Purelymail: Cheap, no-nonsense email

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

User Experiences and Reliability

  • Many commenters report using Purelymail for several years with no outages or only brief ones, and praise it as “just works,” especially for custom domains and low-volume accounts.
  • Support is described as fast and helpful, even for user-caused issues.
  • Downsides mentioned: dated/poor web UI, no audits, bus factor of 1, and the persistent “beta” label undermining confidence.
  • One user reports ongoing spam problems after the SpamAssassin auto-learning system broke, though cost (~$0.40/month) makes them tolerate it.

Pricing and Feature Tradeoffs

  • The main attraction is extremely low cost: around $10/year base, with resource-based “advanced pricing” if usage exceeds that.
  • Users like the absence of per-address fees and support for many aliases/wildcards.
  • Some criticize marketing claims like “no arbitrary limits”; others point out limits are clearly documented via resource billing.
  • Comparison to Proton’s pricing is debated: some say Purelymail’s comparison omits Proton’s free tier; others counter that custom domains require Proton’s paid plans and that Proton’s bundle includes VPN, calendar, drive, and password manager.

Alternatives and Comparisons

  • Alternatives frequently mentioned: Proton, Fastmail, Zoho, Migadu, MXroute, mailbox.org, Runbox, Posteo, Cloudflare + Gmail forwarding, and free forwarders like ImprovMX/Mailcast.
  • Tradeoffs include:
    • IMAP/SMTP support (Purelymail yes; Proton only via bridge; Zoho free plan lacks IMAP/POP).
    • Bundled extras (Proton and Fastmail vs Purelymail’s email-only focus).
    • Deliverability reputation and spam behavior (Zoho called spammy; MXroute and Migadu praised).

Self‑Hosting vs Hosted Email

  • Strong debate: some insist self-hosting mail is straightforward and cheap with a $10–15/year VPS and tools like Mail-in-a-Box or Postfix; others argue deliverability and spam filtering make it “one of the hardest things to do.”
  • Large providers (especially Microsoft, sometimes Comcast) are cited as obstacles due to aggressive blacklisting of small MTAs.

Migration and Backups

  • IMAP-based migration is seen as easy using tools like imapsync, mbsync/offlineimap, or simply dragging folders between accounts in Thunderbird.
  • Several argue everyone should keep local backups regardless of provider; others feel large providers with built-in retention/backup make this unnecessary and see local backups as overkill for personal use.