4 ms·

TL;DR is: If you're interested in inexpensive email hosting for custom domains, consider OpenSRS. Recently Google stopped support for custom domains for free*,

TL;DR is: If you're interested in inexpensive email hosting for custom domains, consider OpenSRS. Recently Google stopped support for custom domains for free*, so I moved my domains recently for a similar reason. I have a couple domains and they all point back to a few mailboxes. Many of the services I looked at were going to charge me per domain per mailbox not just per mailbox so the prices were artificially high. I signed up as a domain reseller at OpenSRS and pointed my domain's MX entries over to them and... that was it. Super easy. This gets me a mailbox for $0.50 per 5gb per month. I have two real mailboxes, dozens of aliases spanning multiple domains, and an email forwarder (sending to certain addresses emails to both my wife and myself) for $1.10/mo. The negatives: * I've been spoiled by gmail's search capabilities. * I'm not a domain expert and not a mail admin, so I worried I was going to mess it up. I didn't, it wasn't terribly painful, you can do it. * I was told they didn't support plus addresses (jane+homedepot@example.com) so I purged my plus-address logins, only to find they really do support plus logins later. On desktop I use a normal imap client (their web email is decidedly spartan) and on my phone I still use the GMail App. The price beat the socks off of anyone else I had looked at and finally encouraged me to get off of GMail. * I'd been a "legacy" customer, and yes, they backtracked but by the time they *officially* agreed to keep supporting me I'd already needed to make a decision

drwl 4y ago
Have you tried this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793838#32797052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793838#32797052
- inanutshellus 4y ago
  Yes. The thing is, they announced they were "considering" a plan for personal-use domains but then didn't follow through until the switch over due date was almost upon us. They also obfuscated the path to acknowledge you were a personal-domain user. Obviously, they wanted everyone to just switch over to being a paying customer (which is shocking, I know, given that they're a business and all ;D). I figured if I was going to pay, I may as well do some research. I decided that, for my needs, the OpenSRS solution was a good fit and was a fraction of the price (~$1/mo vs ...$12ish/mo?). IIRC, about two weeks before the cutoff they finally and made it official and you could sign up for the personal-use domain. By that time I'd already gone to the effort of finding a new solution and was annoyed at the obfuscation tactics, so I went ahead and moved. ... but I also clicked that box, so all I have to do is point my MX records back to google and I'd be back on the juice.
nso 4y ago
I set up a gmail adress, and routed all my domains through CloudFlares new Email product. It's free, and lets you route email to as many addresses as you want (? I think...) to other adresses, in this case my Gmail account. I then set up my GMail account with one profile per incoming address, and to automatically use the corresponding address when replying.
- mdasen 4y ago
  How does replying work? Specifically, if you're sending email from MyCoolDomain.com and you don't have DKIM/SPF/etc., aren't you going to face potential deliverability issues? Or is Google sending the message as `nso@MyCoolDomain.com via nso@gmail.com` (and exposing your Gmail address in replies)? I guess you could specify Google's servers for SPF purposes without any coordination on Google's part, but Google would need to sign the message for things like DKIM. Do they do that for domains that you aren't actually connecting?
  - Namidairo 4y ago
    > Or is Google sending the message as `nso@MyCoolDomain.com via nso@gmail.com` (and exposing your Gmail address in replies)? Yeah the gmail account shows up in the headers as Return-path. Google don't DKIM sign it (there's a X-Google-DKIM-Signature header, but that's obviously ignored), so I think it'll still trigger DMARC if you have that setup. However, their SMTP servers should still reject other people sending on that address' behalf if they attempt to. It'll just bounce and send you an undeliverable mail along the lines of 'You no longer have access to blah@customdomain'

drwl 4y ago

Have you tried this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793838#32797052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793838#32797052

inanutshellus 4y ago
Yes. The thing is, they announced they were "considering" a plan for personal-use domains but then didn't follow through until the switch over due date was almost upon us. They also obfuscated the path to acknowledge you were a personal-domain user. Obviously, they wanted everyone to just switch over to being a paying customer (which is shocking, I know, given that they're a business and all ;D). I figured if I was going to pay, I may as well do some research. I decided that, for my needs, the OpenSRS solution was a good fit and was a fraction of the price (~$1/mo vs ...$12ish/mo?). IIRC, about two weeks before the cutoff they finally and made it official and you could sign up for the personal-use domain. By that time I'd already gone to the effort of finding a new solution and was annoyed at the obfuscation tactics, so I went ahead and moved. ... but I also clicked that box, so all I have to do is point my MX records back to google and I'd be back on the juice.

nso 4y ago

I set up a gmail adress, and routed all my domains through CloudFlares new Email product. It's free, and lets you route email to as many addresses as you want (? I think...) to other adresses, in this case my Gmail account. I then set up my GMail account with one profile per incoming address, and to automatically use the corresponding address when replying.

mdasen 4y ago
How does replying work? Specifically, if you're sending email from MyCoolDomain.com and you don't have DKIM/SPF/etc., aren't you going to face potential deliverability issues? Or is Google sending the message as `nso@MyCoolDomain.com via nso@gmail.com` (and exposing your Gmail address in replies)? I guess you could specify Google's servers for SPF purposes without any coordination on Google's part, but Google would need to sign the message for things like DKIM. Do they do that for domains that you aren't actually connecting?
- Namidairo 4y ago
  > Or is Google sending the message as `nso@MyCoolDomain.com via nso@gmail.com` (and exposing your Gmail address in replies)? Yeah the gmail account shows up in the headers as Return-path. Google don't DKIM sign it (there's a X-Google-DKIM-Signature header, but that's obviously ignored), so I think it'll still trigger DMARC if you have that setup. However, their SMTP servers should still reject other people sending on that address' behalf if they attempt to. It'll just bounce and send you an undeliverable mail along the lines of 'You no longer have access to blah@customdomain'