
Ask HN: Paid email hosting, with custom domains - petecooper
I&#x27;m a one-person operation with email addresses on 8 domains. I&#x27;m currently paying for Fastmail (Standard and Professional) and I&#x27;m broadly happy with the service and price.<p>My contract comes up for renewal in early summer and I&#x27;d like to compare some of the other reputable players in the email space. I&#x27;ve been with Fastmail 3 years and I suspect the email hosting landscape has evolved since.<p>I looked at Google Apps for Work, but with 8x domains I don&#x27;t want to pay for 8x accounts on the non-email apps when 1x is enough.<p>I looked at Outlook 365, and I&#x27;m sort of neutral about the whole thing price- and performance-wise.<p>I had shortlisted, and almost decided on, ProtonMail until I heard about the DDoS and the ransom payment.<p>I&#x27;d like to pay for a service that offers:<p>* IMAP over SSL
* a good track record of security
* a good track record of reliability
* wildcard email (i.e., <i>@example.com drops into alice@example.com)
</i> some reassurance that they won&#x27;t instantly cave if&#x2F;when the feds come knocking
* minimal extra fluff that I likely won&#x27;t use<p>I prefer to keep domains, web hosting and email at different places, so Gandi and self-hosting with Digital Ocean is out. I have no interest in running my own server. I&#x27;ve done that before, and it was a bag of hurt.<p>I&#x27;m still leaning toward ProtonMail. Whether that&#x27;s a good or bad idea is up for debate.<p>I am interested and grateful for your feedback on:<p>* what you use - would you recommend it?
* is ProtonMail worth pursuing?<p>Thank you in advance.
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patio11
_I looked at Google Apps for Work, but with 8x domains I don 't want to pay
for 8x accounts on the non-email apps when 1x is enough._

You can have a single GAfW account, with one primary domain, and N secondary
domains that you can receive and send email from. I did this for years prior
to needing to split the account into one GAfW account per domain. That process
was _a disastrous timesuck_ and I do not recommend it.

~~~
petecooper
Thanks, Patrick. You've hit on something that I had overlooked in my OP:
modularity is attractive. The domains I have are business-related and may be
retired at a given point. Unpicking one from a lump of connected domains is
something I'd rather avoid. I've had the multiple-emails-from-one-Google-
account and it wasn't for me.

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dangrossman
Rackspace Mail (formerly MailTrust) is the leader in this niche, with over
200K paying customers, yet nobody on HN seems to be aware they even exist.
This is what they do. With a 100% availability SLA. And 24/7/365
phone/chat/email support. For just $2/mailbox.

~~~
vincent_s
Problem is, you need to buy at least 10 mailboxes. So minimum monthly price is
$20.

~~~
hackerboos
It's 5 these days.

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philiphodgen
Google Apps for Work -- why not buy a grandfathered GAfW account?

I have done this successfully three times using
[http://www.gappsdomain.com](http://www.gappsdomain.com) but there are plenty
of other people selling these. Ask Mr. Google and he will lead you to them.

For a one-time cost, you now have a free GAfW account forever.

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cweagans
If you're happy with the price and service of Fastmail, why switch? Seems like
a lot of time and hassle for not a lot of benefit.

~~~
mattkrea
This. That and FastMail itself has improved significantly over the years IMO.

~~~
cweagans
Yeah. A provider that's already very good that has a demonstrably good track
record of improving constantly over time seems like a win/win.

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DyslexicAtheist
>> _won 't instantly cave if/when the feds come knocking_

I have never used ProtonMail for business and only have a private account with
them. I quite like them mainly because as you say they probably won't cave in
when the feds come knocking. Since they aren't based in the US (nor the EU
which is equally important). The DDoS was unfortunate as they are a very young
company so a bit unfair to be tested like that. But I think it shows that they
didn't cave in to the ransom - which I respect and support more than them
"fixing it" by paying up.

~~~
Joyfield
They did pay. "The first attack was tied to a ransom of 15 bitcoins (roughly
US$6,000) which ProtonMail eventually paid due to pressure from ISPs and other
companies affected by the attack."
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProtonMail#2015_DDoS_attacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProtonMail#2015_DDoS_attacks)

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doublerebel
I use asmallorange shared hosting when I need cheap easy email for custom
domains. Standard management through cpanel, multiple webmail options, IMAP
over SSL, great customer service and security track record. It's kind of an
old school choice these days but it's quick and it always works.

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aibara
I don't think Protonmail supports IMAP.

[https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/imap-smtp-
and-...](https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/imap-smtp-and-
pop3-setup/)

I love Fastmail but my situation is less complex than yours.

~~~
petecooper
>I don't think Protonmail supports IMAP.

I had wrongly assumed they did - thanks for the clarification.

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kiwichris
Hey - ZOHO Mail comes up pretty good in this survey:
[http://www.smallbusinesswebdesigns.co.nz/business-email-
host...](http://www.smallbusinesswebdesigns.co.nz/business-email-hosting.html)
\- I think it's probably your best option as it's free but also has IMAP and
up to 25 accounts.

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danieltillett
Just curious why deliverability is not on your list. For me this is
requirement number 1 as one lost sale due to my email going into spam is far
more costly.

~~~
petecooper
Valid question, and it's not something I've encountered before. In the past 10
years I've run with Media Temple (VPS hosting), then Fastmail. I've never had
reason to question delivery rates, come to think of it. I guess in that
respect that's another point to stay with Fastmail.

~~~
danieltillett
I used to run my own mail server and had no trouble with deliverability for
about 15 years. In the last 12 months it became so bad with certainly email
providers (I am looking at you Microsoft and Yahoo) that I was forced to
change over to a dedicated email service (I went with luxsci).

It would appear that some of the large email companies have effectively
outsource spam filtering to the email service providers (email from one of the
known service provider == good - everyone else == drop 1 in 20 emails
randomly). This means that in practice it is impossible to run your own email
server anymore if you care about deliverability.

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ldarby
Have a look at [http://www.tuffmail.com](http://www.tuffmail.com).

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terinjokes
Perhaps not a good answer for the OP, but for the greater HN community: I've
been using Pobox.com fo a couple of years now, and been pretty happy with
their services.

They recently joined up with FastMail, but bring a silently different feature
set.

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adam_klein
Have you considered mxroute.com?

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jaxondu
Soho Mail [https://www.zoho.com/mail/](https://www.zoho.com/mail/) is another
option. I have not used them.

~~~
DyslexicAtheist
I am one of their customers. Often buggy (webmail) and issues with
availability. Suffered a prolonged DDoS attack last year which left me a whole
weekend without email. Upgrades seem to often cause outages. Some issues in
Operational security. Also it is unclear if data at rest is encrypted. They
use SSO with all their other apps (makes sense) but then support asks you to
give them your password so they can verify any issues. (and they don't
comprehend and treat you like an idiot if you say this isn't possible).
Support issues generally take ages to solve and you have to mention the CEO in
your tweets to get any response. Also even you have a premium subscription
there is a limit on the number of mails you can send per day from your
account. This might be an issue for companies with marketing or newsletter
accounts and wish to build campaigns for this.

I'm seriously questioning their technical competence not just from support but
also from development. When I subscribed to Zoho first thing I noticed (in
2011) that sending emails with multi-part alternative MIME types results in an
empty plain-text part so anyone reading the mail in a plain-text MUA would see
just an empty email (and it took them ages to get this basic feature fixed).

here some of my recent arguments with them:
[https://twitter.com/search?q=%40valbonneconsult%20zoho&src=t...](https://twitter.com/search?q=%40valbonneconsult%20zoho&src=typd)

On the upside they are pretty easy to set up with IMAP and TLS in more exotic
environments (e.g. offlineimap, postfix, mutt etc). If you go with them don't
expect to scale your business because it's going to end in tears. OK for
private use IMO.

I still use Zoho until now because of integration with some other apps (once I
migrate those I will turn my back on them and never look back).

~~~
hotcool
_I 'm seriously questioning their technical competence not just from support
but also from development._

Have to agree with you there. I tried their online office apps a few times
over the years (also recently) and was surprised how limited and kind of janky
the software is. They don't seem to be improving.

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msh
I use mailbox.org

It works very well and seem to fulfill your requirements if you can live with
all 8 domains going into a single email account.

Proton do unfortunately not support imap or anything like it.

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peternicky
I would recommend highly o365 exchange online accounts. I have been using this
for my personal email for the past year and I recommend it.

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_RPM
FastMail has been doing this since 1999

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__d
pobox.com? (although it's now owned by fastmail, the service is still
separate, I think).

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WaiterZ
Mark

