Purelymail: Cheap, no-nonsense email
188 comments
·January 27, 2025the_jeremy
em-bee
+ is not gmail.
+ is industry standard, supported by almost all mail servers (if configured) since long before gmail existed.
MatekCopatek
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.
sigio
As stated by others, + addressing is not gmail specific. One thing that gmail does however is allowing you to add (or remove) arbitrary dots in your mail-address, and these are stripped out / all end up in the same mailbox.
em-bee
nope, exactly this feature you describe is what i am referring to. it's not a gmail invention. not by a long shot.
bsder
The problem with "+" isn't the email side.
The problem with "+" is dumbass Javascript developers who use broken regexes to "validate" an email address.
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.
dejan
hmm, at that price you could try https://migadu.com
akvadrako
https://mailbox.org comes pretty close.
crossroadsguy
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.
LaSombra
Yup. Have been with them for a couple years now and it has been really stable.
xigoi
That seems to have a limited number of addresses.
kanodiaashu
did you compare with Zoho mail?
eps
Zoho produces a lot of spam and regularly ends up on blocklists.
zelphirkalt
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
Doesn’t support custom domains
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.
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.
xigoi
What do you need SimpleLogin for? Purelymail supports aliases on its own.
drunner
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.
77pt77
How is deliverability?
Because for $11/year you can get a simple kvm machine and run your own servers.
Imustaskforhelp
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.
micw
I really have an issue with that.
On the one hand, it's just wrong. Self-hosting mail is not easy because you need to learn how things work. But it's far from being "one of the hardest things to do", even in the domain of hosting things. A properly set up mail server will seamlessly send mails to almost any other MTA. The only large exception is microsoft. The abuse their market power by black-list all new MTAs by default until you create a ticket to "mitigate" this and they tend to re-blacklist small MTAs from time to time.
On the other hand, it's that kind of statements that worsen the situation. People should be encouraged to set up their own MTAs and provided with help to do it in a good professional way. It's one important part of keeping the mail part internet free and not in the hand of few large companies.
bhaney
> self hosting email is one of the hardest things to do
I spent an hour setting up postfix and some milters on a Digital Ocean droplet around 7 years ago and it's been working fine as my personal email server with no deliverability issues or maintenance since then. I ssh in every few years to try out a new spam filter or something and maybe upgrade some packages if I feel like it. These days there are even easier mail-in-a-box style turnkey deployments that work just as well but don't need as much knowledge or setup as bare postfix.
At this point, the biggest barrier to self-hosting email is the deafening cries of people who don't know what they're talking about parroting how impossible it is to do.
abdullahkhalids
I installed Mailinabox [1] four years ago. There was one annoying upgrade, whose process needs to improved, but outside of that haven't touched anything. Only a couple of random domains where email delivery has failed. Otherwise, it just delivers to all the big providers.
MrDrMcCoy
As someone that's self-hosted email for years, I don't think it's that hard. There's plenty of great solutions that make it easy. Sure, there are footguns, but they are well known and easy to avoid.
jimmydoe
your time worth a lot more.
anshargal
there are not a lot of options to get a virtual server under $1 per month, especially with IPv4 address
selcuka
RackNerd offers one for $10.99 a year [1]. I've used them before and they are a solid provider. Besides you can use the same server and same IPv4 address for hosting multiple email domains.
[1] https://vncoupon.com/black-friday-racknerd-huge-savings-spec...
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TZubiri
Are you insinuating 11$/yr is too expensive for the service lmao.
It's so cheap people probably don't buy it because it will go bankrupt.
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
> 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.
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.
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
bardsore
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.
XCSme
Me and my accountant...
riiii
He could get a cat and technically not be lying.
npteljes
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.
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.
dbcjv7vhxj
It is, but he has someone ready if he gets hit by a bus.
sonofhans
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
bxparks
It's the part about attempting to train someone as a backup that I remember reading on their website. I can no longer find that blurb..
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
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.
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.
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.
qingcharles
Fastmail seems to let me have unlimited domains for like $5/mo
thayne
Which is 6 times more than purelymail.
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.
Gud
Protonmail doesn’t support IMAP which is something wish I knew before migrating
omnimus
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.
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.
Kye
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.
codetrotter
Proton is Swiss, not Swedish
Imustaskforhelp
oh lmao , I had just watched a video where people were confusing sweden and swiss (heck the swiss president missaid switzerland to sweden lmao)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oNX_BHgi3c
I was like , okay nobody confuses swiss and sweden but here you are!
MathMonkeyMan
might be a freemason thing
rolisz
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.
Kokouane
Purelymail has been great! I've used it for about a year, no issues, just works and extremely cheap.
valleyer
Same here. It's wonderful. I moved over when Gandi started charging for its e-mail hosting.
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
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.