this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Not really about selfhosting, but I read that a lot of selfhosters do not selfhost their emails. Should have pop/imap.

I am thinking about iCloud that offers 3 aliases, but actually I need 5. Does iCloud has a catchall-option?

mailbox.org and skiff are „too expensive“ with 3€/month.

migadu is another candidate. 19€/year.

I once read about a cheap one-man-show-E-Mail-provider, that I would like to try, but I can‘t remember the name.

Do you have more suggestions?

Not really about selfhosting, but I read that a lot of selfhosters do not selfhost their emails. Should have pop/imap.

I am thinking about iCloud that offers 3 aliases, but actually I need 5. Does iCloud has a catchall-option?

mailbox.org and skiff are „too expensive“ with 3€/month.

migadu is another candidate. 19€/year.

I once read about a cheap one-man-show-E-Mail-provider, that I would like to try, but I can‘t remember the name.

Do you have more suggestions?

Edit:

Thanks for your recommendations! After a short comparism, these are my current candidates:

icloud 12€/year 3 emailadresses/50GB BUT catchall-option (good)

mxroute 80€/lifetime unlimited/10GB

purelymail 9€/year unlimited/unlimited - BUT one man show (bad)

infomanikak mail-service 18€/year 5 adresses/unlimited

sorted out

migadu 19€/year unlimited / only 5GB / BUT only 20/200 (out/in) mails a day (bad)

Protonmail -> no SMTP (bad)

posteo -> no own domain possible (bad)

other recommendations: too expensive

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Im pretty happy with protonmail. Email is kind of important you may not want to go with the cheapest option.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

Another vote for the proton services. Been with them for years and very happy.

[–] ArtVandelay 9 points 1 year ago

Second proton, I use my own domain with it. Works great!

[–] TechieJosh 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Moved from ProtonMail to iCloud+ last year since I was already paying for iCloud+. Proton’s lack of IMAP support on mobile devices is another reason I left. Their reason for that is privacy, which I understand. Privacy is important to me, but this is email we’re talking about. It will never be private considering the majority of people we email use Gmail, Outlook, etc.

All that being said, iCloud+ has been solid for email. No major issues at all on my end. The spam filter is quite strict for me, but I would consider that a good thing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Same here, iCloud+ works great for me, the domain setup was painless and you can even create multiple aliases & inboxes and share the domain with your iCloud Family if you have one.

[–] TORFdot0 1 points 1 year ago

I’ll vouch for iCloud+ too, and it does have a catch-all that you can set up

[–] panicnow 2 points 1 year ago

Another same reply. There is a catch-all now but there wasn’t originally.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I've been using purelymail. 10 dollars a year and you can add as many domains and make as many accounts as you want.

[–] ReginaPhalange 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Serious question - as a normie I'm usesd to - Email Provider=Domain.
Google = @gmail.
ProtonMail = @protonmail

How does custom domains play into this? Does using a custom domain for mail requires a special entry in the DNS record?

Magnets, how do they work?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah they give you the DNS records to add to your domain

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Not sure why I see this one recommended so much. Seems like it's run by just one dude who won't always be able to respond to support requests, security issues and other emergencies in the time frames you'd want with such a service. I also really wouldn't want to bet my ability to securely access/send/receive important emails on that one person in Delaware not randomly getting hit by a car or something.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, I didn't know it was just one person. That doesn't really feel umm... safe for something like email.

[–] jrylander 1 points 1 year ago

It is true afaik but support has been excellent from him. Used it for a few years but switched to zoho for better support of protocols.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This looks pretty great. How long have you been using it for? I am using FastMail for quite a while, but I don't use web interface, or calendar / contacts syncing (have my own nextcloud server for those), so just need email. Its' pretty pricey compare to purelymail.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I've been using it for around a year

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I have used Fastmail for years now and it's always worked well. I use it with Mac/iOS. It has everything.

[–] sirdavidxvi 3 points 1 year ago

+1 for Fastmail.

I've been using it for about 3 years. I'm on the Standard plan (middle tier). It's $4.20/mo. per user when prepaying for 3 years and ranges up to $5.40/mo. for monthly billing.

Not sure if there's a (practical) limit on domains or aliases, but I have 7 domains and a few aliases plus a wildcard. Includes 30GB of storage per user.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I like their integration with 1Password to generate email aliases on the fly. Great for signing up for trials, then deleting the alias if the trial doesn't work out. Saves you getting spammed for life just because you wanted to check something out, and hides your domain to keep things on the down low.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

mailbox.org and skiff are „too expensive“ with 3€/month.

Ah... I do use mailbox.org and I've self-hosted with docker-mailserver before.

I agree, selfhosting mail is a really big pain, and at least where I live most ISPs don't open the ports necessary for mailservers, so I had to spin up my own server & it was more expensive than just using a mail provider. Could potentially be the cheapest option if I could host it from home & just use a RasPi or something

I'm happy with mailbox.org; the Standard Tier price is 2.50 Euro/mo if paid in full if that helps. Probably not the cheapest option especially since it's not unlimited, but they do allow domain matches at Standard tier or above, and there are other goodies like calendar/video conferencing/cloud storage & stuff.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

yea also custom domain with catch-all + custom rules on mailbox.org is hilariously powerful and allow you to use an own email address + its own folder for every website without actually creating any alias beforehand

I also have a hard time understanding how 2,5€ a month is to expensive for someone who most likely owns Apple devices since iCloud is really awful to use without at least one Apple device

[–] Wxfisch 8 points 1 year ago

I use protonmail with their family plan, it’s not terribly priced when you consider it comes with calendar, vpn, and drive storage as well. The biggest annoyance is probably that you have to use their mobile apps due to the encryption and they are not the greatest, but it does encrypt everything which I find outweighs the forced use of just their app.

[–] RegalPotoo 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Me too. Using Mailbox before that, but cancelled when they moved custom domain to a higher tier. Tried the 5$ Mxroute, but that looked too messy for me; too many frontend options, whereas I like my mail simple and secure.

[–] mea_rah 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I haven't seen anyone recommend Infomaniak Mail. I think it's great option. It's €1.50/month for 5 mailboxes with unlimited storage. You can add multiple domains and mailbox aliases for free. (no limit on either as far as I can tell) You get calendar and contacts as well. They also offer entire office suite, but that's going to cost more.

They offer pretty good webmail interface, that's not just Roundcube or other OSS webmail solutions. (which are okay, but usually limited by the fact that it's IMAP on the backend) They offer apps for mobile calendar/contact sync and they also have (quite new, but already very good IMO) email app. These are all open source. You obviously have IMAP, CalDAV and such if you want to use your own client.

It's not some one man show provider, they are pretty big cloud provider in Switzerland. So you also get custommer support that from my experience is pretty fast to respond.

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[–] solrize 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Try mxroute.com. Full price is already not bad, and they have ridiculously cheap promos around December.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'll second that. I've been using them for 4 or 5 years, and have been pleased.

There even was a day where there was an outage for my server, and they made it right by giving everyone credits roughly equal to 3 years of service or something. I thought that was overkill, and I guess they'll take a loss on it, but... the instincts are nice. It seems like a place where it's some dude taking care of servers, rather than a giant corporation who is more focused on extracting money than providing a great service for a reasonable cost.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've been using Zoho for email on my domain. My residential service blocks port 25 so being actually self hosted wasn't going to work. I had rented a cheap VPS for $4/mo to run it on, thinking I'd have other uses for it. Eventually I just went to the Zoho free email hosting with my domain. It's been fine for years and I'm reasonably sure it has a catch-all as well.

[–] jrylander 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

zoho

Please excuse me if this is just superfluous. Just wanted to chime on Zoho. It has been excellent for me and lowest tier is very cheap (gives protocols for external access without browser)

[–] solidgrue 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

MXroute personal tier is 10GB combined for unlimited domains and addresses (aliases) with IMAP/POP3. It's $49 USD per year, or $99 USD for lifetime service.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That one man is mxroute

Lifetime is $150 for 10gb otherwise is $40 per year for 100 gb both unlimited domains emails and aliases

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm with Migadu at the moment and I find it quite agreeable so far. There is a free, no credit card trial if you want to try it out. They're Swiss, hosting in France, if you want your data on EU grounds and not the US for a better privacy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Same here, works fine for me. The only hitch dor me was that sending from one of domains to another of mine counts towards outgoing mails. Changed the recipient afterwards, everything's shiny now!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

You don't need a mail server if all you want is a custom email domain. You can just use something like CloudFlare DNS to have them forward all emails to your domain to another private email address (e.g. Gmail).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've used mailbox.org for the last few years. They are a privacy-focused provider out of Germany. They aren't restrictive on the app you use, like proton, and offer an integrated PGP-signing solution.

[–] mikehunt 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What's PurelyMail like? They seem very cheap.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here are a couple of links to help you get a better idea of what purelymail is like:

I'm in the process of trying it out for a year before I switch over fully. Have yet to run into any issues but I'm not a heavy email user.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks. I’ll take a look. I’ve wanted to move away from gmail for a while now and this is cheap enough to try out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I am thinking about iCloud that offers 3 aliases, but actually I need 5. Does iCloud has a catchall-option?

Yes they have a catch all option, setup took a minute for me using my domain setup in Cloudflare, Apple’s documents/guided setup made it a breeze and it’s been rock solid.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can use posteo for 1€ a month. For more aliases look at mozmail (mozilla) or simplelogin. Or try runbox if you dont care about encryption at rest

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

There are 2 free aliases with posteo. Every additional comes for €0.10. That would be 1.30 per month, or 15.60 per year

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Proton does have SMTP via Protonmail Bridge

[–] JoeHill 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just switched to iCloud last week. Yes, it does catch-all (although it needs to be enabled through a checkbox in one of the settings menu). It also does sub-addressing / plus-addressing natively (no menu setting needed), which doesn’t seem to actually be documented but it works flawlessly for me.

I’ve been extremely happy with it so far. Pairing plus addressing with some of the filtering rules allows me to direct bulk mail to the right place automatically. For whatever reason, filtering rules can’t be done on iOS but need to be set through icloud.com (not sure if they can be set on macOS).

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[–] Tillyface89 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use forwarding service to send everything to my family's standard gmail accounts. Everyone just gets a full subdomain and short address.

[–] c10l 1 points 1 year ago

I’ve been using Posteo with my own domain for a few years.

You do need an email forwarder in addition to the hosting since, as you noticed, they don’t support that use-case natively.

My DNS provider, LuaDNS, does that for me. I pay for their Basic tier (US$29/year) but only because I’m using a lot more than what the free tier provides. I did get away with free for about a year though, so that could in fact be sufficient for you, if you decide to go that route.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I’ve been using fast mail for about 6 months and have enjoyed it.

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