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simlevesque
Hey, I like the low price. I want to make a SaaS with a low price but sadly with something like Stripe for example at 1.50 per month 23% of your revenue goes directly in merchant fees. Braintree is the same.

Do you use another provider or do you just accept the fact that it's gonna be one of your main costs ?

svjx
Yea it's unfortunate that we lose so much to Stripe and definitely it's something to be weary of when creating your prices. That said, Stripe does provide an excellent service. However, I never put all my eggs in one basket. You will notice that our system doesn't use any of Stripe's fancy features. The fine print will show that they'll take extra cuts for each and every thing. We built everything from scratch and only use Stripe for the final payment processing. That way, if we ever decide to switch, it would be quick and painless ;)
darthrupert
It's too bad how one of the interesting promises of crypto currencies was to facilitate micropayments. That clearly hasn't been delivered in any sensible form yet.
LanternLight83
You can use crypto to pay eg. notable VPN providers, or to make all sorts of donations, but one of the issues facing crypto for a service like this is that you can't automate monthly payments (at least, not in a standardized and broadly compatible way). You always need to pay a regular invoice, pre-pay for a long period, or (in the best case) regularly top off a custodial wallet that cooperates with registered services and protégés on your behalf (eg. via some standardized smart-contract that hasn't been widely adopted yet). Stripe can just store your info and bill you monthly, but no one hands over their crypo wallet seed in the same way.
Houssameddine
Have you considered Paddle, they offer custom pricing if you sell products under $10
svjx
I had no idea about this. Thanks for the heads up!
simlevesque
Well, the Pay-As-You-Go pricing has a base fee that's way over Stripe's price and the percentage is greater too. I'm curious how low they can reach but they'll need to be almost half their normal price to make any sense.

For 1.50 it's going to cost 57.5 cents, which is 38%.

anjel
How much was Fast Mail when they launched compared to now? Email is nothing if not sticky.
svjx
I'm not sure what their original price was but they now charge $3 per address per month for 2GB.
Vincenius
I was just looking for something like this today - I will give it a shot!
svjx
Awesome, glad to hear it! Let me know if you need any help getting set up.
rgbrgb
Love the price, congrats! Any trick making it so cheap or is the margin just low?
svjx
Margin is invisible! Jk, most of everything is done from scratch so we are able to keep costs very low. We take pride in our work though which is why the product is good.
tionis
How's the pricing and bus factor compared to purelymail?
svjx
Mango Mail is $18 a year for 5GB. Purely mail leaves the limits and specifics up in the air. Purelymail is a bit weird with the pricing. "If you use significantly more than $10 a year in resources, you may need to switch to advanced pricing". That sounds like a makeshift system. No offense, but it doesn't seem like the most serious provider.
svjx
Oh also, the bus factor would be 2. That's my brother (Sean) and I (Steve).
TechTechTech
Great work! How does it compare to migadu.com?
svjx
Thanks! I'd say the user experience is much better. Migadu is a great company but sometimes using it can be a headache. That's really one of our main goals, making it as easy as possible.
executesorder66
I've been using Migadu for a while, and haven't experienced any headaches. Which features/services do you offer that Migadu doesn't which makes things easier?
svjx
1. SimpleTransfer - automatically migrates all your old mailbox data / custom folders / custom tags for you

2. Extremely easy-to-use dashboard and overview page with insights on which domains/users are eating up your data

3. Docs. We've gotten a lot of love for our docs. It'd be easier just to show you: https://mymangomail.com/docs/

executesorder66
Thanks, I appreciate your answer. The docs are very well written and useful.
ColonelBlimp
Nice website and interesting option of email provider. However, I haven’t been able to find much information about the company providing the service beyond “Mango Mail is an American company based in the state of Florida”. That (i.e, the limited information about the company, not the location) could be a deal breaker or, at least, a cause for concern for some people. It would be for me.

Some small providers are completely transparent about how small they are and share the information about the company. See, for example Purelymail https://purelymail.com/about .

Edit/note: To be clear, the point I tried to make has nothing to do with the location of the provider but about the lack or limited information about the company.

[dead] k8svet
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[dead] svjx
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schnable
Partisan brainrot.
k8svet
Sure, it could be that, or it could be a simple look at laws, policies, executive actions, and LITERAL ACTIONS TAKEN RELATED TO EMAIL-ADJACENT INFO SECURITY that have played out in the state and me making a sane decision.

once again, I wonder, am I just better informed, or is the ignorance a guise to push an agenda while trying to portray me as "political" because, I assure you, I am not. Or I'd bet your assumptions about me are probably all quite wrong.

Edit: for the record, I didn't flag the OPs reply to me, and I don't think it should be hidden.

schnable
Maybe you're better informed. What are the literal actions you're referring to?
arghwhat
The risk of the service turning out to be run by Florida Man is too high.
jihadjihad
> That could be a deal breaker or, at least, a cause for concern for some people. It would be for me.

Why is that? Are you saying it's something to do with the US state of Florida itself, or something more general about the lack of company info on the website?

Edit: saw your edit, got it!

ColonelBlimp
I explained that better adding a note to my original message. Nothing to do with Florida or any other location in the US or any other country.

What I meant was that before I make the decision to move email providers I would like to see more information about the company (the usual stuff. I suppose I could ask directly but being able to find that information on the website would be nice.

daft_pink
I don't understand this obsession with avoiding American providers. I actually would prefer my vendor to be located in the USA and the contract be subject to US law and knowing my information is located in the United States.

I really doubt the US government is interested in my email and if they are, I'm sure they can read it other ways.

svjx
I'm glad someone finally said this. There is so much concern for "The government is spying on me" but the truth is, if you're doing something illegal, I don't even want you using it. The government only cares when you do something and they are forced to step in.
ColonelBlimp
I hope the note I added to my original message is enough to explain that my comment wasn’t about the location of the company but about what I think is very limited information about the company. I copied the quote from the website to illustrate what I meant by limited information. That was all.

I don’t live in the US, I don’t follow US politics and I have literally no idea about what's going on in Florida.

svjx
Haha, no no you're good. Nothing's going on with Florida except mosquitoes.
svjx
You're right. I'll fix this.
snapplebobapple
I love purelymail. I'm sending 20-30k emails a month for various work and home projects (not spam, real mail) and there has been no problems.
fatterypt
I cannot find it in the website, but do you offer catch all addresses?
svjx
No, we removed catch-all addresses. They're a bad idea. Every 5 seconds a spammer sends something to a bunch of random letters @ your domain.

However, we do have all of the following:

- subdomain addressing - plus addressing - aliases

Can you tell me what you use case for catch-all is? I'm open to rethinking it.

dheera
- Business: Legit customers sometimes guess e-mails like support@, abuse@, sales@, jobs@, careers@, info@, and other language variants of these words, you may not want to set up mailboxes for all of these.

- Personal: Plus addressing doesn't work with many services but you sometimes want a single-use e-mail address to purchase something from a website and still have the receipt.

svjx
Yes, we know that plus addressing isn't always supported. That's why we have subdomain addressing which is really its successor.
neogodless
> Every 5 seconds a spammer sends something to a bunch of random letters @ your domain

In my experience, this is an exaggeration of the truth. I've been using catch-all addresses for something like 15 years. And yes, there are times when I'll get dozens of spam over the course of a day sent to random letters. But that's a pretty rare occurrence.

I default to allowing any <string>@<mydomain.tld>, and then uses aliases to block offenders. My <string> is often a domain name where I'm using the email address, which means I know who either willingly spams me, sells my email address, or otherwise allows my email address to be leaked. At any rate, I'll throw addresses used for spam onto a disabled account as an alias, resulting in bounces.

The biggest advantage here over aliases is that I've used hundreds of aliases, but didn't have to manually track and add each and every one to my email address. Since most of the time, my email is not used for spam, I only have to manually add the bad ones.

mr337
I was thinking the same thing. Been using catch-all for about 7 years with zero issues about that.
svjx
Haha, it's not an exaggeration. It's logs. You don't receive it because the system is constantly filtering it. I do not deem it to be worth the potential spam and many other email systems agree on that.
neogodless
You are not familiar with my system or my logs, so your claim about the filtering is invalid. If some "system" outside of the receiving mail server filters it, then it's irrelevant to whether or not you offer the service.
svjx
Not sure what you mean. This isn't about your system or your logs. If you use Mango Mail, we aren't talking about any other system. I am telling you the attempted spam I see hitting MY servers.
neogodless
What did you mean by

> You don't receive it because the system is constantly filtering it.

Who is "You" in this statement, and what "system" is filtering it?

jarland
It varies. It likely is an exaggeration for you, but for someone else it isn’t. It only needs to target a few domains to act as a DDOS. Rejecting invalid recipients reduces spam scanning overhead. It’s very significant at scale, for someone managing enough domains to see it.

The problem seems to be that while many domains don’t see this behavior, it seems random which ones do. Having the catchall in place when someone finally does target your domain like this seals the deal: Every one of the 16,000 recipient addresses that were accepted were just added to a list of working email addresses to be sold to spammers for the next 15 years. One hour to ruin your domain, and maybe it never happens to you, or maybe it happens to you tomorrow.

I’ve seen it go down like this at least a few hundred times in the last decade. Safe to say I’ve managed email for a few domains during that time. Enough to say it doesn’t happen to most people, but the ones it happens to usually end up having to disable their catchall or buy a new domain.

As an admin of shared mail servers you often have to base protections and actions on the worst of events, as those are the ones that threaten your infrastructure.

fatterypt
I generate one-time only email aliases to virtually every service I use. Some sort of a poor-man's hide my email from iCloud. If that email is compromised, or I start receiving spam for it, I know where it came from. This has become a vital part of my workflow, and not having it is a show stopper to me, unfortunately.
joshmanders
> 200 in/day

How does this work? Do you just limit what gets shown to me, say I get 250 emails sent to me in a day, I can only view 200 of them, or do you bounce the extra 50?

svjx
No we don't bounce your mail. If you really did go over, we'd let it slide. However, if it becomes a blatant overage, the sender will be informed the mail cannot be delivered to you because you're over the quota. You will be warned several times before this happens though.
joshmanders
Not a big fan of someone being able to spam me and get my email locked out of like this. :/
nrabulinski
I’d assume being targeted with spam is not considered „blatant overage”
dheera
Yeah I'm very unclear on this.

I thought the slogan was pay for the "data you use" in which case I'd expect something like no limits on how many in/out per day but e.g. first 1GB in/out is free and $0.10/GB after that with no limits as long as you pay. Or something like that.

svjx
Being a mail provider, most of the things we do are to protect users and the servers. The in/out per day are really to prevent spammers and abuse. Also, I don't like charging people for overages. It never sits well.
dheera
It wouldn't be an overage, if you market it as a pay-per-GB e-mail provider with no limits (but the first 1 GB is free) that would be cool.

As for managing spammers, just require some sort of ID verification? Or set the price point high enough that spammers wouldn't be interested?

$1.50/month for personal or $16/month for business is insanely cheap, I pay a lot more than that to Google. If you're too inexpensive, spammers will be attracted to your pricing.

Real businesses would have no problem paying upwards of $100/month, to be honest.

svjx
Although you're right about successful businesses being able to pay $100+ a month, we are trying to give good email to those that are trying to start their businesses without killing them with costs. Cool idea though about the pay-per-GB. I'll think about that.
sneak
How do you offer real human support for $1.50/mo?
svjx
I'm a real human. Seriously, the support is handled by the system admins which makes resolution almost instantaneous.
Klonoar
Cool service!

One minor bit: the font sizing on some of the headlines on the front page are almost the size of my laptop screen. I know it's a design choice, but it's actually really jarring as I'm going through - it takes me a second to piece together what each section is actually trying to showcase.

Not saying make it much smaller, but maybe a slight adjustment would be helpful.

svjx
I really appreciate that. What device/browser are you using?
Klonoar
13in MBP, Safari.
svjx
Thank you! I'll take a look asap
natn
I'm currently looking for somewhere to park some forwarded addresses since gandi decided to start making money.

I don't see any mention of address forwarding on the website, is this a supported use case?

svjx
We recently had customers come to us for the same reason. They all use aliasing with us. This allows you to redirect mail from any address you own to a real mailbox in Mango Mail.
daft_pink
It doesn't seem like the most affordable. They allow a lot of users, but just charge you for the rate of sending and receiving. I think something like fastmail would be cheaper for me as I'm more focused on the quantity of email and storage and not the total number of users.
svjx
How could Fastmail be cheaper? They are $3 per user per month. Mango is $1.50 per month for unlimited users. It's impossible for Fastmail to be cheaper.
daft_pink
Because I only need one user, but I need the $5 per month plan from Mango, so it ends up being cheaper with fastmail.
svjx
What exactly is it that is making you need Small Business? I want to make the plans as reasonable as possible.
willcosgrove
Just chiming in with my one data point of personal experience: I've primarily used Gmail for all of my email needs. I heard about Migadu several years back and decided to migrate over and give it a try. I was shocked at how completely inundated with spam my inbox was. They had a spam filter with a tunable threshold and no setting on that filter worked well for me. Even on the highest protection level some spam was still getting through, and tons of my actual mail was winding up in spam; which made wading through my spam folder multiple times a day a requirement. Compare that to when I was using Gmail, I didn't even really think about spam. My non-spam email almost never ends up in the spam folder, and I basically never get unwanted email in my inbox.

So after about 6 months of dealing with spam, I went back to Gmail. It's a minor ordeal to move email providers. I'd be scared to move providers without being able to see how well their spam filter works.

As an aside, that would be a nice capability (no idea if it's possible): a way to have your email mirrored to another service to test it out.

Your mail service looks cool though! If I hadn't already been burned I would be more inclined to give it try.

svjx
Can you elaborate more on the feature you would like? I have no problem building a solution from scratch if it comes in handy.

Also we use Bayesian filtering, rbls, dbls, rate checks, the whole 9 yards. We haven't had much complaint about receiving spam. Ik you said you've been burned but I'd love for you to give us a shot so I can see what happens and possibly improve.

willcosgrove
I don't know if what I'm imagining is technically possible. But it would be cool to be able to have my email mirrored to two different services. One email address, email shows up in Mango Mail and my Google Apps email. Then I can evaluate Mango Mail's spam performance against Google's to see if it's good enough for my needs.

If I get up the courage to try again, yours will be my first choice :)

svjx
Hmm... so just off the top of my head, I'm thinking one service would have to forward to the other. Only problem with that is that the sending server would now be the relay and not the original sender. Since MX records only account for using one service, there would need to be some sort of intermediary to do this. Possibly have mail delivered to a common server which then sends it to both Mango and Google (giving each the same odds to detect spam).

If you do end up trying it, feel free to shoot me an email either at contact@mymangomail.com or my personal, steve@mymangomail.com

BrandoElFollito
> a minor ordeal to move email providers

I have never moved from Gmail (yet) but it must be sure difficult if you have a large mailbox.

They have strict rates on their API or IMAP so it takes time and a good software that accounts for the errors.

Didn't you have this experience

browningstreet
Why do so many modern websites all feel like sliding through a PowerPoint deck?
kylediaz
What made you add support for email subdomain addressing? Is it a feature a lot of customers request? I recently incorporated it into my workflow and love it, but I honestly can't recall ever witnessing anyone else use it.
svjx
I knew that plus addressing was inherently flawed in that it required the support of the plus "+" character. So I implemented subdomain addressing to ensure wide comparability. And it looks nicer.
minipark
I would not trust a company with my email that does not even publish its full name and/or address on their website. It's not even clear under which jurisdiction they fall. This is an absolute non-starter for me. I will stay with Migadu who are very clear about these details.