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.
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 haven't spent any real amount of time looking into this, but from the basic research I did perform, I found that well-written guides that aren't grossly out of date are hard to find.
Also, my understanding is that Google, Outlook and other major email services have been implementing as many roadblocks for self-hosted setups as possible to the point where it's a constant battle and difficult to keep up with.
I’ve actually tried before to self host on my VPS as well as my homelab that I use for various services. I honestly just didn’t trust the stability of my own services enough for something as important as email. As a project I definitely want to try again in the future.
Isnt email blacklisting/actually getting mails to inbox infamously hard? I otherwise think the rest of the stack is indeed solved, but its probably cheaper to pay Amazon SES or whatever for getting your emails to an inbox reliably
I worked in webhosting for decades, nobody should host their own email, even webhosts don't do it and just resell half the time now. You will greatly regret that decision at some point in time, probably many times.
If you're fine with some sort of outage when a record breaks, your forget your domain bill 12 years later, dealing with rbls over a trusted mail exchange connection to shoots email almost instantly and don't have critical mail I'm all for it. Way too many customers crying about their email broken on $2.99 vps servers. I don't do anything critical via email, but sometimes you sell a house or something and forget that 10 year old weekend project held together by a shell command you forgot needs to just work.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Feels weird to ignore the largest players, e.g. Fastmail or Protonmail
Or iCloud+. He specifically asked for Apple Mail integration ffs
I use the iCloud custom domain for my personal email and I can confidently say it's worth the cost.
I am definitely engrossed in the Apple Ecosystem™ though so I can't speak to how it would fit any other setup that isn't almost entirely Apple-based.
I can recommend Fastmail. Reasonably priced, modern tech & features, good service. Never had any issues.
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 haven't spent any real amount of time looking into this, but from the basic research I did perform, I found that well-written guides that aren't grossly out of date are hard to find.
Also, my understanding is that Google, Outlook and other major email services have been implementing as many roadblocks for self-hosted setups as possible to the point where it's a constant battle and difficult to keep up with.
I’ve actually tried before to self host on my VPS as well as my homelab that I use for various services. I honestly just didn’t trust the stability of my own services enough for something as important as email. As a project I definitely want to try again in the future.
Isnt email blacklisting/actually getting mails to inbox infamously hard? I otherwise think the rest of the stack is indeed solved, but its probably cheaper to pay Amazon SES or whatever for getting your emails to an inbox reliably
I worked in webhosting for decades, nobody should host their own email, even webhosts don't do it and just resell half the time now. You will greatly regret that decision at some point in time, probably many times.
If you're fine with some sort of outage when a record breaks, your forget your domain bill 12 years later, dealing with rbls over a trusted mail exchange connection to shoots email almost instantly and don't have critical mail I'm all for it. Way too many customers crying about their email broken on $2.99 vps servers. I don't do anything critical via email, but sometimes you sell a house or something and forget that 10 year old weekend project held together by a shell command you forgot needs to just work.
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.
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.
“Integration with Apple Mail” shy not just use iCloud with a custom domain?
AFAIK it doesn’t allow you to have a direct IMAP/SMTP login for your own domain.
This. It was my first reaction too.
I use StartMail [1], which I believe ticks all of OP's boxes (I had similar boxes).
[1] https://www.startmail.com/
> 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.
Why not using iCloud custom domains? Is the simplest option if you want apple mail compatibility
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.
I second this recommendation. My custom domain emails work wonderfully through Apple iCloud account.
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)
Unless something had changed recently, they don't let you use third party email clients.
I use zoho mail, works well.
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 added my custom domain to my provider email. Yes, those still exist in places
I can recommend Lark. Free tier does everything.
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.