I've been using Purelymail as my sole mail provider for over a year now (previously with Fastmail) and it has been my best email experience.
It's a one-man enterprise, which may frighten some people, but I prefer boutique internet companies to the faceless monoliths. (I'd like more of the internet to be made of these small corner bodegas.)
> It's a one-man enterprise, which may frighten some people
Email is super critical for most people these days (eg. 2FA). That sounds like a really scary bus-factor [1] risk, especially considering data is encrypted at rest.
I actually get asked about this semi-frequently. Probably nobody could replace me as a _developer_ on Purelymail, but I've been training my brother to handle extended maintenance and to have handover credentials if anything happens to me personally. (This might be in the FAQ?)
> Email is super critical for most people these days (eg. 2FA). That sounds like a really scary bus-factor [1] risk
Not such a big deal if you have your own domain (you should). Update the MX record and point it elsewhere.
I've switched from Gmail to a similar setup a year ago. Honestly, it's been way easier than I expected, in terms of updating everywhere. And I can just point my MX somewhere else should I ever be unhappy with the current provider.
No delivery issues either so far. Seriously, the hardest part about this whole ordeal was getting imapsync to run, to transfer my mails over.
Not using gmail or another big silo is really not that hard, as HN often makes it out to be.
Fastmail isn't entirely faceless either :p But we're definitely not still the 3-man show that we were before the Opera years (up until 2010).
Obviously, I think Fastmail is worth the extra for the multi-copy redundancy & backups, new features, contributions we're making to the standards world, and not being dependent on a single person - the past few years in particular we've been focusing on not only being able to survive any server dying, but also being able to survive the unavailability of any single person!
Anyway - glad you're happy. Fastmail will still be here if you ever find that you want to move back.
Oh sorry I did not mean to suggest Fastmail was a faceless megacorp, I was thinking of Google, MS, Apple, etc.
I fondly recall many years ago I had some WebDAV issue and got a reply directly from you saying you'd fixed the issue but you were just heading out to dinner and so you'd push to production when you got back. That convinced a few friends to join too.
After about 10 years, Fastmail felt it was shifting to a more "enterprise" focus, which I can understand, and I just wanted to try something a little more "indie web".
Hah, yeah - fair enough. Glad I could fix your issue. Ahh, Webdav. I know the XML libraries a lot better these days and could make that code a lot tighter, but it's still chugging along just fine, pretty much untouched since :)
As for enterprise focus - not so much enterprise, but we are focusing more on the non-technical user. All the power is still there under the hood and available, but it's not so much in your face if you don't want it to be!
No, that isn't likely. The email storage used is part of our cost, but a relatively small part compared to the support, operations, and development costs. We don't have any other business subsidising the email service, and we're not intestered in a race to provide the cheapest, no-frills product.
I'm happy to pay whatever I'm paying for what you're offering. I had create two support tickets so far and both were dealt with very quickly and by an actual human which makes me trust you guys with my data even more.
It's a shame that I don't think I can ever recommend Fastmail, because I had some really old @fastmail.fm accounts that were grandfathered into their free plan [1], but got deleted because I wasn't in the right frame of mind to log in within the 120 days grace period.
Your custom domain pricing is weird. Is it really important to squeeze the extra $20/year out of the first user? It ends up being $50/year for the first user vs $12/year at Zoho. Why not just put custom domains in the basic tier?
DMARC reporting could be a huge value add if you could build something in. That whole industry is a massive ripoff and too expensive for small businesses.
Over 1/3 of our staff are support agents, and support is one of our largest costs, so yes - custom domains do add additional support challenges, and we do need to cover that cost.
Thanks for the suggestion with DMARC reporting. It's not something we're going to work on straight away, but I'll add it into the suggestions for the domain features. Definitely we'd only look at building something pretty basic and low-touch, but maybe that's enough for a lot of small businesses.
Minimal DMARC reports would be useful. The problem that I see for small businesses is the cost keeps them from even trying it, so they can have problems that never get surfaced.
As an example of where I think the current value propositions are bad, DMARCian charges $240/year for the most basic plan that includes 100k compliant messages in a month. Most small businesses won’t do half that in a year. You probably have good stats to grok that.
I get it on the support thing. I pretty much never use support, so I guess that’s why I always feel like everything is too expensive. I’m always stunned to see how many employees at smaller tech companies are support. Sometimes I feel like I’m subsidizing users that are too lazy to learn.
Heh, yep - you are subsidising users that don't know how to do everything - and they are subsidising you by paying for the engineers to build robust and reliable systems with 24/7 operations support, and developers, and standards authors improving the system for the future... along with the support team.
Anyway, I've already filed the DMARC request internally, and linked to this thread.
For this reason alone, I can't trust that they meet all the security considerations email providers now have as a consequence of all the services effectively delegating either secondary or primary authentication factors (or reset mechanisms) to email.
From the FAQ
> Occasionally, obscure email servers will block emails sent through us.
Maybe it's good for personal use or as a throwaway email, but it is not good for main business email. Certainly not a replacement for Gmail or Fastmail kinds. Because you expect the email service to have 24/7 availability and near-perfect email delivery and receiving.
> It's a one-man enterprise
A person can get sick or just wish to take a holiday for a couple of weeks. What happens when service goes down or I need customer support urgently?
> A person can get sick or just wish to take a holiday for a couple of weeks. What happens when service goes down or I need customer support urgently?
I think the expectation of urgency should be put into perspective alongside the $10/year price tag, i.e. if you need someone to get out of bed in the middle of the night $10 is probably not enough incentive.
That said, any issues or questions I've had have been resolved way faster than I experienced with Fastmail.
For me, this would be a major issue for personal emails as well. Even if an undelivered email wouldn't cause a monetary loss it still could have significant consequences, such as upsetting friends or family or missing the signup deadline for your kid's sports team. Personally, I don't mind paying the higher Fastmail prices to not have to worry about this.
It's a one-man enterprise, which may frighten some people, but I prefer boutique internet companies to the faceless monoliths. (I'd like more of the internet to be made of these small corner bodegas.)