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Oh cool, my project is on HackerNews! I was wondering about the sudden uptick in user signups, and then I checked HN... I'm Scott, feel free to ask me anything
by Felz 5y ago
Oh cool, my project is on HackerNews! I was wondering about the sudden uptick in user signups, and then I checked HN...
I'm Scott, feel free to ask me anything about the service.
- rolleiflex 5y agoGreat work, and as somebody who self hosted my own email from 2013 to 2021, I don’t envy you. What broke me down was Google starting to spam my emails that were replies to conversations that I did not start — even with a stellar domain reputation and DKIM, SPF, reverse DNS, greylisting, everything set up right. I hope you have personal contacts on the Gmail team at Google, much as I’d like for this to be a joke.
- Felz 5y agoI actually haven't had huge problems with Google (yet). I'm not sure why.
- rolleiflex 5y agoMy experience has been cyclical, as long as you stick to IPv4 with good SPF and your reverse DNS works it will work 95% of the time. The remaining 5% appears to be completely random however. It’s possible that my issue was too low a traffic to ‘hold onto’ my score with Gmail, since it was one domain and one email address. With some luck you should be able to have enough traffic to avoid that. Best of luck.
- techsupporter 5y agoI had this exact same problem. When I finally got hold of someone who worked for Google (via a friend of a friend on a mailing list) and with the ability to check whatever their logs were claiming, I was informed that my domain's reputation was "too recent" or something like that. My domain is a year older than Google itself and has been in continuous use for e-mail that whole time. The IP addresses it is on haven't changed in a decade. But that didn't matter. DKIM, SPF, DMARC, forward and reverse matching DNS, exactly four users who do not send spam under penalty of being buried under legal solicitations for green cards, and all the rest didn't help. Randomly getting sent to /dev/null for no good reason. And not enough traffic to qualify me to use their Postmaster utilities. Three years ago I gave up and ported to Fastmail with a tear in my eye for the days when even the smallest net on the Internet could be a full participant.
- detritus 5y agoSame here - I HAD to move over to Fastmail because like GP I'd respond to email enquiries from GMail addresses and then never hear back. After weeks of this, someone finally phoned up to complain about my poor customer service. This despite also having an old and apparently well set-up domain. I lost a lot of business back then. Thanks, Google.
- donmcronald 5y agoI have a legacy GSuite account. Google filters email from Facebook and Microsoft sometimes. Hell, I think I might have even seen them filter their own mail once. It’s a clown show. The opaque filters are just an excuse to engage in anti-competitive behavior IMO.
- mcintyre1994 5y agoTo be fair Facebook used to send an enormous amount of spam emails, at least to me. Years ago when I used it somewhat regularly they used to constantly shuffle their contact preferences and the effect was that I was constantly opted back in to an insane amount of emails. Eventually I just started marking them as spam until Gmail blocked everything they send. I've seen family Email addresses fairly recently full of Facebook junk too so I assume they still default to sending a lot.
- vogon_laureate 5y agoI really enjoyed the whole process of running my own mail setups, configuring Postfix or OpenSMTPd to do clever aliases and transports, setting up CARP failover relays, managing DNS records, experimenting with different SPAM-filtering techniques, SSL, IMAP, mailing lists, the works. It taught me a lot about networking and security and everything a good sysadmin should know. I find it sad that that‘s pretty much a waste of time now for most use cases.
- sersi 5y agoI ended up doing the same for the exact same reason. And even when using fastmail, my email still sometimes gets blocked.
- c0l0 5y agoFTR, directed at those who valiantly continue to self-host mail/SMTP: Greylisting is not sound any more in this day and age, because the largest mail services will rarely, if ever, use the same MTA instance to retry delivery upon a soft bounce. The good news is that if you have postfix, using postscreen with an informed choice of blocklists is enough to deal with 99%+ of inbound spam. You can strap in rspamd or spamassassin/amavis behind that, but it's mostly not needed. The inbound-mail-problems are largely solved, but surefire delivery to other parties is a matter of IPaddr/domain reputation, properly implementing relevant standards, and luck. If you're interested in learning more about (including, but not limited to, self-hosting) email, the #email channel on the libera.chat IRC network is a great resource to ask questions.
- arp242 5y ago> FTR, directed at those who valiantly continue to self-host mail/SMTP: Greylisting is not sound any more in this day and age, because the largest mail services will rarely, if ever, use the same MTA instance to retry delivery upon a soft bounce. I had this issue with SendGrid years ago: long story short, after discussing with support and eventually an engineer it turns out they weren't just looking at the status codes, but at the status messages. I don't recall the exact patterns they used, but they will retry if the message matches a fixed set patterns, and otherwise it would just discard it. There was some back-and-forth over this, because our customer just had greylisting with the "wrong" error message. To be fair, they did turn it off for a few hours and took the conversation serious (none of this "we have passed it along", never to be heard from again) but they got back to us they turned it back on again "because the queues got too large". I mean .... okay.... Seems rather curious to break a fundamental aspect of email because "muh queues". Not having to worry about this sort of stuff is exactly why we're using SendGrid in the first place :-/ My experiences with MailGun were also not exactly stellar. At the time at least, these people literally did not understand how encodings worked and would mangle e.g. Greek or Hebrew emails in ISO-8869-7 or -8. Why? Well, turns out that "emails should be in ASCII or UTF-8 and there is no way for us to know which encoding is used". Ehh ... there is literally a header telling you... I sent a nice detailed email explaining this: no reply. Some follow-ups over the course of a few weeks: no reply. A not-so-nice snarky email inquiring whether the entire MailGun team was suffering from a horrible debilitating disease and if there was anything I could do to help: "well, we just didn't know what else to do as there is no way to solve this"... I'm hardly an "email purist"; I understand there are practical concerns and the RFC isn't a stone tablet from the mountain. But this was just ridiculous. There are a bunch of other cases both SendGrid and MailGun are actually quite bad at. Dealing with email providers is always a frustrating experience.
- homero 5y agoHow are you doing that trial proof of work?
- Felz 5y agoHash-based proof of work: https://github.com/ScottPeterJohnson/hashwall https://github.com/ScottPeterJohnson/hashwall Same idea as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash Similar idea to cryptocurrencies.
- chaz6 5y agoTwo questions from me:- Usernames on shared domains: 1 to 6 letters: $1.00 per user per year 7 to 12 letters: $0.25 per user per year 13+ letters: $0.10 per user per year 1. Why does the length of a mailbox name make a difference? 2. Do you support IPv6?
- nine_k 5y agoShorter emails are more catchy, and their total possible number is smaller. So they can be more valuable. boss@example.com is cooler for some than john.n.johnson.2@example.com, and they will pay.
- forgotmypw17 5y agoI think there is also another reason: Shorter addresses receive more spam and spam attempts from guessers.
- Felz 5y ago1. Basically what nine_k said. It's kind of a trivial point most of the time- honestly might be a bit overpriced right now. 2. Not at the moment- IPV6 support is a little dicier for mailservers because the scarcer IPV4 address is often used as a antispam signal.
- chaz6 5y agoBut if I am using my own domain, what difference does it make if it is more "valuable"? Sadly the lack of IPv6 is a deal breaker for me.
- koselig 5y agoOh I think there's some confusion here: for your own domains it doesn't cost anything extra, so go nuts with addresses. Purelymail also has some domains you can use like I can get "koselig@purelymail.com" and then I'm charged in the 7 letters tier for it. At least that's how it's been for me as a happy user of PM for the past year and a half.
- Crazyontap 5y agoHow do you do spam blocking? I think Gmail really shines at this. It's one of the reason I was thinking of switching to Hey email also, though after reading Hey's reviews I've decided not to. So anyway, would love some comments from users or you about how good you are at separating the wheat from the chaff.
- Felz 5y agoI think SpamAssassin (plus curated greylisting) does a decent job most of the time, although I'm starting to see weird issues with spurious DNSWL tests that pass through pretty spammy mail. In the long run I'm probably going to replace the Bayesian part of SpamAssassin with something custom, simply because operationally it's painful and I think neural nets are closer to state of the art.
- pkulak 5y agoHey has bad reviews now? Huh. I really enjoy it.
- stanislavb 5y agoGood job, Scott! This is Stan from SaaSHub. I'll be featuring Purelymail on next week's newsletter of SaaSHub. It's a good moment to verify the listing and improve the details.
- Felz 5y agoCool! I'll make a note of it on my task list (I think I still have the old task on there too, which is nothing against SaaShub, I was preoccupied).
- postiecard 5y agoLooks great! Supporting ManageSieve is a nice touch. Most sieve services only allow managing sieve through a web UI. I use Fastmail and like that they contribute to open source mail servers, and do standards work (JMAP). Does PurelyMail contribute to open source?
- Felz 5y agoIn general yes I do contribute to open source, although there's not too much to contribute back to open source _yet_, so the main contribution has just filing Roundcube bugs. (The main mailserver code has diverged too much from Apache James to really be useful.) Some of the libraries I wrote are open sourced and on my Github account, e.g. the web framework: https://github.com/ScottPeterJohnson/shade https://github.com/ScottPeterJohnson/shade
- brongondwana 5y agoHey cool - glad to see James being used as well. Hopefully the JMAP support that Linagora have worked on will mean that you can bring JMAP eventually too. I hope you don't find the pain of diverging from the mainline to be too great. We kind of cheated there with Fastmail and Cyrus IMAP by merging all our changes back to the mainline, since there wasn't much other development happening.
- Felz 5y agoYea, I do plan on adding in JMAP. It's so much nicer than IMAP, I really do hope it can overcome the adoption hump.
- brongondwana 5y agoAwesome - do keep in touch while you're doing it. We have some documentation up at jmap.io but of course seeing the challenges that people face as they try to implement is always good for improving the documentation for the next round. (We're also working on JMAP for calendars and for contacts over in the IETF working groups - hoping to publish Calendars by the end of this year)
- fastball 5y agoWill sign up in a heartbeat as soon as you have CardDAV / CalDAV support!
- postiecard 5y agoConsider etesync, which offers client side encrypted Card/CalDAV. You can still use Purelymail for mail, and have your mail client provide a cohesive mail/contacts/calendar UI.
- Felz 5y agoWe do have CardDAV support, and hope to develop CalDAV soon :)
- brongondwana 5y agoGood luck with CalDAV - it's pretty hairy! I do recommend joining CalConnect if you have the budget for it - you get access to a lot of experts there. Or at least show up to the calsify mailing list at IETF, we're pretty friendly there too. The edge cases in Calendaring are a right pain.
- malinens 5y agoI would recommend using some existing opensource tool for that and not roll your own implementation
- pwrplus1 5y agoIf you don't mind separating your mail from your CalDAV there is https://fruux.com https://fruux.com (I use a paper diary, YMMV.)
- f1refly 5y agoI'm sorry if I missed it, but do you do catchall email service for custom domains? My current email provider (https://mailbox.org https://mailbox.org) limits email aliases per price plan, the most basic that I currently use allows for 3 + a free root@ and webmaster@. I'd probably be convinced to go through the hassle and switch providers if your service provides an improvement over this limit.
- merlinscholz 5y agoIIRC, mailbox supports catchall if you sacrifice one alias for it. You’d have to input „@domain.tld“ at the alias config menu.
- detaro 5y agomailbox.org supports catchall aliases.
- pwrplus1 5y agoYes you can have unlimited domains/aliases with catchalls and RFC 5233 subaddressing.
- Felz 5y agoYes, we have catchalls. We don't restrict how you route anything under your domain, and you can send from any email address you own.
- 5y ago
- a012 5y agoI just want to thanks for the service, I just need email for my personal stuffs and after hassles with self-hosted solution I gave up. The pricing is on point, I'm relying on the free Protonmail and their asking price is too high to me so I signed up for purelymail.
- maxk42 5y agoHey Scott - tell me how you got the word out about Purelymail? Obviously you reached the right audience and they liked what they saw to post it here and generate so much interest. Consider me another subscriber!
- Felz 5y agoSum total of my marketing efforts: One time I mentioned it in HN comments on a post about Fastmail, mostly because I was going to make a comment about owning your own email domain anyway. I am usually the classic "engineer who neglects marketing" archetype. Maybe at some point I'll overcome that.
- avipars 5y agoHow do you deal with spoofing?
- Felz 5y agoDepends on what you mean. Inbound email is checked for authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc) as part of the spam filter. For outbound email, we ask you to set up at least one of SPF or DKIM before you can send.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y agoOne thing is not very clear: how many custom domains can I have? Can I use 30 domains with 2 users each (random number, but i do need 3 domains). How is the mailbox on phone? My major problem with email hosting is the lack of a decent mailbox service that's available on. Windows, android, linux that's either. One-time-purchase or open source. A monthly fee is fine if for unlimited users (I have a family)
- Felz 5y agoYou can have as many domains/users as you want. (Unless it's like five billion and breaks the service or something.) Generally phone access is third party through IMAP. On Android I personally use K-9 mail, but you can use anything that supports IMAP anywhere, which is a pretty good number of options for any platform.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y agoThanks for the response, suddenly this makes it very interesting! I wish K-9 had snooze-email, it's the one feature (non-standard) I use a lot
- 1cvmask 5y agoIt seems you support TOTP as 2FA. Great job.
- eps 5y agoWhat provisions are in place to prevent someone from opening an account, use it to spam and then putting your IP block on a shitlist with large email providers like Gmail?
- Felz 5y agoRate limits, feedback loops, and we scan outgoing mail through SpamAssassin. In practice we've only had password breaches causing spam, nothing intentional.
- progx 5y agoIf a plane crash into your house while you stop the service for maintenance, how will the service be back again and can we access our mails? Sure, i use IMAP and have local copy and backup. But Murphy's law, my Laptop die at the same time and my backups were stolen.
- Felz 5y agohttps://purelymail.com/docs/companyPolicy#bus https://purelymail.com/docs/companyPolicy#bus Also, I generally don't stop the service for maintenance, unless I need to upgrade the database engine.
- bambax 5y agoSlightly OT, but what is the best practice to store (archive) email locally after they have been read from a remote imap server? 3 Gb is plenty for a few months of "live" email but after that what should we do to keep those emails -- and still have them searchable if need be?
- liotier 5y agoI keep everything remote, so that every client gets the whole corpus. For now, that means that indexing is done with notmuch whose command line I use for search... Not as good as a webmail's UI but it puts search results as a maildir so I can open them from any IMAP client as a special folder.
- bluedino 5y agoAre there any open-source projects similar to Barracuda’s Archiver product?
- f1refly 5y agoThunderbird has "local" accounts, you can move emails there and have them removed from your imap server. You can also export emails to .eml files, throw them wherever you like and grep for contents if you like.
- gkmcd 5y agoI have a local maildir[1] account in Evolution. Each of my (IMAP) mail accounts is set so the "archive" command moves the message to a folder under the maildir account (if you're using Evolution, this can be configured under "Defaults" in the account properties for each IMAP account). Anything worth keeping from any of my IMAP mail accounts is archived to the local maildir, everything else is deleted. The local maildir account is searchable like any other mailbox (I have about 10,000 messages going back to 2003). Syncthing[2] is configured to sync the maildir directory for backup and sync. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir [2]https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
- antihero 5y agoDo you support DKIM/SPF etc? Are these still useful?
- Felz 5y agoThey are still useful. One of DKIM or SPF is required to send emails on a custom domain. Both are recommended.
- desdiv 5y agoHey there, cool service. I signed up immediately. >You cannot have more than $50 in credit at any time. Just curious, why a $50 limit? I'm the weird kind of guy who likes to pay years in advance. If possible, please consider raising this limit to $100 or even $200.
- bovermyer 5y agoWhat happens if you die, get frozen in carbonite, or some other circumstance that prevents you from maintaining the service?
- Felz 5y agoLong run it'd probably get deprecated, short to medium run it'd be fine: https://purelymail.com/docs/companyPolicy#bus https://purelymail.com/docs/companyPolicy#bus
- nanis 5y agoWhen signing up for a trial, the page says: > To activate a trial account, you will need a reasonably modern browser and a phone number that can receive SMS texts. It makes no mention of the use of a "hashwall" ... It gives no indication of what the user's browser is going to do ... Just a progress meter with a note saying it will take about 3 minutes. This feels fishy. Especially if a user doesn't know how to get into the developer console, find out what's running etc. Just completed my signup. I am going to check if the domain that failed to work with forwardemail.net[1] will work with your service. If it does, then I'll say goodbye to my $36 and hello to your service. Update: While setting up, I noticed: - Ownership record content in `code.codebox` does not fit in the content area and extends entirely too far to the right. I had to inspect and copy out of developer tools. - In general, UI elements seem not properly aligned, contained. These are not deal breakers to me. The site might actually benefit from going more old school. Trying to fit everything in a narrow box with large font sizes and padding is hard. Update: I had already clicked on CloudFlare instructions. It's the friendly stuff that has the problems I mention above. The actual information at the bottom of the page is actually displayed the way I would have expected. Update: After creating the DNS records, I noticed the checks were still failing. So, I replaced the actual IDN in the textbox with punycode and the DNS checks worked. It would be a better user experience if the punycode conversion step was handled by the UI. Update: Created a new user on the custom domain. Login box does not accept IDN either but the email composer does show the from address using IDN instead of punycode. Update: I was able to exchange email with a Gmail user. Did not go to SPAM. But, in my reply, Gmail did give a scary warning about the IDN. To be clear, there is nothing the email provider can do about that :-) I'll try out a few more custom domains and very, very likely switch. Thank you and good luck. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27523038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27523038
- 725686 5y agoI clicked for a trial... after a while I entered my phone, received an SMS, and no indication of what to do with the code I received. No place to enter the code in the web page, nothing. Second attempt, and I got a place to put the code. Then, while I was filling up the registration data, the page refreshed and started all over. Third attempt finally worked... Not the best on-boarding experience, but hey it really is cheap!
- massung 5y agoScott, nice service! Two notes: 1. I don't know if it's the social media kiss of death at work, but I'm getting lots of SSL errors trying to load your site. It's a crap-shoot whether it works or not right now. 2. Seeing this post, I posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27711124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27711124. If you don't already (did I miss it?) it might be worth tossing up a page or an item in your FAQ teaching people about how they can go about migrating their email address to another/your service. I don't know how easy/hard it is (hence my AskHN post), but the perception is that it's nigh impossible to do.
- Felz 5y ago> 1. I don't know if it's the social media kiss of death at work, but I'm getting lots of SSL errors trying to load your site. It's a crap-shoot whether it works or not right now. Hard to say for sure. None of the servers really went above 15% average CPU and I don't think they maxed out net, and the health checker for HTTPS didn't have any problems. I'll doublecheck. On the subject of migration, I'll make a note to add a FAQ for that, thanks.
- creeble 5y agoI think you're typing purelyEmail.com, not purelymail.com.
- newscracker 5y agoI looked at your About, Security and Privacy pages. I see that you're using AWS, but which region/country/jurisdiction is that located in? Is it safe to presume that since the company is an LLC, the company as well as the AWS country are the U.S.?
- Felz 5y agoYes.
- crossroadsguy 5y agoIs it a one person show, or are there people, team, cofounders, and a company behind it?
- Felz 5y agoJust me- check the about page. (It is registered as a company too.)