HN Explorer

Ask HN: What email service(s) do you use for your side projects?

39 points by jtap ↗ HN
I have a couple side projects that I use for my friends, family, and myself. I'd like to have both an email such as team@mysite.com to send and receive emails that I might want to type out. I'd also like to be able to send transactional emails, password reset ... I would think that I'm not the only one with this problem. What do you all use to achieve this?

50 comments

[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 100 ms ] thread
PaulHoule
SES from AZMN. Also mailgun. Even out of the free tier I see these as a good value for low volumes of mail (less than 10k per month)
jrblo
I've found Mailgun's services to be pretty good. Admittedly I haven't tried many of the alternatives in recent years, but we use Mailgun to send a few hundred thousand transactional messages per month at my day job and they have been good. For my personal side projects, their free plan has been sufficient enough that I've never paid for usage.
icelancer
Mailgun is great. I keep coming back to it after trying many alternatives.
dboreham
OP wanted to send and receive, which afaik neither Mailgun nor SES does. Recommend Fastmail.
jrblo
Mailgun has a variety of ways you can receive incoming mail.
PaulHoule
If you need to send (and have better than 50% get through) and receive you're probably going to set up a service like Fastgmail to handle receiving and personal sending and send your automated mails out through something like mailgun, SES, sendgrid, etc.

You have to properly set up your DNS records so that all your sending servers authenticate properly.

mjomaa
If it is under 100 mails per day just use gmail.

If you are scared of abuse usw postfix+opendmarc (for sending), but IP/domain reputation takes time.

Otherwise one provider that offers sending+mailbox or two providers for the use-cases.

atemerev
EmailJS linked to my gmail account. So far it is enough. When it won’t be enough, I’ll use Mailgun.
reducesuffering
I'm using Zoho for the custom domain email team@mysite.com.

For transactional email, I'm using Resend, a newcomer with a very quick and polished React/Next.js integration.

Both are free tier.

ensignavenger
PurelyMail (purelymail.com) has been great for me! And very affordable.
snapplebobapple
I love those guys. I send around 30k emails a month programatically to our o365 domain (bunch of different users sending a bunchof different things) and it just works great.
Spunkie
mxroute for real projects, or migadu for tiny things
birdman3131
+1 for mxroute. Works great for anything but spam or marketing email. Those get a quick ban and a downgrade from valued customer to scum of the earth.
Spunkie
We actually do use mxroute for our marketing email just fine, but we are also low volume and go way above and beyond qualifying leads.

Nobody likes a cold call/email.

zarlo
its likely you have low bounce rates so they are allowing it
hnrodey
iCloud+ accounts support bring your own domain. Then use SMTP connections from your app to send messages. I suppose there's no native support for any type of hook connection but could probably achieve that effect if you wanted to pay for Zapier or a similar service.
umbra07
Custom domain through porkbun ($1.5-12 yearly, depending on the TLD).

Email through purelymail ($10 yearly, no hard limits on anything).

rijavecb
Zoho is pretty cheap and not bad. They also own Zeptomail [1] that is meant for transactional emails, also cheap and you can even buy credits in advance. Haven't tried it yet though.

[1] - https://www.zoho.com/zeptomail/pricing.html

snozolli
I was plodding through the steps to set up a mail servicer on my Hetzner instance when I realized I was about to sink a ton of time into a subject I know nothing about that would earn me no money.

So I did the reasonable thing and signed up for Zoho. It's cheap and I don't have to worry about having a zombie spam server because I misconfigured something.

curiousfab
A VPS @ Hetzner, exim4. No problems with deliverability.
asveikau
For small scale stuff, it's not difficult to run a mail server on a VPS.

I use dovecot for IMAP.

SMTP, there are tons of options...

senko
Transactional send: Recently switched to Amazon SES from Sendgrid (for my volume, SES is free while Sendgrid was ~$20).

Receive: gmail (custom domain)

jimsmart
We use Migadu for everything.

There's no extra cost for extra domains, on everything but their smallest account — and as we already have an account for all of our other domains, using Migadu for side projects as well is a no-brainer.

dabbz
+1 on Migadu. Service has been rock solid. Pricing is very reasonable. The few times I've needed customer support has been helpful.
geoah
+1 for migadu as well
andrewmcwatters
I’m also curious about this, because we have clients whose back office web services just use sendmail and for the most part, we don’t have trouble.

I remember looking into mailbox providers sometime ago and wanted to resell Zoho because they seemed like the best provider on the market at the time but their reseller contacts are a waste of my time. Awful sales channel. They willingly don’t understand plain English.

[1]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h4hgdBFEgOt7XQaTAR7Q...

alphabettsy
Fastmail can work with multiple domains, but isn’t interchangeable with something like Google Workplace or Office. Zoho works really well for that though.
romanhn
It's a mix. I use my registrar's (Porkbun) email service for human communication (name@, support@, etc). Added those accounts to my personal Gmail inbox so I can send/receive using Gmail instead of logging into the registrar's webmail. Eventually will move to something like Google Workspace most likely, which is a bit more expensive.

I use AWS SES for transactional emails (mostly send, but making use of the receive capability as well). Nice and cheap. And finally using MailerLite for marketing emails. Just surpassed their free tier so may look again, but not too bad pricing-wise.

One advice I've seen is not to mix transactional and marketing providers (and ideally domains). If you get a high incidence of unsubscribes or "this is spam" responses, don't want your app to be dead in the water for transactional stuff if the marketing provider suspends your account temporarily (can happen even if you're legit).

FlyingAvatar
This is exactly how I handle my mail as well.
johnklos
You can self host email. There are plenty of how-tos, prepackaged packages, even books:

https://mwl.io/nonfiction/tools#ryoms

I'm writing my own how-to which includes finding suitable Internet providers and includes setting up smarthosting in case you can't get a good address for yourself.

PaulHoule
You can self host email but less (maybe much less) than 50% of what you send will actually be received by the recipient, particularly for recipients at major providers like gmail, etc.
johnklos
That's definitely not true. You can either put in the work to improve your deliverability, or you can smarthost through a provider that has a good reputation.
PaulHoule
How do you get big co’s like Google to answer your support emails when it is in their best interest for them to discourage the use of any other options?
johnklos
You don't. Google doesn't have humans that non-paying customers can reach.

As I wrote, either you work on improving your reputation (set up all the acronyms, send lots of test messages, tell everyone you know that uses Google for mail to look in their filtered mail and tell Gmail that your mail is not junk, keep sending, et cetera), or you smarthost through a reputable service.

mjomaa
Thats just gmail. They limit you based on reputation.
zarlo
i have self hosted for years never had any issues with people not getting emails
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
SparkyMcUnicorn
Others have mentioned Fastmail, and it really is great. But I don't think it's the final stop if you want transactional emails.

Decided to try out Cloudflare email routing[0], and have it routing to Fastmail and/or Gmail. I'm not using email workers for much yet, but it's a pretty cool feature.

I'd definitely recommend it as a super easy way to just get email working for a domain, and just route the emails to/from your existing email accounts.

[0] https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/email-routing/

EDIT: removed CF MailChannels integration note. Apparently it's been axed.

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/mailchannels-end-of-life-...