

Ask HN: What's a good POP3/IMAP provider - cissou

I have a very precise need: I need a server to receive e-mails sent @mydomain.com and forward them to another inbox.<p>I was relying on Namecheap, my registrar, to do it as they offer it for free. However, they failed today and it jeopardized my entire web services, so I&#x27;m trying to move to a more specialized service.<p>I already set up a Google Apps account, but as a temporary&#x2F;emergency solution: it will only be up for the 30 days free trial. I really _only_ need the e-mail forwarding feature and not the entire GApps suite, so I don&#x27;t see myself becoming a GApps customer just for that.<p>So I was wondering: what do folks on HN use to receive and process their e-mails? Is there any POP3&#x2F;IMAP as-a-service thingy that would be known&#x2F;reliable?
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dangrossman
Rackspace Mail. It's Rackspace. The big high-end service guys with the
24/7/365 live support (phone/chat/email, even 4AM on Christmas Eve). Except
their e-mail service is cheap at $10/month for 5 mailboxes ($2/mailbox after
that). They give you a 100% uptime SLA. I have used them for my domains for
many years, and there has never been an outage.

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cissou
Postkmarkapp (postmarkapp.com) is also providing such a thing. Just like
Mandrill, they don't let you forward it to any inbox; however, I was already
using them to process the e-mails and send a JSON payload to a webhook of
mine, so it solves my problem apparently. I just hope their uptime is decent.

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hackerboos
I use Zoho:

\- nice interface

\- native mobile apps for iOS and Android

\- support for multiple domains and aliases

\- Free for a single domain or $24/year per user for 10GB

[https://www.zoho.com/mail/](https://www.zoho.com/mail/)

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cissou
I've dug a bit in my Mandrill account and they seem to have such a feature
(although it's advertised exactly nowhere). I'll give it a try too.

Update: Mandrill receives e-mail, but then only lets you POST a payload to a
webhook. No e-mail forwarding.

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hackertoolbox
Tools from previous discussions:
[http://www.hackertoolbox.com/tags/email%20hosting](http://www.hackertoolbox.com/tags/email%20hosting)

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RexRollman
Fastmail would probably be a good suggestion.

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cissou
So I assume it would be their $40/year plan as I need to use a custom domain.
I've never heard of them before; did you use them? Happy/any feedback?

Edit: apparently they also have "family" and business plans, which seem more
suited, but without trials.

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jfb
I've been with them for years and I can't remember a single outage longer than
minutes. I'm sure they've had them, but in my experience, Fastmail is 100%
reliable, and will continue to get my money until they prove otherwise.

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cissou
sounds like what I'm after. Have you had the chance to benchmark it with
anything over the years? I'm just curious about the competition at this point

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jfb
It's always worked for my purely IMAP workflow, so I've never bothered trying
anything else. It's my personal mail, so I never really end up sending or
receiving LARGENUM mails through them.

Personally, I don't notice a difference between them and my work IMAP servers,
which have been Google Apps and some Oracle thing.

