this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Hello friends, I am considering using some of my domains for email in addition to my self hosted stuff and i cannot stress enough how much i do not want to host and run my own email service. My objective is to find a service that i can hook up with Gmail, so i think it'd have to do mail forwarding and submission/SMTP for sending mails. Mostly just myself, but maybe a few others too. I don't want to spend twenty bucks per domain though. Does anyone have suggestions?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Many paid email services such as Mailbox.org or Protonmail allow you to use custom domains. You don't need gmail.

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

I see.

Gmail also offers the option to use a custom domain. It's aimed at businesses but there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to use it as a private person.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I picked up a black friday deal from mxroute for $15/year. Unlimited domains and 300 email/hour. I have it setup as the relay for my internal postfix/dovecot setup. It also hosts one email account so if I mess up my own configuration I can still do email.

Looks like their current deal is a $5/year for 1 domain https://account.mxroute.com/order/micro You could still set that one domain up as a relay.

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

I've been a long time user of mxroute and agree that their services are quite good. I've never had my emails end up in someones spam folder.

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

You have to absolutely know 100% what you are doing with MXroute, they're not into hand holding you through any problems caused by inexperience.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Check into Google workspaces, it’s a paid service now but I got a family email set up 20 years ago and it’s awesome. You get all the access to Google stuff, administration, there’s plugins and stuff it’s just a Google account with a cooler email and an admin panel really.

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

I've used SimpleLogin for awhile and it's worked very well for me, everything shows up and everyone receives their mail as expected, very happy with it. AnonAddy is another alternative, although I personally haven't tested that one. They're both pretty cheap and recommended by PrivacyGuides. SimpleLogin was purchased about a year back by Proton. Who run Proton VPN, ProtonMail and a few other products iirc. https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email/#email-aliasing-services

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

Sweet, i will look into that

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

Google Workspaces can do exactly this. You set up custom domains for it to handle mail for, and you can set up aliases or whatever so you aren't making/paying for more than $6/user/month (assuming you are ok with the limitations of their lowest plan).

If you use cloudflare for your DNS you can take advantage of their email routing feature to handle incoming mail on your domains, and can apparently even jump through some hoops to set up a normal gmail account to be able to send email from that same account by just changing the from address when composing an email. I have used email routing for some things, but not gone through the outgoing email workaround.

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

I use Zoho Mail to host my email these days; I like their UI a lot.

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

For sending I am using smtp2go. It's free if you send less than 1,000 emails a month.
For receiving my dns host provides free email forwarding

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

Microsoft offers custom email domains for Office365 family plans, but looks like they're closing that to new customers in November

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-a-personalized-email-address-in-microsoft-365-75416a58-b225-4c02-8c07-8979403b427b

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

I only know of Microsoft and email from the corporate world and instinctively want to put as much distance as I can between that and myself. How is it working for you?

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

I don't personally use it, but from what I've heard the folks that do love it, and I was considering it until I saw they were deprecating it, so presumably at some point you'd be forced into either one of their more popular consumer Office365 products or into one of the entry level M365 business tier products.

I saw another thread recently where someone said they setup a NixOS mailserver based on the instructions here and had great success

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

Check into Google workspaces, it’s a paid service now but I got a family email set up 20 years ago and it’s awesome. You get all the access to Google stuff, administration, there’s plugins and stuff it’s just a Google account with a cooler email and an admin panel really.

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

Read about Google workspaces

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

I'm in the same boat. I use Cloudflare email routing to route mail for my domain to Gmail. That covers the inbound email, CF routing provides a catch-all option and you can direct individual addresses to different inboxes.

For outbound, just use any provider that gives SMTP for custom domain. I used Zoho for a while, recently went back to running my own server for outbound. In Gmail web interface, you can add other addresses to send mail as using external SMTP servers.

All of this is of course not very good privacy-wise. Both CF and Google can read your mail... But putting that aside, the setup works really well. You can get your custom domain to Gmail with the price of a cheap email service. Zoho is around 10€ / year, but you could even use something like Amazon SES, I understand with low volumes it's practically free.

I thought about just forwarding from my own MX to Gmail, but that may cause problems if spam gets forwarded. SPF + DKIM setup is simple for traditional use, but forwarding all mail requires the original headers included in the fw mails, seemed like CF probably knows how to handle that better than me.

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

I use namecheap’s email service privateemail since a couple of years. Google workspace was great, but don’t need the other features anymore and this is fifth of the price https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/email/

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

Purelymail.com sound great for your use case, it's also very cheap.

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