Purelymail: Cheap, no-nonsense email

https://purelymail.com/

by LorenDB • 1 year ago

310 211 1 year ago

purelymail.com

Kokouane• 1 year ago

Purelymail has been great! I've used it for about a year, no issues, just works and extremely cheap.

valleyer• 1 year ago

Same here. It's wonderful. I moved over when Gandi started charging for its e-mail hosting.

mometsi• 1 year ago

Seems like a reasonable alternative to Proton for multiple domains: email that costs money instead of being haunted by AI.

That logo is creepy though, and implies exactly the opposite.

MathMonkeyMan• 1 year ago

might be a freemason thing

blackeyeblitzar• 1 year ago

Haunted by AI? I haven’t heard of problems with Proton outside of their calendar implementation, which I’ve heard they’re fixing this year.

Kye3• 1 year ago

They have an optional writing assistant thing that uses their own in-house model. Sweden is mostly hydro and nuclear, so the environmental arguments against generative AI don't hold up very well.

qingcharles• 1 year ago

Fastmail seems to let me have unlimited domains for like $5/mo

thayne4• 1 year ago

Which is 6 times more than purelymail.

WrongOnInternet• 1 year ago

Their comparison of themselves to Proton is rather deceptive. If you're willing have only 1GB of storage, instead of 3GB, you can get proton for free. And at the price they list ($48/yr), you'd get 15GB storage, plus a lot more. And no, I was not paid by proton to say this. I only have the free plan.

omnimus2• 1 year ago

This claim is also rather deceptive because the free proton mail does not allow custom domain. To get your own domain with proton you have to get 4usd/month plan.

xigoi4• 1 year ago

Proton does not allow you to use standard protocols (IMAP/SMTP), which is a deal-breaker for me.

Gud3• 1 year ago

Protonmail doesn’t support IMAP which is something wish I knew before migrating

Evidlo• 1 year ago

Use it for email redirection from my domain. Just a few bucks per year

Imustaskforhelp6• 1 year ago

https://improvmx.com/

how about improvmx , it gives redirection for free , I have also discovered it right now in this thread though I think I had heard about it (I am not sure , I know of some email software where you pay one time and then you can self host or they host I am not sure)

teamx• 1 year ago

Whats the reason for using this over free options like gmail?

thangngoc89• 1 year ago

Mostly custom domain emails or API usage

KetoManx64• 1 year ago

Your emails aren't being anaylyzed to create a profile about for being used for targeted ads.

brunoqc• 1 year ago

Doesn't Google claim they don't read your emails?

There's plenty of reasons to drop Google thought. They barely improve old products.

They probably try to force us to use their products: I think you can't use your own assistant with a wakeword. On my pixel watch 1, using a calendar other than Google's sucks. There is almost no useful wearos apps (sure, it's the devs jobs but Google could bribe them or something). A lot of great wear os apps would benefit everyone.

I'm still pissed that they want a monthly subscription for the sleep tracking with the Google home thing... That you buy with your own money.

nine_k• 1 year ago

I care relatively little because I cut ads using browser plugins and suchlike.

Allowing anything shady, let alone incriminating in your email would be insane, whether it's a mailbox at Google or at Proton. Transactional emails from shady websites, like password reset, are best done with email services like mailinator, which offer zero access protection and destroy the received email in a few minutes automatically.

thayne4• 1 year ago

Except for all the emails you send to all the other people still using Gmail.

LorenDB3• 1 year ago

For me it's the ability to use a custom domain. See https://lorendb.dev/posts/the-case-for-custom-email-domains/ for my reasoning why I do this.

metadat• 1 year ago

https://purelymail.com/advancedpricing

That actually seems pretty good. Who's behind this?

If they had a minimal free tier which supports custom domain names I'd definitely give to a go. Gmail was great 20 years ago, but today it's disheartening to see many services restricting registration except from Gmail.com and Yahoo.com domain names.

fastball• 1 year ago

It's disheartening to see services with limits
If they had a free tier I'd give it a go

Maybe these two things are related.

LorenDB3• 1 year ago

Custom domains aren't worth $0.83 per month to you?

bxparks2• 1 year ago

Is it still a one-man operation? They used to have a blurb about that on their website, but I cannot find it anymore.

The bus-factor of one was probably the main reason I did not choose them when I de-googled myself during Google's fiasco with their "free forever" Legacy GSuite termination. I found out a year or two later that they had rescinded their termination, but it was too late. I had migrated out of Google, to my relief.

infecto2• 1 year ago

Looks like it.

https://purelymail.com/about

dbcjv7vhxj• 1 year ago

It is, but he has someone ready if he gets hit by a bus.

sonofhans• 1 year ago

Don’t take this the wrong way — really, no hate — but I find it amusing that a cryptic comment from a green-text account on HN is the best business continuity planning documentation available :D

Bradlinc• 1 year ago

I have used this for several years and have had few issues. When I needed support for something (which was my fault) I received a response within a couple of hours.

drunner2• 1 year ago

Customer for a few years now. I don't do anything fancy with it. It was the cheapest and most appealing option for a custom domain for personal email. I think it runs me ~$11 a year or something

I combine it with simplelogin to handle all my aliasing needs.

Thanks for the great service.

77pt772• 1 year ago

How is deliverability?

Because for $11/year you can get a simple kvm machine and run your own servers.

anshargal• 1 year ago

there are not a lot of options to get a virtual server under $1 per month, especially with IPv4 address

jimmydoe• 1 year ago

your time worth a lot more.

Imustaskforhelp6• 1 year ago

I have heard this a lot of times but self hosting email is one of the hardest things to do , sure if you are masochist then do it , but if you are a working functional part of society , not recommended.

TZubiri2• 1 year ago

Are you insinuating 11$/yr is too expensive for the service lmao.

It's so cheap people probably don't buy it because it will go bankrupt.

xigoi4• 1 year ago

What do you need SimpleLogin for? Purelymail supports aliases on its own.

drunner2• 1 year ago

I still prefer to shield my domain and inboxes. Probably a silly exercise, but I like knowing that no one can spam my true inbox or domain as its never given out.

ocdtrekkie2• 1 year ago

I have an automated account that needs its own inbox but sends like two plain text emails a day... mostly just to me. I never moved it to Fastmail because the price was prohibitive but this would be a great option for it instead.

notpushkin6• 1 year ago

Just get something like SendGrid or Mailgun – services like this are usually free for a few thousand emails per month, and support SMTP (though are trying to push you to their proprietary API).

ocdtrekkie2• 1 year ago

I've used Sendgrid quite a bit, it's great! But in this particular case, you may note I specified it needs it's own inbox: This particular tool of mine does presently use IMAP for inbound mail, and even though the volume for it is insignificant, it means I generally need a "real email account" for it.

manishsharan• 1 year ago

This is lovely.

However I am also curious and in awe : how did this company survive and acquire paying customers with so many well established competitors and so many free alternatives?

I am seeking inspiration!

thayne4• 1 year ago

AFAIK (and I have looked) no free options have all of the following features: support for custom domains, support for imap, a decent amount of storage.

Most users don't need all of those things, but there is a niche that does, and are willing to pay a little bit to get it.

the_jeremy• 1 year ago

I also use this. Pros: super cheap. <$2/mo for all my custom email addresses and routing rules. Nothing else came close - everything else I found would make me pay per email address even if that address receives an average of 0 emails per month. The wildcard suffixes are really nice as well - they use _ instead of gmail's + (I've had issues with gmail's version as it sometimes is transparently removed, or sometimes the form doesn't consider + a valid character).

Cons: UI is bad, so you'll want to access through a client. 1 person shop. Not audited AFAIK.

kanodiaashu2• 1 year ago

did you compare with Zoho mail?

eps• 1 year ago

Zoho produces a lot of spam and regularly ends up on blocklists.

em-bee4• 1 year ago

+ is not gmail.

+ is industry standard, supported by almost all mail servers (if configured) since long before gmail existed.

MatekCopatek2• 1 year ago

It's gmail in the sense that they deliver you+[whatever]@gmail.com to you@gmail.com

By default it's just a valid character.

bsder• 1 year ago

The problem with "+" isn't the email side.

The problem with "+" is dumbass Javascript developers who use broken regexes to "validate" an email address.

dejan4• 1 year ago

hmm, at that price you could try https://migadu.com

akvadrako2• 1 year ago

https://mailbox.org comes pretty close.

crossroadsguy3• 1 year ago

I know online services or any service depends a lot on personal interaction experiences and personal expectations from those services and people involved in those services, but I can't leave mailbox.org sooner.

I have tried/explored couple of them like Mailbox.org (of course, current user), Fastmail, Proton, and Runbox etc. Given everything http://runbox.com seems to be the best among them - much better than Mailbox. In fact for Mailbox their less than 'less than ideal' support is enough for me to move elsewhere once my balance runs out (which I foolishly pumped in more than I should have had)

Runbox isn't w/o its challenges but they do certain things really nice and they are: prompt, not into disregard a request in its entirety, not un-kind, not-jerk, not-flippant, not-entitled, not-costly, not into offering unusable shit that you don't need in an email suite to begin with, and basically open and engaging.

So while I am not a customer right now, once the mailbox.org balance is close to running out and I will leave mailbox (and leave them I will) Runbox is the first contender to replace them right now.

LaSombra2• 1 year ago

Yup. Have been with them for a couple years now and it has been really stable.

xigoi4• 1 year ago

That seems to have a limited number of addresses.

zelphirkalt• 1 year ago

posteo has been great for me and also allows you to define aliases, thou each alias costs 10c per month. If you stay below 10 aliases, it is <2€ per month as well.

noja• 1 year ago

Doesn’t support custom domains

riezebos2• 1 year ago

As far as I can tell Fastmail comes pretty close, I have as many email addresses as I want on multiple domains and a bunch of routing rules for €4/mo.

rstuart4133• 1 year ago

How do you do that on Fastmail? I only see per email address pricing with each email address cost close to what you pay.

indigodaddy• 1 year ago

Various shared hosting likely will always beat this price. Caveat is that many shared hosters don't know how to properly run mail servers within their shared hosting infra. Many do, however.

nomilk• 1 year ago

How difficult is exporting from one provider into another (e.g. from gmail into proton or purely)? I guess normies like me are a bit hesitant due to the risk of messing it up (would be a disaster to lose years of emails, as some are important for record-keeping). Curious to hear from people who've done(/attempted) it and how it went? Was it hard? Were there risks? Any regrets?

brokegrammer2• 1 year ago

If your provider supports IMAP, you can use imapsync https://imapsync.lamiral.info/ to sync emails between two mail boxes. I did it a few times and it was straightforward.

defanor• 1 year ago

For libre options available from Linux distributions' repositories, see isync (aka mbsync) and offlineimap. And mail clients in general should be able to handle IMAP and standard formats (Maildir, mbox). If one cares about mail backups, it is also useful to archive and backup one's mail in one of those standard and portable formats, and/or to synchronize between multiple machines regularly.

Groxx• 1 year ago

I can't speak for Purely, but every one I've tried has had an "import from [previous provider]" feature because that's basically just "pull from imap".

Otherwise: for ~20 years now I've been able to just attach two imap accounts in thunderbird, and drag to move/copy everything from one to the other, and that'll just chug away until it's done. I've never had an issue doing that.

Open-Sourcery• 1 year ago

From one domain to another (gmail.com to custom), a bit of faffing about to get all the accounts moves over.

Moving the mails was as simple as ctrl+a and dragging my mouse in thunderbird.

Between providers with a custom domain (zoho to mxroute) was easy. Just updating the DNS records and moving the emails.

If you are technically able (really just buying a domain and setting the DNS records the provider tells you) I would recommend getting a custom domain. It gives you the ability to move providers at will pretty easily, even if you did want to stick with a gmail for now.

magicalhippo3• 1 year ago

Last year I migrated from my hosting providers email service to Proton Mail after 20 years. I too was worried about preserving mails.

I have used Thunderbird for everything, set to download everything and never delete, so had my primary backup there. I take regular backups of the profile directory as secondary measure, which are kept on my NAS and offsite.

What I did was to just decide to do a hard break. I renamed the old IMAP accounts, added the Proton Mail accounts using the IMAP bridge, and then configured my DNS to point to Proton.

DMARC and all that was easily set up as well thanks to Proton having nice guides and active verification.

Now I still have access to my old mail in my old account folder, and I can use the Proton Mail app on my phone for new stuff.

I also migrated a secondary mail, which was not using my domain and which I've had for almost three decades. There I had to do the laborious task of changing any accounts tied to it, and notify people still using it. I've been keeping it operational for a year and still get the occasional mail, but at a point where I'll be retiring it soon.

Overall been very happy. It showed me it was easier than I feared as long as I have Thunderbird and mail accounts under my own domain.

swaits3• 1 year ago

I migrated from Fastmail to Proton last week. I found the whole process pretty painless. Proton has an IMAP migration. Took it a few days, maybe even three. But everything ended up working just fine.

abdullahkhalids2• 1 year ago

Pretty much every "normie" should download and setup an email client like Thunderbird. You can open it once a month or so to let all the emails download to your own computer. Possibly backed up by some cloud service.

Should be sufficient unless you lose your computer and your email account gets blocked at the same time.

omnimus2• 1 year ago

After trying to do this many times using scripting or even paid services… i came to conclusion that easiest and most reliable way is to add both accounts in Thunderbird and copy paste the emails.

xyst• 1 year ago

I personally prefer to setup my own mail server. No troubles with receiving or sending, thus far (2 years)

But this is a pretty good option for non-technical folks.

brokegrammer2• 1 year ago

I have my own server for a few mailboxes as well but the spam detection isn't great. I still receive emails from Ukrainian billionaires who want to wire me all their money for safekeeping.

I use rspamd, which is supposed to be great. How are you dealing with spam?

andrewfromx• 1 year ago

https://improvmx.com/ is free for 1 email

notpushkin6• 1 year ago

It’s also just forwarding, not email hosting.

Imustaskforhelp6• 1 year ago

you could use something like proton mail free for hosting if you want something free ?

Sure they have it for 500 mb , but there was a deal to get 5gb instead but I think (Okay so I don't have 5gb) but still 500mb is decent enough , like some others said , you could also export some emails locally and use syncthing but I don't know for me 500mb is decent

wopwops• 1 year ago

Why does the logo feature an eyeball?

xigoi4• 1 year ago

Why not? People like to add eyeballs to random things to make them look like living creatures.

tuananh• 1 year ago

email & storage/backup are a few things i would want absolute resiliency.

imagine missing some important emails could cost you a lot.

thelastgallon• 1 year ago

Discussed before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27707857 (2021)

dang• 1 year ago

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Purelymail: Cheap, No-Nonsense Email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33058691 - Oct 2022 (4 comments)

Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27707857 - July 2021 (307 comments)

Purelymail: Cheap email with custom domains, 2FA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23567456 - June 2020 (1 comment)

Show HN: Purelymail (Beta) – extremely cheap custom domain email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19134881 - Feb 2019 (1 comment)

CobrastanJorji2• 1 year ago

No arbitrary limits. Have as many users and store as much mail as you want.

There is absolutely a limit. If you don't think you have a limit, it's because you don't have your asshole building his too-clever, "mountable PurelyMailFS" project or whatever yet. So you have a limit, but you aren't telling us what it is, or you don't know what it is. And an unknown arbitrary limit is worse than an arbitrary limit.

EDIT: I WAS WRONG. They bill by storage size & queries if you use "significantly more than $10 in resources" -- which is still vague and arbitrary but probably not a lot of users in the murky grey area.

BeetleB2• 1 year ago

I get where your mentality is coming from, but I've been with my current mark provider who has "no limits" for twenty years without problems.

I've been with my unlimited backup provider for over a decade without any problems. They keep increasing their available fee but that's ok for how much I'm backing up (several terabytes).

It pays in life not to be too cynical.

TechDebtDevin• 1 year ago

What company?

throwaway290• 1 year ago

Mark?

simple10• 1 year ago

I found the limits are on the pricing and advanced pricing pages. It seems pretty straightforward. You get $10/year of resources. If you use a lot more than that, then you'll get upgraded to advanced pricing.

https://purelymail.com/advancedpricing

CobrastanJorji2• 1 year ago

Oh! I read that much more pessimistically. This is great!

funride1• 1 year ago

Another very happy customer of this for the past 3 years.

codegeek• 1 year ago

Very honest Landing Page. If anyone is interested in self hosting their own emails, I have found mailinabox to be a useful start:

https://mailinabox.email/ https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox

hitekker• 1 year ago

We're not trying to bamboozle you with glossy images, or sell you a lofty ideal.

Avoiding "lofty ideals" resonates with me. That kind of marketing reeks of weird self-hyping. Like, the company is over-valuing its service and under-thinking its shortcomings.

tonyoconnell• 1 year ago

Do you want free email for multiple addresses on multiple domains with all the features of a Gmail? Just setup Cloudflare to manage your email, create rules to forward to regular Gmail accounts, which you can configure to send email from your domains. 100% free.

et-al• 1 year ago

iirc with this setup, Google just changes the "reply-to" and someone can still figure out your actual Gmail address.

notpushkin6• 1 year ago

I think you can still add an SMTP server in Gmail, and it will use that (with a proper From header, DKIM and all).

notpushkin6• 1 year ago

I do want all the features of a Gmail, I just don’t want Google going through it.

kanodiaashu2• 1 year ago

Could you say more? Is there a tutorial I could follow?

noman-land• 1 year ago

You can't send outgoing mail to arbitrary email addresses. You can only reply, synchronously, to incoming emails.

dejan4• 1 year ago

just forwarding is great if you can afford losing mail. Gmail will drop your messages occasionally.

You can use gmail's own relay for sending but it won't DKIM sign which is a must even for Gmail itself.

for a more reliable solution use forwarding AND POP3 fetching with some provoder OR use https://gmailify.com which offers own relays too for ~$7 a year.

YPPH5• 1 year ago

An interesting service, and very competitively priced. But for me, my email is fairly mission-critical. It's not something I'm prepared to endow in a one-man shop. I don't mean to offend, but it looks like something that might be used as something of a novelty. Were I to use it, I'd be backing up my email locally.

sneak3• 1 year ago

You should be backing up your email locally regardless, even if you use Google Workspace or Fastmail.

YPPH5• 1 year ago

I don't agree with you. A key reason to host your email with a reliable cloud storage provider is to have backups handled for you. Fastmail is particularly good in that respect, since it takes periodic backups for you, allowing deleted items to be accessed.

To put things in perspective, I dare say that many large commercial organisations who rely on Office 365 are not backing up emails locally. They do likely have fancy retention holds preventing nefarious actors who compromise access to the account nuking things. I think Fastmail's backup is limited to 7 days. Outside that is a risk; it's one I'll take.

Maybe we have different perceptions of risk. But I think one can reasonably take the view it is unnecessary to have an independent copy in this scenario.

6LLvveMx2koXfwn2• 1 year ago

Isn't back-up longhand for POP in this context?

mariusor• 1 year ago

I've been using purelymail for multiple domains (with low traffic granted) for about ten years. I've never experienced an outage so far. Support has never failed to respond in the under 5 times I needed it.

raybb• 1 year ago

They're a very nice service. I set it up with a custom domain a few years back and forgot about it and recently realized I had negative $9 in credits. I couldn't log into the webmail to access the emails there and it seems they stopped accepting emails. But as soon as I paid the $9 and topped up with a little more credit I was able to access everything.

pikdum• 1 year ago

I've been using this for a while now just to have mailboxes for various domains. Works well, no complaints.

AnonC• 1 year ago

It’s been around for several years and the homepage still says it’s in beta. I understand that any platform may have undiscovered bugs and issues, but an update on the progress (any indication of improved stability) would be helpful.

swaits3• 1 year ago

This is unfair comparison to Proton as it is bundled with their VPN, Calendar, Drive, and Password manager. Given all it comes with, it's very competitively priced. Additionally, they've been at it a long time and built a strong brand around privacy.

freeone30003• 1 year ago

But you can’t debundle those — you cannot get ProtonMail (which doesn’t have IMAP) without ProtonCalendar (which doesn’t have CalDAV), ProtonVPN, Proton Password Manager, and an expanding suite of services I already have solutions for that I like better. Being cheaper and only doing mail is a huge plus.

6LLvveMx2koXfwn2• 1 year ago

ProtonMail has IMAP via ProtonMail Bridge, which handles the decrypt/encrypt step locally - not sure how else it would be implemented. Ideas?

dsissitka• 1 year ago

It looks like standalone Proton Mail might still be available:

https://proton.me/mail/pricing

silisili2• 1 year ago

For the use case presented, one user 3GB, Zoho is absolutely free. It's free for up to 5 users at 5GB each, in fact.

I've been using it for a few years now and love it. Will gladly pay if they kick me off the free plan.

thayne4• 1 year ago

Zoho free plan doesn't include IMAP or POP.

silisili2• 1 year ago

That's completely fair, but should have been included as criteria in the price comparison section.

mmooss• 1 year ago

Some features other providers have, such as calendar syncing, are not yet implemented.

What is the story with FOSS calendar sync tools on the server end? Standardized? Reliable? Easy enough?

csomar• 1 year ago

This has roughly the same pricing as Fastmail just that it offers much smaller plans. If you are really that tight about money, have your domain DNS on cloudflare and redirect mail to gmail and send from a Cloudflare worker. A bit of a hassle but completely free.

Fastmail is worth it though as it has a really good web client and can do other nice things (Calendar, rules, notes, store random files, etc..)

LaSombra2• 1 year ago

Have Fastmail moved their servers outside the US?

notepad0x903• 1 year ago

Delaware incorporation is the norm, but for anyone who cares about dragnet surveillance, the state of incorporation is important, as well as the country.

Proton also does end-to-end encrypted email and supposedly, your emails are never stored decrypted, they are decrypted in your browser and in ingress/egress out of their environment. They're also hosting in switzerland.

That said, like many, I also am looking for an alternative. I pay them too much to not care about their CEO's political commentary.

jurgenaut23• 1 year ago

What kind of commentary are you referring to?

homarp• 1 year ago

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42837181

sangnoir• 1 year ago

They're also hosting in switzerland.

Crypto AG was also based in Switzerland - that by itself mattered very little because it was owned by the CIA and the West Germany Intelligence service.

dejan4• 1 year ago

end-to-end encryption? yes, if both users are on Proton - but don't call it email then.

Storing encrypted makes only sense when keys are not in their hands. Plaintext password enters their system on each login which means they can have your decryption key at any point if needed.

smoke and mirrors marketing...

notepad0x903• 1 year ago

if they use the email/smtp protocol then it's email.

plaintext password does not enter their system. For example I still have to enter a second password for the in-browser decryption (although these days they use the same password). Most of security feels like theatrics, but small measures that add difficulty for a potential threat actor add up.

Ylpertnodi• 1 year ago

They're also hosting in switzerland.

....means nothing. Unless you know something the rest of us don't?

notepad0x903• 1 year ago

they're very protective about giving foreign states/entities access to information stored by swizz companies. It's not just for banking. As an american,any country not part of the five-eyes coalition and also not a hostile country is great. Not that I have anything to hide, I just want to support a culture of privacy.

andrewguru• 1 year ago

https://mailcast.io offers free email forwarding for one domain

kseistrup• 1 year ago

This would be a nice transport/storage backend for DeltaChat, as it seems there are no limits for number of incoming and outgoing emails. In DeltaChat most messages are very short, but if you're chatting in a group it may incur a lot of emails in both directions.

voussoir• 1 year ago

I've been a Purelymail customer since July 2021. For the most part I have been very satisfied. However, in July 2024 I sent an email to Scott for support because I have been getting too much spam. He said that the spamassassin auto-learning filter was broken and he was working on a replacement. In the time since then, I think maybe it is doing a little better, but I still get quite a lot of spam.

But for $0.40/month I have not had any inclination to switch providers.

https://voussoir.net/spam

pyromaker• 1 year ago

I looked into Purelymail when searching around for good email solution. Google Workspace was getting a bit costly and there were too many things I did not need.

Zoho Mail provides another option - $1.95 per month I think for my use where I am (AU) and has all the features I need for my small indie business.

One other option I tried was to actually run mail myself with Linode VPS - https://mailinabox.email/

I know it sounds a little scary at the start running your own thing, but so far it's been working out great - zero issues so far. I may turn off Zoho one day and go fully into self-hosted option.

oldandboring• 1 year ago

Came here to mention Zoho Mail. I use Zoho to provide IMAP and SMTP mail for a webapp that required a dedicated address. Would have been like $72/year to make a whole new user in Google Workspace.

crossroadsguy3• 1 year ago

Like every last time it was posted. It’s not suitable for anything other than your hobby email domain. If you use your email with your bank, and other critical services I’d seriously not go with a one-person show.

Also, we're in beta

https://purelymail.com/about

We're a small company. So small, the "we" is royal.

I wish Scott best of luck and I hope one day it reaches there but until it is anything but confidence boosting.

ffsm8• 1 year ago

Whenever I come across landing pages I always wonder, how many people are the "we" and "team" really. It feels disingenuous to use these terms under such circumstances, but he's definitely not a minority doing so. It's kinda the norm, wherever we (｡ ◕ ‿ ◕ ｡) like it or not

bardsore2• 1 year ago

I think it sounds natural to say "we" in the context of a company even if it's a one-person company, but I just know english as a second language.

riiii• 1 year ago

He could get a cat and technically not be lying.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard

npteljes• 1 year ago

I did web dev for many one-off projects, and very often this is the case - that the people are non-existent. When having an altercation with a customer, one of my guys even fired the non-existing support person, and then another non-existing support person took over, apologized, and made amends with the client.

So yeah, at least this guys is somewhat transparent. And with services like my primary email address, I only trust longstanding, reliable services, nothing fresh, nothing beta, nothing with the bus factor of 1. But with the custom domain, at least migration is not super hard maybe? Just hope that it doesn't happen during a 2-week vacation or something.

LorenDB3• 1 year ago

If you use your email with your bank, and other critical services I’d seriously not go with a one-person show.

OTOH using your own domain means you can easily migrate to a new email server in the event that Purelymail folds.

todotask• 1 year ago

Zoho have a free plan we have been using for years for business, 5 emails, each 5 GB.

vander_elst• 1 year ago

Do you have a link? The nearest best I can find is https://www.zoho.com/de/mail/zohomail-pricing.html which is ~12 bucks a year

aembleton2• 1 year ago

https://mail.zoho.eu/signup?type=org&plan=free

binary_slinger• 1 year ago

It would be an interesting experiment ditch the Roundcube or any web UI to decrease the attack surface.

bardsore2• 1 year ago

I use Purelymail to send emails from my personal domain (admin@domain.tld) from my self-hosted stuff and to forward emails to my personal domain to my gmail, and it works great for that. I only use it for hobby projects so I'm not too bothered by the lack of audits or a bus factor of 1.

waldrews• 1 year ago

The pricing model is very well thought out and worth studying. Cheap but not free generous base layer, that falls back to prepaid credit resource based billing for high users. Even details like punitively increased pricing to discourage higher risk outbound email patterns.

This removes risks from both seller and buyer. The seller is not afraid of an avalanche of free trial users resulting in a big cloud bill. The user is not afraid of surprise overages (cough recent Vercel scandals cough) nor has to think about usage patterns that fit into arbitrary quotas, nor about surprises that catch up to you if you use the service at scale.

This is the way to do small utilities that have a cloud cost; services of the 'save you the trouble of self-hosting' type, or the 'tool somebody writes once, and people might use occasionally for years' pattern.

Maybe not the way to extract maximum value and growth for an ambitious startus, but a good choice for the many modest niche services out there.

fryd_w• 1 year ago

that's great. are you planning to build a nicer client?

TZubiri2• 1 year ago

No arbitrary limits. Have as many users and store as much mail as you want.

New company policy, if you need to save large files like 3d renders, please use email for storage.

infecto2• 1 year ago

"If you use significantly more than $10 a year in resources, you may need to switch to advanced pricing"

chaz6• 1 year ago

According to their advanced pricing calculator at https://purelymail.com/advancedpricing you can get about 16GB for $10 per year. The price for 1000GB would be $376.65.

    $210.40 for storage, $4.00 in account fees, $112.89 for received email, $2.77 for received email bandwidth (GB), $46.53 for sent emails, $0.00 for sent email bandwidth (GB), and $0.05 in username fees.

Brajeshwar• 1 year ago

They missed a good service, which I’ve recommended here often, in their comparison — Migadu (no affiliation).

https://www.migadu.com

nickweb• 1 year ago

I'm genuinely surprised no one has mentioned mxroute[1]. Thier pricing normally is pretty decent, but they keep the BF deals going pretty much all year [2].

I've been using them for 6 years with no issues. I use it now with all my domains and never have any deliverability issues.

The owner (Jar - one person shop again) is passionate about their email reputation for deliverability and is active on both lowendtalk and the dedicated sub Reddit.

I ended up comparing purleymail and mxroute - tested mxroute and stayed with them.

[1] https://mxroute.com/ [2] https://mxroute.blackfriday/

haint• 1 year ago

+1 happy customer since 2020.

maltalex2• 1 year ago

You're not concerned about the bus factor? What happens if the owner suddenly disappears?

simfree• 1 year ago

Purelymail's About page lists one person, and the product is in beta.

MXRoute has years of track record, more than 1 employee, and has good tools like IMAPSync to enable easy duplication of your emails for backup or migration to a different platform.

jcul• 1 year ago

Been using mxroute for years, have multiple domains (they let you use unlimited domains IIRC), never had any issues.

Great info on setting up stuff like SPF, DKIM. Easy to set quotas on accounts, set up catch-alls etc.

Never had an issue with deliverability or anything like that.

Probably sound like a shill, but I think it's such a good option, and really reasonably priced. I have a perpetual black friday deal, and I pay like 15 USD a year!!

mydoghasworms• 1 year ago

Their black Friday special does not seem to work (at present, anyway). I followed the .blackfriday link, tried to sign up and got a notice that "Black Friday 2024 - BF2024 Small plan is currently unavailable". Also, on the .blackfriday site, when they say "Price: $15 / 3 years", do they mean $15 per year for three years, or $15 for three years?

g8oz• 1 year ago

Runbox is pretty good too.

rolisz• 1 year ago

Another happy customer here - for about 5 years I think. 0 issues. I think they had a small outage at some, but it was resolved super quick.

steveharman• 1 year ago

Another happy Purelymail customer here (5 years).

if anyone needs to move mail storage from one IMAP server to another (eg; Purelymail) I can highly recommend https://imapsync.lamiral.info/

Not for it's website graphic design, but as a CLI tool that works perfectly. "source server -->> target server" and let it run

fraXis• 1 year ago

+1 for Imapsync.

I use it to back up/sync all of my email accounts via IMAP to a different email provider account, and it works great!

honestSysAdmin• 1 year ago

No JMAP huh.

NnnomNom43• 1 year ago

Similar price at https://domainname.shop, a Norwegian company: 1€/month (around 13 USD / year) for 15GB per account, 20 accounts.

Purelymail: Cheap, no-nonsense email

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