very low usage domain that I feel I'm paying Fastmail a fair bit for. I wouldn't mind if I was using it a bit more actively but presently I'm not. I'll sign up to your service shortly; it would be very economical with my current usage!
• randunel 8y ago
  Zoho Mail is free, thus a "cheaper" custom domain email provider than your "cheapest" paid service, which charges per email received (wtf?!) and sent (i guess..).
  • newscracker 8y ago
    As someone else pointed out here, Zoho Mail is web access only on the free tier. So you cannot move your emails to another provider unless you pay. So it's not really free in every sense.
  • throwaway9d0291 8y ago
    For anyone thinking Zoho Mail might be a good idea based on this, I'll save you some time. From https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html: > Up to five users. > 5GB/User, 25MB attachment limit. > Web access only. Email hosting for single domain. That "Web access only" is pretty crippling.
• hellofunk 8y ago
  I've heard so many arguments against this, I don't know where to start. Make sure, for starters, that if you use a custom domain for your email, you use a registrar with stellar security practices, as opposed to Namecheap, Godaddy, and many others that have shown deep flaws with vulnerabilities to social engineering. Otherwise, once someone has access to your domain, they have access to your email, which is the keys to the kingdom.
  • fergbrain 8y ago
    What registrars would you suggest?
    • Ultramanoid 8y ago
      Gandi, Hover.
    • ekovarski 8y ago
      Cloudflare is in the DNS business now as well. It is pretty straight forward.
• hombre_fatal 8y ago
  Do you recycle emails like Fastmail once people stop paying?
  • Felz 8y ago
    Yes, which is part of why I recommend getting your own domain. (Although you gotta pay for that too.) Is that a big issue for you?
    • C14L 8y ago
      "Recycle"? Does that mean that abandoned email addresses are given again to other people? That would be terrible practice. Hope I misunderstood.
      • dingaling 8y ago
        All of the big commercial email providers do that.
        • aquabeagle 8y ago
          Google is perhaps the biggest commercial email provider and they never release old usernames. That would be a huge security problem.
          • LinuxBender 8y ago
            Google will not throw away any chance at regaining their lost product (you). So certainly, they are the exception. Without user data, Google would no longer provide email. If someone else starting using your identity, then their tracking, big-data and stats would be less useful.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • hombre_fatal 8y ago
      Of course. It's a security nightmare.
• montenegrohugo 8y ago
  I love the honesty on your website. I feel like I'm being treated as an adult. Signed up. Please don't change, even if you get much bigger.
  • Felz 8y ago
    Well, thanks. Feel free to let me know if you come across any issues. I'll definitely try not to become full of bullshit :). I hope it's not as inevitable as it seems. (It probably helps that there's no VC funding involved, and I can stay small.)
• tallanvor 8y ago
  Your pricing, while fairly transparent, is too complicated for most people to figure out what they would be paying. Even I'm put off by being charged based on the number of emails I receive - why should I pay extra if I get a lot of spam that should be caught by the spam filter? You have up to 6 different types of fees you're going to charge and no easy way for me to figure out what my numbers would end up looking like (Your $7.72 amount means nothing to me since I have no easy way to compare your estimates vs my usage).
  • deleted 8y ago
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• deleted 8y ago
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• qpery 8y ago
  THANK YOU for this, I will definitely check it out. The pricing of most email platforms, including FastMail, is simply ridiculous. And if you complain they'll tell you that, well, all other platforms cost rougly the same! It's basically an oligopoly.
  • Felz 8y ago
    Yea, that was my reaction too some months ago when I was looking to move away from gsuite, which was beginning to get ridiculously slow and expensive. (Seriously, what is gmail _doing_?) We have this weird dichotomy in services pricing that's either free or pretty expensive. If you're a free customer, you're not a customer. You're a potential customer in need of sales. And everyone is looking for the features they can put behind a pricing gate. Let me know if you run into any issues!
• x0x0 8y ago
  Fastmail is the best webmail outside gmail. Fastmail provides webmail that is faster to sync than gmail (seriously; I use fastmail for personal and gsuite for work all day); a calendar; and a nice little notes utility. Be warned it's fidgety to sync fastmail calendar on android because you'll have to use a 3rd party app. But again, worth it to de-google your personal life.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• johnchristopher 8y ago
  > Let's get straight to the point: > We sell email. You do what with my mail ?
  • Felz 8y ago
    Hah, you're right- that's terrible phrasing.
• newscracker 8y ago
  I'm always on the lookout for email providers who protect privacy and are cheap. I have three suggestions for you. Firstly, as others have stated, your pricing is way too complicated for anyone to understand and figure out how much they would be charged. It would be better to make some assumptions and go with pricing based on account, aliases, storage, etc. Your current pricing is almost like one of those cloud service pricing calculators. Very nice in theory for paying based on usage, but practically next to impossible to make any sort of cost estimates on. Secondly, your privacy policy is very short and doesn't give a lot of comfort. Take a look at Posteo.de to see how privacy is handled. It's one of the best that I know of. On pricing, also compare with mailbox.org.
  • acqq 8y ago
    So where is posteo.de pricing and sign up? I can’t find it.
    • Xylakant 8y ago
      Sign up is in the header bar (Button named "Sign Up") and a second option is in about the middle of the start page. Pricing is mentioned both on the signup page and on the start page, starts at 1 EUR/month.
      • acqq 8y ago
        Using smaller iphone, sign up is nowhere. Not in the hamburger, nowhere else.
  • Felz 8y ago
    Thanks for the suggestions! I'll look at the privacy policy again and see how I can make it more clear that we're not abusing users' trust. I did look at mailbox.org. It's about double for their lowest monthly plan, which is reasonable. Where I hope Purelymail will shine is that it scales a lot more naturally (once you hit mailbox.org's 2 GB cap, you upgrade to a plan that's 2.5x more expensive), it enables use cases that'd get you frowny faces from other providers (because we charge appropriately), and there's no surcharge for things that don't actually cost more. Want a dozen usernames? Sure, whatever. Need a hundred users? Sure. Store 2 TB of mail for some reason? We've got you covered. The downside, as you point out, is that the pricing gets a bit scary and I need to work on making it feel safer.
• proyb 8y ago
  I’m yet to hear if anyone using WorldPosta which is competitive and using MS Exchange
• wvh 8y ago
  I am paying for personal email, internet connectivity, virtual servers and other services, and I don't think I would ever use such a service for personal purposes that isn't flat-rate. I don't actually use a lot of resources; I just wouldn't want abuse, security issues or other irregularities to threaten my ability to eat. I'm not sure it's a winning proposition to have variable rate email services aimed at individuals or small companies. People prefer to know up front what something costs, and I imagine they even rather pay double or triple the "real cost" if it means they don't have to think about it any more.
• JunkDNA 8y ago
  I am on google’s grandfathered free tier for my domain. Recently it has gotten annoying with new google products since they have to be supported by g-suite for you to use them. So I recently was shopping around for a new host. Basically I’m a non-business user who is probably in your target market. As others have said, your pricing is unpredictable and hard to compute. As I’m evaluating you with competitors, I’m not going to invest the time. In my experience, when a company makes it hard to know what you’re actually going to end up paying, you usually end up paying more than you want (see: Verizon). From a business perspective, it seems to me your value proposition is that you are striving to be the cheapest email provider. I think you should consider the kind of customer this attracts. The sort of person who thinks a few dollars a month per email address is too expensive is going to be high maintenance. If you want this to be sustainable, I think you need a different angle. Consider that all these other email providers basically charge around the same amount. That isn’t an accident. I don’t know the email business, but I assume it needs a certain margin to actually be sustainable and these guys have landed in the right ballpark. If you’re looking for business customers, then your pricing is basically rounding error compared to the other guys. It’s not materially different enough to matter for a business of any reasonable size to be worth having as a customer. In fact, the lack of predictability is a major deterrent. Businesses need to create budgets and every variable cost adds to the complexity of the forecast.
  • gnrl 8y ago
    Look into migadu. :-)
  • rkangel 8y ago
    > Recently it has gotten annoying with new google products since they have to be supported by g-suite for you to use them Interesting - which products has this been an issue for? I'm on the same grandfathered GSuite deal and used to have this problem, but haven't in a while.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • Spooky23 8y ago
• asdkhadsj 8y ago
  Can anyone comment on good/bad domain extensions? Ie, aren't some domain extensions bound by odd nation specific rules? Namely, the ones that represent countries that we like. I have a `.la` but I'm unsure if I want to put my email behind it. Thoughts?
  • Felz 8y ago
    I generally recommend .com. You can still get a pretty decent domain name if you try a bunch of options and put some thought into it. (It has to be 5 letters or above; I recently confirmed that every 4 letter or fewer domain name is taken.) .com has legitimacy, it's not going to have hiccups (some country code domain names are pretty iffy, like .io had issues a while back), and contracts with ICANN ensure it's not going to extort a huge price out of you.
    • asdkhadsj 8y ago
      Yea, perhaps I'll snag the .com version of me .la - I'm keeping my .la for naming reasons, but I just don't know if I want to bet email on it. Appreciate the comments, thanks.
• mike-cardwell 8y ago
  Have you tested your service using https://www.emailprivacytester.com https://www.emailprivacytester.com yet? I would do it myself, but you don't seem to have a free tier
• ekovarski 8y ago
  You need to make the pricing much much simpler - less math acrobatics = less friction in the decision process for the customer. Take a look at Migadu as an example of simple pricing - how many emails do you need to send per day? Many of your pricing components are items that most users will simply not know at the onset of the signup process to make a valid comparison.
• tzs 8y ago
  > If anyone's considering moving their email addresses over this, please take the time to get your own custom domain to host email on. That way you can switch providers more easily and actually own your email address. Seconded. I'd also add make that domain a .com, .net, or .org. Yes, some of the other TLDs are cheaper, especially since they started making TLDs for almost everything. But spammers have jumped all over those, using them in from and return addresses. I suspect that a fair number of people have black holed email from entire TLDs due to this. I know I have. I'm currently dropping all email from domains under: accountant, bid, christmas, click, club, cricket, date, download, faith, gdn, gq, help, info, link, loan, men, party, press, pro, racing, review, science, site, space, stream, team, top, trade, uno, webcam, website, win, work, xyz, and zone.
• deleted 8y ago
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• philistine 8y ago
  I just need a quick and dirty redirect. I suppose your webmail client supports that, right?
  • Felz 8y ago
    It should support that through Sieve (filters, basically). If you want to redirect a whole domain, that's a routing level function.