
Pawnmail: a free email host for custom domains - vortico
http://www.pawnmail.com/
======
kbar13
I don't want to be the party pooper, but without knowing too many details I
can tell you that you're in for a bad time. You're essentially asking for
abuse, as spammers will use your service to forward their junk, and whoever is
hosting your service is going to receive abuse reports and act on them.

There are mean people on the internet :(

~~~
vortico
Yes, sadly you are correct. I will do my best to monitor outbound SMTP
frequency and blatant spam abuse, although so far it has been surprisingly
pleasant. Thank you for the announcing this concern.

~~~
brongondwana
This is precisely why we don't provide free account at FastMail any more - and
even then the free trials are causing us trials and tribulations right now.

Honestly, good luck - but you're going to find that giving away something for
free to other people is very different than running it for yourself right
about the first time something goes wrong and a few thousand very angry people
want to know what's up with their email.

(and as an aside, I really think good email service is worth paying for, and
having been woken in the middle of the night to fix things that customers
never even noticed - I know that it won't stay surprisingly pleasant forever)

~~~
brillout
Because of the domain registration costs, using emailing with Pawnmail is not
free. This should dramatically reduce the incentive of using Pawnmail to spam.
Btw, @vortico I'm using Pawnmail for my new domain name and it looks quite
nice so far, thanks!

------
nandhp
> Your email messages are private and are only used in the event of a legal
> order or search warrant.

Okay; Which jurisdiction?

~~~
vortico
Tennessee, United States

------
sideproject
Several comments are in regards to the issues surrounding the service, but I
have to say, the service itself fills the niche need for anyone out there who
is looking for a quick custom email solution.

When Google App stopped providing their free custom email service (which is
fair enough), I asked a question here to see if there were any alternatives
and basically there wasn't (there were a few similar ones, but not as
convenient as what Google offered) -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5179478](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5179478)

Of course there are issues I think that pawnmail needs to consider, but it
definitely feels like this might be that alternative.

~~~
ternaryoperator
I don't understand the problem. Why is free so important? For $1/month you can
get 5 email accounts with 2GB each at 1an1. If you go to $5/month, you can
host your domain on Lunarpages and have unlimited email accounts. There are
other services that offer similar possibilities at the same price points. With
email accounts so cheap, why is free so important? Am I missing an obvious use
case?

~~~
spindritf
When you're setting up a website for someone else, it's much easier to deal
with no billing than it is even with $1/year.

Email services provided on the side by hosting companies (or worse,
registrars) don't measure up to Gmail or Fastmail. And Gmail is what people
will be comparing it to.

------
jawns
1) "free forever"

2) "we currently have enough funds to support 226 more days of hosting"

I know it's possible for 1 and 2 to not contradict each other, but it
certainly gives the appearance of being a potentially unsustainable service,
and thus a potentially unreliable service. If I'm going to set up an email
hosting account, I'm going to want to expect it to be available for the long
haul.

~~~
vortico
You're right, the wording is a bit humorous and certainly contradictory. I
should rephrase the statements to say:

1) "free for as long as the service exists" 2) "we currently have enough funds
to support 226 more days of hosting given that no one supports the server
costs

Hosting a simple email service such as Pawnmail is cheaper than the cost of
hosting many individual mail servers for each domain, so the incentive to
donate exists as long as individuals and companies value the service. Being
financially open is an attempt to fix the problem met by Google and Microsoft,
who have suddenly discontinued their free custom domain email hosting services
within the last year.

~~~
MichaelApproved
> Each email account costs us approximately $0.30 per year, and we currently
> have enough funds to support 318 more days of hosting.

Curious. What does the $0.30 figure take into account? Is it just server and
IT or does it also include customer service and other administrative work?

~~~
vortico
Good question. To clarify, the $0.30 figure is simply the cost of servers per
number of users. The figure may vary according to average space used by
accounts and bandwidth.

The figure does not include administration, but donations may be used for
human resources. After a reasonable amount is distributed, funds will go into
the server budget, thus increasing the "days remaining" meter.

I will soon summarize this on the home page.

~~~
brongondwana
I have a pretty good idea of the costs of running an email service, since I do
that as well - and I do wonder if you have any redundancy or backups or any of
the niceties considered here (and I bet you'll feel less happy about giving
your time for free at some point)

Last thing I saw with "free forever" on it was called Evony and it used to
advertise all over my Facebook a few years ago.

~~~
vortico
Incremental encrypted backups are performed hourly and stored off-site.

------
chrisan
What does HN use for multiple domain email hosting? I realize I can create an
alias/forward to an inbox, but I'm looking for something that lets you send as
multiple domains but maintain a single inbox without having the dreaded
outlook "Sent from XXX on behalf of YYY".

Is the only option to have multiple accounts?

~~~
fbueno
have you tried [http://proxy4.us](http://proxy4.us) ?

~~~
chrisan
thx I'll check into it!

------
bkeroack
I admire the philanthropic intent behind this, but last time I registered a
domain with Gandi.net I got domain email included at no extra charge. It was
way easier to set up than GA (or live.com before it went away).

~~~
to3m
Agree. If you have a domain, you presumably have web hosting, and it seems to
be usual for this to come with mail. My hosting provider will host email for
any domain (presumably works like pawnmail...) and it doesn't cost any extra.
Now, if hosting were $50+/mo then I could see the value of a free service, but
you can get it for $10/mo, where the tradeoff makes (to my mind) a lot less
sense. After all, you _want_ to pay for services like these, if only to ensure
they don't suddenly stop in 226 days' time :)

My ex business partner would argue with me about this sometimes. "You always
take the piss out of my daily coffee [which cost £2, mostly to pay for coffee
shop overheads]", he'd say. "You're so tight. But you make us pay for hosting
and email, like it's a good idea. We could use Google for free." I'd just
shrug noncommittaly as I supped my tea [total cost about £0.03, mostly to pay
for electricity]. How could he not see? Over time these free services _always_
get rolled back, sometimes without any warning.

(Obviously that happened to Google Apps, or whatever. Maybe that was while we
were working together... I don't remember. I wasn't really paying attention,
because I didn't have to worry about it. That's what you pay for.)

~~~
minot
I've been lurking for a while here. In my observation, the previous consensus
seemed to be that it is a bad idea to bundle hosting and email from your
domain name registrar. Has this changed? If you have your domain name from
Gandi, isn't it a bad idea to let Gandi host your website?

Disclaimer: I have nothing against Gandi in particular. Just curious about the
prevailing convention as I always seem to be behind times...

~~~
PavlovsCat
> If you have your domain name from Gandi, isn't it a bad idea to let Gandi
> host your website?

Why? I'm with a small web shop for nearly 10 years for my private site, and
happy as can be. You might say I'm putting all eggs into one basket, but for
me it's rather a single point of failure, which so far _never_ failed me. I
expect if they, god forbid, ever go down or get bought, to be as gentlemanly
as humanly and technically possible about that. I know you'll have to take my
word for that, but let's just grant those things; so what am I missing that I
should be worrying about?

------
jonlucc
I don't see any screenshots of the web client. I know I could use a remote
client, but I'm curious. Are there any?

~~~
vortico
Pawnmail uses Roundcube for webmail, which looks a bit like this.
[http://freecode.com/screenshots/28/66/2866738b9422aeb16180a8...](http://freecode.com/screenshots/28/66/2866738b9422aeb16180a873ca40a94c_medium.jpg?1295801523)

------
l33tbro
I use zoho for my custom domain. Free, no spam, great support

~~~
donniezazen
Free account doesn't have domain aliases. Does that mean I can't use
personal@my-domain.org and work@my-domain.org all pointing to one inbox?

Since they allow 10 users with each 5gb inbox that means I have 10 different
inboxes that can be personal@my-domain.org or work@my-domain.org or mailing-
list@my-domain.org.

No custom url? Does that mean no custom domain allowed?

~~~
syntern
AFAIK, grandfathered accounts have custom domain.

~~~
donniezazen
It seems they call custom domain as custom URL and don't allow it with free
account.

------
ebbv
It's very sweet and naive of you to offer this. There's a reason other people
don't, and it's not because there aren't other nice people. It's because like
another poster said, you're gonna get abuse as soon as more than a few people
know about this. A lot of abuse.

I work for a hosting company, and one time we did a promotion where you could
get a VPS for about a dollar for a month. This boosted our sales tremendously
during the promotion, but all the boosted sales were abuse accounts and none
of them renewed.

Free or nearly free == here comes abuse.

------
deevus
What happens once I reach the 2GB limit? Can I pay for more?

------
justboxing
Thanks for providing this great service. Pardon me if this sounds ignorant,
but won't other email providers like google, yahoo flag an email coming from
@pawnmail.com as junk because of the word "pawn" (synonymous with pawn shops
etc) in the domain name?

~~~
TheDong
Junk/spam is far more complex than that. That alone will not be an issue
almost certainly.

HOWEVER, there are _many_ issues with this site that will cause messages to
get marked as spam with a high frequency (including my innocuous test message
to a gmail address).

1) There's no recommendation to setup SPF for your domain. This is the big
one. SPF is a big deal, and not having any spf will give you a higher spam
score.

2) The creator of this service did not setup a reverse dns entry for the ip to
the mx domain. There's no reverse dns at all (even though he's hosted with
ramnode and ramnode supports rdns).

3) The creator does not allow you to add dkim signing keys; you can't dkim
sign your messages.

The above factors ensure that google has a high chance of marking you as spam,
as well as any other sufficiently strict spam software. amavisd did not mark
it as spam for me, giving it only a spam score of a little over 2, though I
have mine configured at a high threshold compared to many people.

Because of the above reasons, I wouldn't consider using this. The lack of a
rdns entry is especially unforgivable because it's so easy and helps with your
spam rating so much. The other factors are all additional complexity because
the owner of the domain (user) would have to do additional work beyond the dns
record, but those should also be there.

Perhaps the creator will see this and improve these problems.

~~~
jstalin
This is why I've moved over to Fastmail. They allow up to 100 custom domains
and provide SPF. It's only $40 a year.

------
jameshk
This is awesome. Yes, the spam problems and everything but if this can be
hosted somewhere more secure, and get a better SSL cert :) then it's a viable
option for personal @yourdomain.com email. I would love to see a paid tier for
when you outgrow the 2GB.

------
digital-rubber
Also the bigger your service grows, the more time you will have to spend on
it. You might want to rethink the cost per mailbox.

Also people that care about their email, (should be/ are) willing to pay for
it. Then again, people that care will most likely host their own.

------
Slix
Is there an option to forward all of my mail to my gmail (preferably deleting
the copy on pawnmail too)?

This is an interesting idea. I was going to set up an email server on my VPS
with just SMTP that auto-forwarded everything to my gmail. But this might be
simpler.

~~~
stormbrew
> I was going to set up an email server on my VPS with just SMTP that auto-
> forwarded everything to my gmail. But this might be simpler.

Do NOT do this. Unless you're willing to make absolutely sure that no spam
gets through to gmail, you will be blacklisted by gmail when it flags spam
coming from your host. And not even a lot of it.

Basically, to use gmail this way you have to be almost as good as gmail at the
thing that most makes gmail worthwhile. It's not worth it. Much easier to go
the other way.

~~~
andrewaylett
TTBOMK, Google have tooling to help with this -- they're aware that people
forward them mail, and if you don't rewrite the mail on the way through (and
especially if you've registered the forwarded address in gmail) they say
they'll do the right thing.

[https://support.google.com/mail/answer/175365?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/175365?hl=en)

------
frdmn
Is the source code available for the web interface (to manage custom domains)?

------
ForHackernews
Fastmail used to provide a service like this, but no longer. This could be
really useful.

~~~
brongondwana
That's because providing a service like this really sucks the life out of you.
The theory was that we could either drive people towards the paying accounts,
or monetize the accounts some other way.

The stats said - free accounts very rarely converted to paying accounts. All
the monitizing options for people with free accounts are pretty creepy, even
text-only ads were bad. We hated that.

So we turned off free accounts. FastMail only provides paid accounts, and in
exchange we don't need to look for another business model - we take payment in
exchange for providing an awesome service and everybody is happy.

... and per the estimated price of $0.30/yr for 2Gb storage - our costs are
much higher than that. On the other hand we have 3 full copies of every email
store, two in one datacentre and one in another - and each of them is on RAID1
SSD and RAID6 SATA, all encrypted - with enough CPU and RAM to work fast.
Metadata and the current week's email is on SSD, the rest on SATA. There's a
reason we're fast, and it's because people pay us enough to be able to invest
in full time engineers working on optimising our usage of the hardware
resources we have. Feel free to read the source code for our IMAP server at:

[https://github.com/brong/cyrus-imapd/](https://github.com/brong/cyrus-imapd/)
in the fastmail branch.

(or have a look at the git repository at git.cyrusimap.org where we are
pushing many of our contributions back into the master branch in preparation
for the public 2.5 release soon)

I feel no guilt at not offering free service. We provide value for money to
our customers.

~~~
ForHackernews
This was a weirdly defensive response. I'm actually a paying Fastmail customer
(for about six months) and so far the service has been good.

------
tux
Very nice project. Thank You ^_^

------
frequentflyeru
Accept bitcoin and I'd be glad to pay 10X the yearly hosting cost for my
account.

------
gprasanth
I find free email forwarding service more useful than this. Just think about
it.

~~~
chrisBob
The difficulty is that it is often hard to use your favorite email account
(gmail, icloud, exchange), and use your custom domain in the sent field. I
have a few accounts that I really try to keep separate, so the hosting really
does help.

------
ForFreedom
If you are using roundcube what is so good? Is it the email service?

------
cmwslw
Thanks for providing this, just set it up with my new domain!

------
devappbkk
zoho offers free email for a domain with up to 10 users. i tried using
pawnmail, i think it's better to use zoho because of the mail forwarding
feature.

------
tzz
What API do you use for users to register domain names?

------
pingec
Very cool. Any chances of accepting bitcoin donations?

~~~
vortico
Bitcoin donations are now accepted.

------
n0body
why is this on the front page? sure, i'll host my email with some random
internet person, it's fine, they said they won't read it

------
tiatia
I am happy to pay for such a service:

1\. if I know it is still there tomorrow. 2\. It has a good price 3\. It is
not hosted in the US.

~~~
minot
Someone replied this was hosted in Tennessee, United States. Just curious,
where would you prefer this to be hosted? (Germany? Switzerland?) I am sure
Andrew would not mind someone in that region duplicate a set up like this as
this does not seem to be for-profit to begin with.

~~~
mrweasel
That's actually one of my main requirement: No US hosting. Countries I feel
sort of safe with is Germany, Switzerland and Norway.

------
notastartup
gandi.net came with free webmail.

I used name.com and they charge the price of another .com for webmail access.
whois privacy costs extra too. gandi includes all these things at no extra
charge. I'm going to be moving to gandi.net permanently pretty much had it
with getting hustled by name.com

~~~
hmsimha
This. Gandi is a remarkably good 'no bullshit' (their motto) registrar.

------
kayman
Why not use mailgun as an alternative? 10,000 email per month free which
should suffice most users

~~~
duskwuff
Mailgun is an email _sending_ service, not an email host.

~~~
phantom784
I took a look at their documentation, and it looks like they do support
receiving mail as well. You don't get an actual mailbox, but you can have
incoming mail forwarded wherever you want, which would be enough if you just
want everything to go to your gmail.

Am I missing something? Is there a reason that this would be a bad idea?

