They have an optional writing assistant thing that uses their own in-house model. Sweden is mostly hydro and nuclear, so the environmental arguments against generative AI don't hold up very well.
Late night mixup. Switzerland is also substantially hydro, nuclear, and renewables and headed toward eliminating fossil fuels, so the point still stands. It doesn't contribute to the crisis in the way most generative AI does.
Their comparison of themselves to Proton is rather deceptive. If you're willing have only 1GB of storage, instead of 3GB, you can get proton for free. And at the price they list ($48/yr), you'd get 15GB storage, plus a lot more. And no, I was not paid by proton to say this. I only have the free plan.
This claim is also rather deceptive because the free proton mail does not allow custom domain. To get your own domain with proton you have to get 4usd/month plan.
how about improvmx , it gives redirection for free , I have also discovered it right now in this thread though I think I had heard about it (I am not sure , I know of some email software where you pay one time and then you can self host or they host I am not sure)
There's plenty of reasons to drop Google thought. They barely improve old products.
They probably try to force us to use their products: I think you can't use your own assistant with a wakeword. On my pixel watch 1, using a calendar other than Google's sucks. There is almost no useful wearos apps (sure, it's the devs jobs but Google could bribe them or something). A lot of great wear os apps would benefit everyone.
I'm still pissed that they want a monthly subscription for the sleep tracking with the Google home thing... That you buy with your own money.
I care relatively little because I cut ads using browser plugins and suchlike.
Allowing anything shady, let alone incriminating in your email would be insane, whether it's a mailbox at Google or at Proton. Transactional emails from shady websites, like password reset, are best done with email services like mailinator, which offer zero access protection and destroy the received email in a few minutes automatically.
That actually seems pretty good. Who's behind this?
If they had a minimal free tier which supports custom domain names I'd definitely give to a go. Gmail was great 20 years ago, but today it's disheartening to see many services restricting registration except from Gmail.com and Yahoo.com domain names.
Is it still a one-man operation? They used to have a blurb about that on their website, but I cannot find it anymore.
The bus-factor of one was probably the main reason I did not choose them when I de-googled myself during Google's fiasco with their "free forever" Legacy GSuite termination. I found out a year or two later that they had rescinded their termination, but it was too late. I had migrated out of Google, to my relief.
Don’t take this the wrong way — really, no hate — but I find it amusing that a cryptic comment from a green-text account on HN is the best business continuity planning documentation available :D
I have used this for several years and have had few issues. When I needed support for something (which was my fault) I received a response within a couple of hours.
Customer for a few years now. I don't do anything fancy with it. It was the cheapest and most appealing option for a custom domain for personal email. I think it runs me ~$11 a year or something
I combine it with simplelogin to handle all my aliasing needs.
RackNerd offers one for $10.99 a year [1]. I've used them before and they are a solid provider. Besides you can use the same server and same IPv4 address for hosting multiple email domains.
I have heard this a lot of times but self hosting email is one of the hardest things to do , sure if you are masochist then do it , but if you are a working functional part of society , not recommended.
I installed Mailinabox [1] four years ago. There was one annoying upgrade, whose process needs to improved, but outside of that haven't touched anything. Only a couple of random domains where email delivery has failed. Otherwise, it just delivers to all the big providers.
That annoying upgrade is the reason I’m planning on moving to Stalwart[1]. I’m still on the old MiaB version and I’ve always been interested in JMAP (which Stalwart supports)
As someone that's self-hosted email for years, I don't think it's that hard. There's plenty of great solutions that make it easy. Sure, there are footguns, but they are well known and easy to avoid.
> self hosting email is one of the hardest things to do
I spent an hour setting up postfix and some milters on a Digital Ocean droplet around 7 years ago and it's been working fine as my personal email server with no deliverability issues or maintenance since then. I ssh in every few years to try out a new spam filter or something and maybe upgrade some packages if I feel like it. These days there are even easier mail-in-a-box style turnkey deployments that work just as well but don't need as much knowledge or setup as bare postfix.
At this point, the biggest barrier to self-hosting email is the deafening cries of people who don't know what they're talking about parroting how impossible it is to do.
Setting up a mail server isn't hard. Making it trustworthy enough for Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook.com to accept your messages and not put them in the spam folder is the hard part. Especially if whoever had your IP address previously was sending spam.
In my experience, every large provider except Microsoft will default to delivering your emails to the destination inbox unless your mails actually look like spam, you incorrectly set up a verification mechanism like SPF or DKIM, or your IP has a bad reputation (which usually only comes with sketchy hosting providers, as good ones will quickly cut off spam coming from their network). Microsoft was well known at the time for having the extremely annoying policy of just automatically blackhole-ing any new mail server until you contacted them and got yourself whitelisted. I did that when I first set up my mail server and got a response the next day saying I was whitelisted. No idea if they still have that policy, and I've never had to do it for any other host.
But like I said, I've put very little effort into this and have no problem getting into my recipients' inboxes with all major mail providers.
On the one hand, it's just wrong. Self-hosting mail is not easy because you need to learn how things work. But it's far from being "one of the hardest things to do", even in the domain of hosting things. A properly set up mail server will seamlessly send mails to almost any other MTA. The only large exception is microsoft. The abuse their market power by black-list all new MTAs by default until you create a ticket to "mitigate" this and they tend to re-blacklist small MTAs from time to time.
On the other hand, it's that kind of statements that worsen the situation. People should be encouraged to set up their own MTAs and provided with help to do it in a good professional way. It's one important part of keeping the mail part internet free and not in the hand of few large companies.
Comcast also gives me no end of annoyance by repeatedly black-listing my server for no apparent reason. The process goes: get blocked, request reason, get a hand shrug and unblock, rinse and repeat.
Agreed , I don't know two things about mail (use proton mail) , but I don't own any servers .
But I still self host stuff using docker (shiori etc.)
I mean , see there is a difference in complexity.
Like if you want to self host supabase , its complex , but its still automatable by a docker compose.
About Mails?? I am just not sure! , Maybe I shouldn't have expressed this opinion on the internet. I was just regurtitating what I heard from r/selfhosted feeds about email where they constantly said this. They even provided some explaination (see the message to which I said "this!!" , because that's what I meant.
Maybe even what you said about microsoft. But still , I really really don't want to take any risks with the mail , like what if a critical message of email doesn't come? I don't even want to know!!
I personally just believe that due to these reasons , that mail is just an old wagon which is riding into the future. I personally would prefer mail alternatives like xmpp / (preferably matrix!!)
I know matrix self hosting can take quite some resources but I do believe that the protocol in my honest opinion could be much more better for self hosting.
I still prefer to shield my domain and inboxes. Probably a silly exercise, but I like knowing that no one can spam my true inbox or domain as its never given out.
I have an automated account that needs its own inbox but sends like two plain text emails a day... mostly just to me. I never moved it to Fastmail because the price was prohibitive but this would be a great option for it instead.
Just get something like SendGrid or Mailgun – services like this are usually free for a few thousand emails per month, and support SMTP (though are trying to push you to their proprietary API).
I've used Sendgrid quite a bit, it's great! But in this particular case, you may note I specified it needs it's own inbox: This particular tool of mine does presently use IMAP for inbound mail, and even though the volume for it is insignificant, it means I generally need a "real email account" for it.
Oh, right, sorry! I misread that as something along the lines of “sends to my own mailbox”. Perhaps replying on HN first thing in the morning wasn’t such a bright idea haha
However I am also curious and in awe : how did this company survive and acquire paying customers with so many well established competitors and so many free alternatives?
AFAIK (and I have looked) no free options have all of the following features: support for custom domains, support for imap, a decent amount of storage.
Most users don't need all of those things, but there is a niche that does, and are willing to pay a little bit to get it.
I also use this. Pros: super cheap. <$2/mo for all my custom email addresses and routing rules. Nothing else came close - everything else I found would make me pay per email address even if that address receives an average of 0 emails per month. The wildcard suffixes are really nice as well - they use _ instead of gmail's + (I've had issues with gmail's version as it sometimes is transparently removed, or sometimes the form doesn't consider + a valid character).
Cons: UI is bad, so you'll want to access through a client. 1 person shop. Not audited AFAIK.
You're right. Originally the + sign in an email address was an indicator to the Andrew Message System's delivery agent to process the email in an extensible way. The syntax was +<keyword>+<args>. As an example. you could use
"user+dir-insert+misc" to route the message to the "misc" directory in the user's mailbox structure. An unknown keyword would just get ignored and the mail delivered as usual, giving the behavior as used today.
Not a gmail invention perhaps, but also not per RFC. That some use it to mean something special is not in the RFC. Actually, a significant number of SMTP servers don't even implement the required parts of the related RFCs, let alone fancy things like plus handling.
As stated by others, + addressing is not gmail specific. One thing that gmail does however is allowing you to add (or remove) arbitrary dots in your mail-address, and these are stripped out / all end up in the same mailbox.
I know online services or any service depends a lot on personal interaction experiences and personal expectations from those services and people involved in those services, but I can't leave mailbox.org sooner.
I have tried/explored couple of them like Mailbox.org (of course, current user), Fastmail, Proton, and Runbox etc. Given everything http://runbox.com seems to be the best among them - much better than Mailbox. In fact for Mailbox their less than 'less than ideal' support is enough for me to move elsewhere once my balance runs out (which I foolishly pumped in more than I should have had)
Runbox isn't w/o its challenges but they do certain things really nice and they are: prompt, not into disregard a request in its entirety, not un-kind, not-jerk, not-flippant, not-entitled, not-costly, not into offering unusable shit that you don't need in an email suite to begin with, and basically open and engaging.
So while I am not a customer right now, once the mailbox.org balance is close to running out and I will leave mailbox (and leave them I will) Runbox is the first contender to replace them right now.
I tried runbox before mailbox.org but it didn't work for me.
They didn't support a server-side filter that copied emails from the inbox to another folder. And something was wrong with their DKIM support, but my notes don't say what.
mailbox.org has it's problems though and I'd be happy to find something better.
> didn't support a server-side filter that copied emails from the inbox to another folder
You mean a rule where you can say [mail:received-from="domain:xyz.com" > move to > "Saved" folder] - and it happens, something like this? Honestly I did not check it but I guess they might handle it.
During my trials I didn't find any issue with their DKIM support. https://help.runbox.com/dkim-signing/ seems fine to me. You might want to ask if you are interested, unlike mailbox.org they do reply, and they reply promptly, and they reply as if they mean it.
> I'd be happy to find something better
Please do share here on HN if you happen to find something better. Cheers.
posteo has been great for me and also allows you to define aliases, thou each alias costs 10c per month. If you stay below 10 aliases, it is <2€ per month as well.
Oh, maybe I didn't mean the same as you. I can create as many email addresses as I want, but they all go to the same inbox. Multiple inboxes would cost more.
In the pricing page it is listed in the "Individual" plan as "+ Extra email addresses for personal and work".
Edit: It is possible to create an extra email address and set it up so that all emails it receives are sent to a different external email address
Various shared hosting likely will always beat this price. Caveat is that many shared hosters don't know how to properly run mail servers within their shared hosting infra. Many do, however.
How difficult is exporting from one provider into another (e.g. from gmail into proton or purely)? I guess normies like me are a bit hesitant due to the risk of messing it up (would be a disaster to lose years of emails, as some are important for record-keeping). Curious to hear from people who've done(/attempted) it and how it went? Was it hard? Were there risks? Any regrets?
If your provider supports IMAP, you can use imapsync https://imapsync.lamiral.info/ to sync emails between two mail boxes. I did it a few times and it was straightforward.
For libre options available from Linux distributions' repositories, see isync (aka mbsync) and offlineimap. And mail clients in general should be able to handle IMAP and standard formats (Maildir, mbox). If one cares about mail backups, it is also useful to archive and backup one's mail in one of those standard and portable formats, and/or to synchronize between multiple machines regularly.
I can't speak for Purely, but every one I've tried has had an "import from [previous provider]" feature because that's basically just "pull from imap".
Otherwise: for ~20 years now I've been able to just attach two imap accounts in thunderbird, and drag to move/copy everything from one to the other, and that'll just chug away until it's done. I've never had an issue doing that.
From one domain to another (gmail.com to custom), a bit of faffing about to get all the accounts moves over.
Moving the mails was as simple as ctrl+a and dragging my mouse in thunderbird.
Between providers with a custom domain (zoho to mxroute) was easy. Just updating the DNS records and moving the emails.
If you are technically able (really just buying a domain and setting the DNS records the provider tells you) I would recommend getting a custom domain. It gives you the ability to move providers at will pretty easily, even if you did want to stick with a gmail for now.
Last year I migrated from my hosting providers email service to Proton Mail after 20 years. I too was worried about preserving mails.
I have used Thunderbird for everything, set to download everything and never delete, so had my primary backup there. I take regular backups of the profile directory as secondary measure, which are kept on my NAS and offsite.
What I did was to just decide to do a hard break. I renamed the old IMAP accounts, added the Proton Mail accounts using the IMAP bridge, and then configured my DNS to point to Proton.
DMARC and all that was easily set up as well thanks to Proton having nice guides and active verification.
Now I still have access to my old mail in my old account folder, and I can use the Proton Mail app on my phone for new stuff.
I also migrated a secondary mail, which was not using my domain and which I've had for almost three decades. There I had to do the laborious task of changing any accounts tied to it, and notify people still using it. I've been keeping it operational for a year and still get the occasional mail, but at a point where I'll be retiring it soon.
Overall been very happy. It showed me it was easier than I feared as long as I have Thunderbird and mail accounts under my own domain.
I migrated from Fastmail to Proton last week. I found the whole process pretty painless. Proton has an IMAP migration. Took it a few days, maybe even three. But everything ended up working just fine.
Pretty much every "normie" should download and setup an email client like Thunderbird. You can open it once a month or so to let all the emails download to your own computer. Possibly backed up by some cloud service.
Should be sufficient unless you lose your computer and your email account gets blocked at the same time.
After trying to do this many times using scripting or even paid services… i came to conclusion that easiest and most reliable way is to add both accounts in Thunderbird and copy paste the emails.
I have my own server for a few mailboxes as well but the spam detection isn't great. I still receive emails from Ukrainian billionaires who want to wire me all their money for safekeeping.
I use rspamd, which is supposed to be great. How are you dealing with spam?
you could use something like proton mail free for hosting if you want something free ?
Sure they have it for 500 mb , but there was a deal to get 5gb instead but I think (Okay so I don't have 5gb) but still 500mb is decent enough , like some others said , you could also export some emails locally and use syncthing but I don't know for me 500mb is decent
> No arbitrary limits. Have as many users and store as much mail as you want.
There is absolutely a limit. If you don't think you have a limit, it's because you don't have your asshole building his too-clever, "mountable PurelyMailFS" project or whatever yet. So you have a limit, but you aren't telling us what it is, or you don't know what it is. And an unknown arbitrary limit is worse than an arbitrary limit.
EDIT: I WAS WRONG. They bill by storage size & queries if you use "significantly more than $10 in resources" -- which is still vague and arbitrary but probably not a lot of users in the murky grey area.
I get where your mentality is coming from, but I've been with my current mark provider who has "no limits" for twenty years without problems.
I've been with my unlimited backup provider for over a decade without any problems. They keep increasing their available fee but that's ok for how much I'm backing up (several terabytes).
I found the limits are on the pricing and advanced pricing pages. It seems pretty straightforward. You get $10/year of resources. If you use a lot more than that, then you'll get upgraded to advanced pricing.
> We're not trying to bamboozle you with glossy images, or sell you a lofty ideal.
Avoiding "lofty ideals" resonates with me. That kind of marketing reeks of weird self-hyping. Like, the company is over-valuing its service and under-thinking its shortcomings.
Do you want free email for multiple addresses on multiple domains with all the features of a Gmail? Just setup Cloudflare to manage your email, create rules to forward to regular Gmail accounts, which you can configure to send email from your domains. 100% free.
The usual ones like SendGrid or Mailgun are probably not great for personal email, but it could probably work. Personally, I’ve used Duocircle for a similar setup and it worked pretty well: https://www.duocircle.com/email/outbound-smtp
just forwarding is great if you can afford losing mail. Gmail will drop your messages occasionally.
You can use gmail's own relay for sending but it won't DKIM sign which is a must even for Gmail itself.
for a more reliable solution use forwarding AND POP3 fetching with some provoder OR use https://gmailify.com which offers own relays too for ~$7 a year.
220 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadThat logo is creepy though, and implies exactly the opposite.
They also ran their datacenters on 100% renewables as of 3 years ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/pa76za/is_proto...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oNX_BHgi3c
I was like , okay nobody confuses swiss and sweden but here you are!
how about improvmx , it gives redirection for free , I have also discovered it right now in this thread though I think I had heard about it (I am not sure , I know of some email software where you pay one time and then you can self host or they host I am not sure)
There's plenty of reasons to drop Google thought. They barely improve old products.
They probably try to force us to use their products: I think you can't use your own assistant with a wakeword. On my pixel watch 1, using a calendar other than Google's sucks. There is almost no useful wearos apps (sure, it's the devs jobs but Google could bribe them or something). A lot of great wear os apps would benefit everyone.
I'm still pissed that they want a monthly subscription for the sleep tracking with the Google home thing... That you buy with your own money.
Allowing anything shady, let alone incriminating in your email would be insane, whether it's a mailbox at Google or at Proton. Transactional emails from shady websites, like password reset, are best done with email services like mailinator, which offer zero access protection and destroy the received email in a few minutes automatically.
That actually seems pretty good. Who's behind this?
If they had a minimal free tier which supports custom domain names I'd definitely give to a go. Gmail was great 20 years ago, but today it's disheartening to see many services restricting registration except from Gmail.com and Yahoo.com domain names.
> If they had a free tier I'd give it a go
Maybe these two things are related.
The bus-factor of one was probably the main reason I did not choose them when I de-googled myself during Google's fiasco with their "free forever" Legacy GSuite termination. I found out a year or two later that they had rescinded their termination, but it was too late. I had migrated out of Google, to my relief.
https://purelymail.com/about
I combine it with simplelogin to handle all my aliasing needs.
Thanks for the great service.
Because for $11/year you can get a simple kvm machine and run your own servers.
[1] https://vncoupon.com/black-friday-racknerd-huge-savings-spec...
It will have more than enough resources for SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, and even a personal VPN.
It's really not difficult.
The problem is that most IPs will be tainted and unless you are a major player, email deliverability sucks.
That's why I asked, because these guys were unknown to me.
[1] https://mailinabox.email/
[1]: https://stalw.art
I spent an hour setting up postfix and some milters on a Digital Ocean droplet around 7 years ago and it's been working fine as my personal email server with no deliverability issues or maintenance since then. I ssh in every few years to try out a new spam filter or something and maybe upgrade some packages if I feel like it. These days there are even easier mail-in-a-box style turnkey deployments that work just as well but don't need as much knowledge or setup as bare postfix.
At this point, the biggest barrier to self-hosting email is the deafening cries of people who don't know what they're talking about parroting how impossible it is to do.
But like I said, I've put very little effort into this and have no problem getting into my recipients' inboxes with all major mail providers.
On the one hand, it's just wrong. Self-hosting mail is not easy because you need to learn how things work. But it's far from being "one of the hardest things to do", even in the domain of hosting things. A properly set up mail server will seamlessly send mails to almost any other MTA. The only large exception is microsoft. The abuse their market power by black-list all new MTAs by default until you create a ticket to "mitigate" this and they tend to re-blacklist small MTAs from time to time.
On the other hand, it's that kind of statements that worsen the situation. People should be encouraged to set up their own MTAs and provided with help to do it in a good professional way. It's one important part of keeping the mail part internet free and not in the hand of few large companies.
Comcast also gives me no end of annoyance by repeatedly black-listing my server for no apparent reason. The process goes: get blocked, request reason, get a hand shrug and unblock, rinse and repeat.
But I still self host stuff using docker (shiori etc.)
I mean , see there is a difference in complexity.
Like if you want to self host supabase , its complex , but its still automatable by a docker compose.
About Mails?? I am just not sure! , Maybe I shouldn't have expressed this opinion on the internet. I was just regurtitating what I heard from r/selfhosted feeds about email where they constantly said this. They even provided some explaination (see the message to which I said "this!!" , because that's what I meant.
Maybe even what you said about microsoft. But still , I really really don't want to take any risks with the mail , like what if a critical message of email doesn't come? I don't even want to know!!
I personally just believe that due to these reasons , that mail is just an old wagon which is riding into the future. I personally would prefer mail alternatives like xmpp / (preferably matrix!!)
I know matrix self hosting can take quite some resources but I do believe that the protocol in my honest opinion could be much more better for self hosting.
Just my two cents.
It's so cheap people probably don't buy it because it will go bankrupt.
FWIW Mailgun also has a receiving API (proprietary, unfortunately): https://www.mailgun.com/products/send/inbound-routing/
However I am also curious and in awe : how did this company survive and acquire paying customers with so many well established competitors and so many free alternatives?
I am seeking inspiration!
Most users don't need all of those things, but there is a niche that does, and are willing to pay a little bit to get it.
Cons: UI is bad, so you'll want to access through a client. 1 person shop. Not audited AFAIK.
+ is industry standard, supported by almost all mail servers (if configured) since long before gmail existed.
By default it's just a valid character.
there are a number of servers that support it. wikipedia lists some if them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Sub-addressing
The problem with "+" is dumbass Javascript developers who use broken regexes to "validate" an email address.
+ was always a legal character, right from the first SMTP RFC 822
In other words, don't worry, they'll find a way to block your email one way or another. :P
I have tried/explored couple of them like Mailbox.org (of course, current user), Fastmail, Proton, and Runbox etc. Given everything http://runbox.com seems to be the best among them - much better than Mailbox. In fact for Mailbox their less than 'less than ideal' support is enough for me to move elsewhere once my balance runs out (which I foolishly pumped in more than I should have had)
Runbox isn't w/o its challenges but they do certain things really nice and they are: prompt, not into disregard a request in its entirety, not un-kind, not-jerk, not-flippant, not-entitled, not-costly, not into offering unusable shit that you don't need in an email suite to begin with, and basically open and engaging.
So while I am not a customer right now, once the mailbox.org balance is close to running out and I will leave mailbox (and leave them I will) Runbox is the first contender to replace them right now.
They didn't support a server-side filter that copied emails from the inbox to another folder. And something was wrong with their DKIM support, but my notes don't say what.
mailbox.org has it's problems though and I'd be happy to find something better.
You mean a rule where you can say [mail:received-from="domain:xyz.com" > move to > "Saved" folder] - and it happens, something like this? Honestly I did not check it but I guess they might handle it.
During my trials I didn't find any issue with their DKIM support. https://help.runbox.com/dkim-signing/ seems fine to me. You might want to ask if you are interested, unlike mailbox.org they do reply, and they reply promptly, and they reply as if they mean it.
> I'd be happy to find something better
Please do share here on HN if you happen to find something better. Cheers.
In the pricing page it is listed in the "Individual" plan as "+ Extra email addresses for personal and work".
Edit: It is possible to create an extra email address and set it up so that all emails it receives are sent to a different external email address
Otherwise: for ~20 years now I've been able to just attach two imap accounts in thunderbird, and drag to move/copy everything from one to the other, and that'll just chug away until it's done. I've never had an issue doing that.
Moving the mails was as simple as ctrl+a and dragging my mouse in thunderbird.
Between providers with a custom domain (zoho to mxroute) was easy. Just updating the DNS records and moving the emails.
If you are technically able (really just buying a domain and setting the DNS records the provider tells you) I would recommend getting a custom domain. It gives you the ability to move providers at will pretty easily, even if you did want to stick with a gmail for now.
I have used Thunderbird for everything, set to download everything and never delete, so had my primary backup there. I take regular backups of the profile directory as secondary measure, which are kept on my NAS and offsite.
What I did was to just decide to do a hard break. I renamed the old IMAP accounts, added the Proton Mail accounts using the IMAP bridge, and then configured my DNS to point to Proton.
DMARC and all that was easily set up as well thanks to Proton having nice guides and active verification.
Now I still have access to my old mail in my old account folder, and I can use the Proton Mail app on my phone for new stuff.
I also migrated a secondary mail, which was not using my domain and which I've had for almost three decades. There I had to do the laborious task of changing any accounts tied to it, and notify people still using it. I've been keeping it operational for a year and still get the occasional mail, but at a point where I'll be retiring it soon.
Overall been very happy. It showed me it was easier than I feared as long as I have Thunderbird and mail accounts under my own domain.
Should be sufficient unless you lose your computer and your email account gets blocked at the same time.
But this is a pretty good option for non-technical folks.
I use rspamd, which is supposed to be great. How are you dealing with spam?
Sure they have it for 500 mb , but there was a deal to get 5gb instead but I think (Okay so I don't have 5gb) but still 500mb is decent enough , like some others said , you could also export some emails locally and use syncthing but I don't know for me 500mb is decent
imagine missing some important emails could cost you a lot.
Purelymail: Cheap, No-Nonsense Email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33058691 - Oct 2022 (4 comments)
Purelymail – cheap, no-nonsense email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27707857 - July 2021 (307 comments)
Purelymail: Cheap email with custom domains, 2FA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23567456 - June 2020 (1 comment)
Show HN: Purelymail (Beta) – extremely cheap custom domain email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19134881 - Feb 2019 (1 comment)
There is absolutely a limit. If you don't think you have a limit, it's because you don't have your asshole building his too-clever, "mountable PurelyMailFS" project or whatever yet. So you have a limit, but you aren't telling us what it is, or you don't know what it is. And an unknown arbitrary limit is worse than an arbitrary limit.
EDIT: I WAS WRONG. They bill by storage size & queries if you use "significantly more than $10 in resources" -- which is still vague and arbitrary but probably not a lot of users in the murky grey area.
I've been with my unlimited backup provider for over a decade without any problems. They keep increasing their available fee but that's ok for how much I'm backing up (several terabytes).
It pays in life not to be too cynical.
https://purelymail.com/advancedpricing
https://mailinabox.email/ https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox
Avoiding "lofty ideals" resonates with me. That kind of marketing reeks of weird self-hyping. Like, the company is over-valuing its service and under-thinking its shortcomings.
The usual ones like SendGrid or Mailgun are probably not great for personal email, but it could probably work. Personally, I’ve used Duocircle for a similar setup and it worked pretty well: https://www.duocircle.com/email/outbound-smtp
You can use gmail's own relay for sending but it won't DKIM sign which is a must even for Gmail itself.
for a more reliable solution use forwarding AND POP3 fetching with some provoder OR use https://gmailify.com which offers own relays too for ~$7 a year.