I’m setting up my Nextcloud server and am at the point of needing to connect an email server. I’m not interested in selfhosting an email server (not yet anyway), and I don’t particularly like Proton as my current email provider (which was what I migrated to when de-Googling my life).
What email providers do y’all like that aren’t run by shady tech bros and are easy to integrate with your other selfhosted services?
I want to thank everyone who replied. I did some research on most of these and think PurelyMail is the winner for me. Feel free to correct me if I got some details wrong. I want to give a shoutout to @mbirth for mentioning Disroot, which looks like a really interesting experiment in federated services.
Also, I know this post is really bending the rules for c/selfhosted, but connecting your selfhosted services to an email provider is essential, and having a reliable and affordable email provider just makes this weird hobby of ours a little easier.
My Rating (1-5) Service Website Annual Cost Only Email? 5 PurelyMail https://purelymail.com/ $10, pay for added storage Yes 4 MXRoute https://mxroute.com/ $50/year small plan Yes 4 Disroot https://disroot.org/ Free, pay to add storage and domains Yes, separated from other Disroot services 3 Fastmail https://www.fastmail.com/ $60 individual plan Yes-ish 3 Mailo https://www.mailo.com/ ~$14 premium plan No 3 Proton https://mail.proton.me/ $48/year plus plan $120/year unlimited plan No 2 Mailbox.org https://mailbox.org/ ~$14 light plan ~$42 standard Light plan 2 Migadu https://migadu.com/ $90 mini plan Yes 1 GMX https://www.gmx.com/mail/ Free, ad supported No Check out PurelyMail
I’m liking what I’m seeing here! Most other services try to be like Google, where you can’t get a mail account without also paying for drive, calendar, office, etc. All I want here is an email service, and this looks good and cheap for that.
It’s good but it’s also been bought out by, at least to me, an ‘unknown’ early this year. Since then, there’s been a couple outages though nothing too drastic. New owner also promised to only make changes that are ‘thoughtful and focused on making your experience better’ but I am still cautiously eyeing other options since then - I’ve learned never to trust those words by new owners.
Is this for me? Do you want email? Then yes, probably.
Well, you really can’t argue with that logic. LOL
Seconded, been using them for years. It’s just… mail. No weird stuff.
Based in USA and using AWS? Hard pass. Even Stripe is bad enough, but I do understand that one.
I use Migadu, it’s probably the closest you can come to fully managing email while not hosting your own server. All their plans are limited on inbound/outbound mails per day and storage used. Beyond that you add as many domains as you want (within reason on their cheapest plan) and create any number of separate mailboxes/users.
I second migadu. I’ve been with them for about a year, no problems so far, works nice with thunderbird and K9-mail.
Purelymail is nice. Stupid cheap and really easy.
Have a look at posteo. Gives you IMAP so you can use any client. Its only €1 a month and is supposed to be good with privacy. Have had no complaints so far. https://posteo.de/en
Seconded. Works really well for me.
Mailo.com. French company. They have quite a quirky UI. like one can tell it’s made by a backend guy and the junior version is made by his younger nephew but technical wise it’s perfect. All standards are there plus price is OK.
French government is trying to crack down on encrypted services. https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/1993035936800584103 I’m avoiding anything from France for now.
Email is not encrypted.
True. Maybe it was not the best phrasing. It may apply to some email providers (eg. Proton) if email communication happens only between recipients of the same provider, which is rarely the case.
I mentioned this to highlight that if this pressure is put on legitimate secure services like GrapheneOS, then you can imagine that your email data is scrutinized without your knowledge.
At this point if I have to choose between French government looking at my email and yellow man minions I go with French.
GrapheneOS also has an official Bluesky account. Here’s a link to the same post except you don’t need to visit that nazi-bar website and don’t need to login: https://bsky.app/profile/grapheneos.org/post/3m6fm6vseik27
Mxroute for me. Or Zoho.
I have had delivery issues with Zoho in the past. Just me?
I didn’t experience that (or I just didn’t notice it).
My small team using mxroute for a few years now.
Its fine. Its cheap. Support is very responsive.
It’s great… And having Jar reply to your question/doubts in Discord almst in real time is a big plus.
Careful, I had a post like this locked almost a month ago.
FWIW, I went with purelymail, and it’s been pretty good. Basic, but solid.
I use inleed.xyz. It’s free, has IMAP/SMTP access and you can have as many accounts as you want. It’s limited to 1GB of storage shared between all accounts though.
disroot is quite decent. I like their (privacy) vibe and the set of semi-independent services they provide.
I’ve got a so-called “Asteroid” with UberSpace. You just have to bring your own domain and configure DNS to use their servers. Unlimited mailboxes, unlimited aliases, Sieve scripts … and SSH access.
Apart from that, I’ve got a free account with disroot for emergencies.
I been using mailo.com for years now. It’s a small EU business that’s been in business for 20 years iirc. Never had an issue. Other than that, I predominately use aliases that forward to my main email address.
Fastmail. It’s been around forever and it just works. And they don’t do anything weird with SMTP/IMAP.
mailbox dot org is also pretty good, but I wasn’t a fan of their 2FA implementation.
Fastmail is probably the best, but their pricing is egregious.
I was with them for a decade or so but with a large archive of emails and multiple users i couldn’t justify the cost.
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Plus, if you are a 1Password user, it integrates to give you randomly generated email addresses.
When did you try mailbox.org last? they improved 2FA this year. It is now TOTP + possibility to make application passwords. Finally works great!
https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/security-and-privacy/how-to-use-two-factor-authentication-2fa/
Ah very nice, good to hear they addressed that. It was the only real deciding factor last time I moved my mail around ~2 yrs ago
Gmx for automatic emails to myself since the Calibre days. Maybe there is something better now.
