Purelymail: Cheap, no-nonsense email

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Purelymail, a low-cost email hosting service with custom domain support, is drawing interest as an alternative to providers like Gmail, Proton, Fastmail, and Zoho. Commenters praise its simplicity, pricing model, and IMAP support, but raise concerns about its one-person operation, “beta” status, limited web UI, and spam filtering. The exchange broadens into a comparison of paid vs. free email, the trade-offs of self-hosting, and how much risk users are willing to accept for a mission-critical service like email.

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.