Ask HN: What's the easiest way to set up email forwarding on your own domain?

5 points by ProblemFactory 13y ago ↗ HN

I've used Google Apps in the past for a simple use case: redirecting email aliases from various personal domains to a gmail.com address. Unfortunately, it's no longer available for free.

Whereas Google Apps is good value as a full service to businesses, $64 per year (UK pricing) per email alias is a bit expensive for this use case.

What would be the most simple replacement for forwarding-only email addresses on your own domains?

4 comments

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p4bl0 13y ago ↗

It depends on what you want to do. For simple redirections, most domain name registrars offer this service and you can set a number of email redirections from your admin web interface on their website. I think this is all you need.

If you want to do more complex things, it is quite easy to setup Postfix [1] on your own server (a little VPS would suffice) to do the redirection, even using a database like MySQL to dynamically create / update the redirections.

[1] http://www.postfix.org/

pdx 13y ago ↗

I use Postfix and Procmail.

In my .procmailrc file in my user directories, I set up forwarding rules. I've set up several servers this way. It's always a bit of head scratching, but it's fun when you get it working and it's not that bad to set up.

What's fun about .procmailrc files is that you can do anything with the email based on regex rules of the subject, to, from, etc. You can even run scripts. I can reboot my server by sending a properly formatted email to a certain email address, for example.

scottrb 13y ago ↗

I use namecheaps free email forwarding feature and send them on to gmail. Has worked great so far for being such a simple solution.

dadads 13y ago ↗

I use nearlyfreespeech.net. Bare-bones simple settings, and also very cheap.