Hi Jacob, Ado here, from FounderMail. I'm really glad you ended up on-boarding with us, and I wanted to reach out to thank you for the review and feedback.
The manual approve to outbound sending helped a lot to keep spammers out of the platform.
We ensure that domain exists and you're the owner, the website is legit, etc, making impossible for a bot to operate throughout our channel.
And is working, almost 4 weeks in, no complaints, less than 0.1 bounce rate.
You know, having an high reputation is vital to ensure the emails we send on behalf of our customers are reaching the inbox not the spam folder.
Said that, you continue to be right: it's annoying. We're working to reduce the pain autoapproving it for cases like your.
Thank you again (I hope you'll never find a reason to leave us! :)
Thank you for creating such a great service! It’s always great using a product and getting to thank the developer directly. Your platform seems perfect so far and it was extremely quick to get approved for outbound sending (definitely less than 12 hours). Seems to be working perfectly so far, and I don’t think i’ll be switching anytime soon.
I went to your site to check this out, and I found the bright orange from the first slide was killing my eyes, and my coworkers. The other landing page slides were great, the first one made me want to leave.
Overall looks like a great tool that I'll look into for my next projects.
Jacob's blog links to https://foundermail.mx/, I'm guessing you were looking at foundermail.app. I have no idea if they're related, but the former does not burn your eyes, the latter is very bright
It looks fine in sRGB, but I can see how it would be bad with the horrid default profiles that monitors ship with. Graphic designers should really be aware of that at this point.
"I had to submit a special request before I could send emails to new addresses that had not previously messaged me."
sounds even more insane, completely unusable service, I mean if the client sends me automated emails from their system on behalf of the PMs, I would need to submit request to reply to each PM with their individual address? insanity unless they meant domain which would be a bit more sensible
Ditto. The cheapest iCloud subscription includes everything necessary. My partner and I both have emails through our respective personal domains, all on the same sub – I think the limit is 3 custom domains.
The shared hosting package that I bought with my domain 20 years ago from a local hosting company comes with all of these, it cost I think €12/year originally. They got acquired some time ago by a large hosting company who charges more than €120/year for the same package. Then I switched to another local mail provider who charge €40/year (but with more storage). Aren't there many such providers?
There are, but I've seen several of those price increases in a row so you may be moving a lot. And mail deliverability to Outlook and Gmail from those hosts isn't always great.
MXRoute's lifetime plans (which they usually offer around black Friday) are a great option if you can get one. I paid $99 for mine five years ago. The service has only improved since then.
I just looked at their website. Even without the lifetime plan, their pricing makes much more sense to me. You basically pay for the management account and the storage, which is really the thing that cost money.
It never made sense to me that you need to pay for storage per email account, if you use a custom domain. It I use 10GB why should it matter than I have it split over two email accounts?
Protonmail doesn't have unlimited addresses for sending, which is one of his requirements. It has catch-all , which means you can receive from an arbitary number, so it's okay for one -email-per-vendor, but if you ever need to send via one of those addresses then you have to use up one of your 10 or 20 allowed addresses.
This is because like most other vendors, they do price discrimination based on number of users. Which is no doubt why the other large vendors were also ruled out.
With Proton and SimpleLogin you can effectively reply through all the aliases. It’s not actually unlimited addresses but I’ve been using it for some time and I find it meets all my needs in a simple clean way. Very happy with the combo.
Simplelogin doesn't do SRS which is pretty bad for this time and age.
That makes emails forwarded from, say, PayPal or ebay marked as scam/phishing in Gmail, AND makes it impossible to report actual spam that comes through.
With a well set up SRS all these emails are recognised correctly. SimpleLogin does some naïve forwarding which messes it up.
I'm migrating out of them exactly for this reason - if I could do it on my hobby server for my personal domains, THEY should be able to do it as well.
> Protonmail doesn't have unlimited addresses for sending, which is one of his requirements.
I can't find that in his list of requirements. He said he wants unlimited addresses, but I'm not able to spot any mention that he wants to send from all those addresses. A catch-all will work just fine for receiving mail, so it may be an option for him.
Ah, that. I keep my actual mailbox address secret and use identities to communicate and aliases for various accounts' emails as a protection against credential stuffing.
Noted. My workaround is using a randomly generated mailbox address with aliases and identities on top. But yeah, I can't imagine a solution other than Proton/Tuta's way of locked down clients and bridges.
Yea, Fastmail checks all the boxes, and is well-regarded around here as far as I know. I have used it for something like 7-8 years now and am very happy with it.
protonmail doesnt even work in 3rd party apps and you can't install their app on Android lower than 10 for some reason (while most of the other email providers have no such problem), wanted my kid to use their email (though kids dont really use email anyway) on heavily restricted old phone, but since protonmail is not interested...
Protonmail has worked great for me. Never had any issues and I like the inclusion of docs + sheets (even though their apps are ridiculously slow to load)
I've got my domain at namecheap, and they just forward all mail to two different pre-existing mailboxes. I configure my mailreader to use my address at my own domain when sending mail, and that works perfectly fine. Sure, headers may show them going through different mail servers, but nobody ever looks at that anymore.
Unpopular opinion, but I've used Google Workspace for years and I really like having my email via gmail. SSO and spam filtering and Google Docs. I thought about switching to Amazon Workmail but the price I pay for Workspace is worth it.
> Unpopular opinion, but I've used Google Workspace for years ...
Not that unpopular. I've used it since way before it was called "Google Workspace" and it Just Works [TM]. Also once you pay for it, suddenly they pick up the phone if you ever need support.
A shitload of SMEs are using Google Workspace to get their own domain and all the Google suite.
I know it's cool to hate on Google on HN but for my part I'll forever be hating on Microsoft and Meta. I tolerate Google.
This and them sunsetting Exchange EWS (which enabled push) was the straw that forced me into looking at other options (the other being them forcing you to pay for Gemini even if you have it completely disabled in your Workspace)
Interesting that self-hosting isn't on his list. It hits every one of his checkboxes and only costs you an old Linux server collecting dust at home (or at most, a $5/mo VPS), which you can also use to host other things.
It's never been easier to self-host, but it feels like, in general, when faced with "I want to do X with a computer," people are more and more reaching for paid, hosted services rather than DIY anymore.
I've tried this approach, but I found that most email providers aggressively filter out all incoming messages that don't come from validated sources. No matter what I tried deliverability of emails remained very spotty. I did configure DKIM, DMARC, SPIF, etc as suggested. But minimal improvements. Eventually ended up going with AWS SES.
I've had surprisingly good luck the few times I've tried it - but using VPSs that were a bit more spendy and not known to be spamhavens helped, I think.
The cost of something like AWS SES or Postmark is so low as to make it almost not worth it, but it worked; not that I'd trust "real" email to it - but I was surprised that Wordpress setup emails were getting through with little config.
So, there are two main reasons people avoid trying to self-host email, plus a third you only find once you start digging:
1. Deliverability: "the email mafia will flag your emails as spam"
2. Complexity: "configuring and maintaining a mail stack is a technical nightmare".
3. Network blocks: VPS providers and residential ISPs frequently block outbound mail ports (like port 25) entirely or in their terms of use.
I decided we should try self-hosting because some issues with their reliability cost us very expensive problems.
The experience was frustrating anyway, as the weird restrictions on providers caused our setup to be quite bad on some regards -- most notably being forced to use the provider UI to manage some things, which took time and is a non-transferable useless skill, not having users for things that should have had one, etc.
MailCow made the technical setup trivial, blowing objection #2 out.
For #3, we could not rely on stable electricity/internet, so we just spun it up on a reliable VPS provider after a small research.
As for the biggest fear, the IP reputation and deliverability mafia (#1), it is easily solved by routing outbound mail through a simple SMTP relay like SMTP2GO.
You pay based purely on sending volume rather than a flat service fee, and their free tier completely covers small setups.
And how much time did it take? Less than half a day, before AI could do everything for you.
Most paid services charge absurd per-user or per-domain fees for basic features that do not cost them anything.
After 2 years of bad service on paid providers followed by 2 years of flawless self-hosting, there is absolutely no going back.
I self-host email, and it's mostly working. However the problems others have outlined are real: The stack is complicated, even for an expert to set up and keep running. And deliverability can sometimes be a problem, especially to Google who are obviously plotting to monopolise email.
I've been self-hosting (using a server at home) using MailInABox ( https://mailinabox.email ) for around 5 years.
I've been very happy with it. I have a perfectly normal email service, over which I have full control. MailInABox handles all the necessary DKIM etc. I had minor hassles, when I first started, with sending to google and microsoft, but these were reasonably easily managed by following microsoft's advice. (And I have a good ISP.)
The only hassle is that, because MailInABox uses greylisting, initial account-validation emails are sometimes delayed. But because I have control of the service, I can whitelist anything important :)
> There was one annoying limitation. I had to submit a special request before I could send emails to new addresses that had not previously messaged me.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but this sounds absolutely wild. What?
The founder of foundermail actually left a comment here talking about this. I will likely update the article that it took less than 7 hours to be approved.
Before sending to strangers you have to request outbound access just once for domain.
We manually evaluate your request and approve it, it takes a few hours.
Yes it seems wild, but, it helped a lot to keep out of the platform spammers: being a free service we receive sometime requests from throwaway domains that are used by spammers.
We also check that the domain is not blacklisted or is not looking like well known companies, like amazon-customer.com, etc.
What does it means for our users? Well, bounce rate below 0.1% and 0 complains so far.
Reputation when sending emails is everything, and it's the most important thing to preserve in FounderMail.
I use Migadu(migadu.com), but Apple's iCloud email hosting is basically tailor fit to your expectations, so I don't have any idea why you don't use it.
But you can host your own email too. It's not the easiest option, but it can be done, and there has been some newer email server software written that tries to make it easier.
iCloud email has been part of some sketchy things in the past, supposedly they have been dropping emails with certain words in them with no notification to either side of the message. There isn’t an option to turn it off and it isn’t advertised anywhere https://forums.techsoup.org/t/icloud-email-system-blocks-ema...
Your link is from over 10 years ago. I can't find any newer information on it persisting. Perhaps they turned it off after they got caught? Or perhaps it was an outage or some thing and not actual filtering? I don't know.
All email providers have issues now and again.
I'm not saying they aren't doing it, but if they are, nobody seems to be complaining or upset about it except those few in that forum from over a decade ago.
I just dealt with this due to the impending termination of .name email. I use a combination of gmail as my mail agent, CloudFlare for the domain, and SMTP2Go for low volume outbound with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. I don't have any Apple usage or requirements.
Oh, I just remembered that I send mail received by my CloudFlare domain to both gmail and zohomail, and use Thunderbird as the mail agent for the latter.
I use it for outgoing SMTP from my gmail agent, identified as coming from me@mydomain.com ... I added this step because gmail doesn't do DKIM and DMARC, so my emails were being marked as spam by aggressive systems. mail-tester.com rates me at 9.3/10, and the missing points are mostly because my domain is less than 4 weeks old.
Gmail will drop support for sending from custom domains (at least those that aren’t hosted with them) next year btw. That’s why I’m looking for another smtp solution.
In the mean time I’ve checked them a bit and apparently they do work on having a good reputation and allow you to add them as a smart host to your own smtp server so looks like I’ll give them a try.
I've always ran my own smtp for receiving, I just need something for sending because of the big uns being fully against independent smtp servers. And this being personal mail, i send less than 1000 mails per year.
Resend just kept getting stuck in spam folders for me when sending, maybe I set something up wrong. On their documentation it just says you have to pay for the extremely expensive certificate needed for gmail to trust your messages.
Often it's just a shared IP address that is naughty, you can usually raise a ticket and ask to transfer to a new pool. There is no "expensive certificate" you can buy to bypass spam filters and anyone selling you that is selling snake oil.
139 comments
[ 10.6 ms ] story [ 79.9 ms ] threadThe manual approve to outbound sending helped a lot to keep spammers out of the platform.
We ensure that domain exists and you're the owner, the website is legit, etc, making impossible for a bot to operate throughout our channel.
And is working, almost 4 weeks in, no complaints, less than 0.1 bounce rate.
You know, having an high reputation is vital to ensure the emails we send on behalf of our customers are reaching the inbox not the spam folder.
Said that, you continue to be right: it's annoying. We're working to reduce the pain autoapproving it for cases like your.
Thank you again (I hope you'll never find a reason to leave us! :)
Somewhat ironic, given your entire website is AI generated.
Overall looks like a great tool that I'll look into for my next projects.
RIP
If you don't care about your website, why should I?
sounds even more insane, completely unusable service, I mean if the client sends me automated emails from their system on behalf of the PMs, I would need to submit request to reply to each PM with their individual address? insanity unless they meant domain which would be a bit more sensible
You aren’t told something has been filtered and it doesn’t go to spam. It’s just deleted with zero recourse. The sender isn’t notified either.
https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/icloud-mail-what-to-do-when...
I had this happen as recently as June 2026 when my current provider was up. It happens on @mac.com @me.com @icloud.com and custom domains.
It never made sense to me that you need to pay for storage per email account, if you use a custom domain. It I use 10GB why should it matter than I have it split over two email accounts?
Looks really interesting, thank you.
[1] https://www.startmail.com/
This is because like most other vendors, they do price discrimination based on number of users. Which is no doubt why the other large vendors were also ruled out.
That makes emails forwarded from, say, PayPal or ebay marked as scam/phishing in Gmail, AND makes it impossible to report actual spam that comes through.
With a well set up SRS all these emails are recognised correctly. SimpleLogin does some naïve forwarding which messes it up.
I'm migrating out of them exactly for this reason - if I could do it on my hobby server for my personal domains, THEY should be able to do it as well.
I can't find that in his list of requirements. He said he wants unlimited addresses, but I'm not able to spot any mention that he wants to send from all those addresses. A catch-all will work just fine for receiving mail, so it may be an option for him.
What host are you using?
An example of a company that does exactly what I pay them to do and respects me as a customer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958660
Not that unpopular. I've used it since way before it was called "Google Workspace" and it Just Works [TM]. Also once you pay for it, suddenly they pick up the phone if you ever need support.
A shitload of SMEs are using Google Workspace to get their own domain and all the Google suite.
I know it's cool to hate on Google on HN but for my part I'll forever be hating on Microsoft and Meta. I tolerate Google.
This and them sunsetting Exchange EWS (which enabled push) was the straw that forced me into looking at other options (the other being them forcing you to pay for Gemini even if you have it completely disabled in your Workspace)
It's never been easier to self-host, but it feels like, in general, when faced with "I want to do X with a computer," people are more and more reaching for paid, hosted services rather than DIY anymore.
The cost of something like AWS SES or Postmark is so low as to make it almost not worth it, but it worked; not that I'd trust "real" email to it - but I was surprised that Wordpress setup emails were getting through with little config.
1. Deliverability: "the email mafia will flag your emails as spam"
2. Complexity: "configuring and maintaining a mail stack is a technical nightmare".
3. Network blocks: VPS providers and residential ISPs frequently block outbound mail ports (like port 25) entirely or in their terms of use.
I decided we should try self-hosting because some issues with their reliability cost us very expensive problems. The experience was frustrating anyway, as the weird restrictions on providers caused our setup to be quite bad on some regards -- most notably being forced to use the provider UI to manage some things, which took time and is a non-transferable useless skill, not having users for things that should have had one, etc.
MailCow made the technical setup trivial, blowing objection #2 out. For #3, we could not rely on stable electricity/internet, so we just spun it up on a reliable VPS provider after a small research. As for the biggest fear, the IP reputation and deliverability mafia (#1), it is easily solved by routing outbound mail through a simple SMTP relay like SMTP2GO. You pay based purely on sending volume rather than a flat service fee, and their free tier completely covers small setups. And how much time did it take? Less than half a day, before AI could do everything for you.
Most paid services charge absurd per-user or per-domain fees for basic features that do not cost them anything. After 2 years of bad service on paid providers followed by 2 years of flawless self-hosting, there is absolutely no going back.
I've been very happy with it. I have a perfectly normal email service, over which I have full control. MailInABox handles all the necessary DKIM etc. I had minor hassles, when I first started, with sending to google and microsoft, but these were reasonably easily managed by following microsoft's advice. (And I have a good ISP.)
The only hassle is that, because MailInABox uses greylisting, initial account-validation emails are sometimes delayed. But because I have control of the service, I can whitelist anything important :)
I self hosted my email domains for 15+ years. Finally got fed up with the constant trickle of the maintenance and got a service for everything.
Not quite happy with that as they don't even do SRS (implying they do), but i guess I'll just migrate elsewhere.
The upside is I've got more time for myself and have less CVEs to worry about.
Self hosted apps migration in progress; I guess I'll leave media, book and file server only, off the internet, and that's it.
other self hosting? sure.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but this sounds absolutely wild. What?
But you can host your own email too. It's not the easiest option, but it can be done, and there has been some newer email server software written that tries to make it easier.
All email providers have issues now and again.
I'm not saying they aren't doing it, but if they are, nobody seems to be complaining or upset about it except those few in that forum from over a decade ago.
Oh, I just remembered that I send mail received by my CloudFlare domain to both gmail and zohomail, and use Thunderbird as the mail agent for the latter.
If you run your personal mail on this and not automated notifications it's basically free, but how many spam lists are this kind of services on?
In the mean time I’ve checked them a bit and apparently they do work on having a good reputation and allow you to add them as a smart host to your own smtp server so looks like I’ll give them a try.
Big benefit of this combination is that you get "login with google", docs, drive, hangouts
Can even send email, although recipient sees that it has been forwarded.