Purelymail: Cheap, no-nonsense email

[the_jeremy]

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.

[em-bee]

+ is not gmail.

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

[dejan]

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

[akvadrako]

https://mailbox.org comes pretty close.

[riezebos]

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.

[indigodaddy]

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.

[kanodiaashu]

did you compare with Zoho mail?

[nickweb]

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/

[jcul]

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]

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?

[maltalex]

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

[haint]

+1 happy customer since 2020.

[drunner]

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.

[77pt77]

How is deliverability?

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

[xigoi]

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

[crossroadsguy]

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]

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

[LorenDB]

> 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.

[bxparks]

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.

[infecto]

Looks like it.

https://purelymail.com/about

[dbcjv7vhxj]

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

[steveharman]

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 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!

[mometsi]

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.

[blackeyeblitzar]

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.

[qingcharles]

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

[WrongOnInternet]

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.

[MathMonkeyMan]

might be a freemason thing

[pyromaker]

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]

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.

[Kokouane]

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

[voussoir]

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

[waldrews]

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.

[codegeek]

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

[YPPH]

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.

[mariusor]

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.

[sneak]

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

[thelastgallon]

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

[dang]

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)

[tonyoconnell]

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.

[noman-land]

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

[notpushkin]

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

[dejan]

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.

[kanodiaashu]

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

[et-al]

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

[Brajeshwar]

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

https://www.migadu.com

[notepad0x90]

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.

[manishsharan]

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!

[Bradlinc]

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.

[nomilk]

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?