At this point, I have owned the domain jacobg.co for over 2 years. For the longest time, I have been trying to have a custom email address at my domain without paying a fortune for a service that isn’t widely used. Here are some of the things I was looking for: Bring-Your-Own domain, Cheap pricing, Unlimited addresses, Verified email sending and receiving, Integration with Apple Mail. I tried a few different solutions, from Cloudflare’s built-in email routing to completely self-hosted options. In this post, I’ll go over what I tried, what didn’t work, and what I’ve finally settled on.
Cloudflare E-Mail Routing: This site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, and the DNS records for this domain are routed through Cloudflare. Naturally, my first instinct was to use Cloudflare’s own solution for custom domain email: Email Routing. Cloudflare receives each email sent to your domain and forwards it to an address of your choice. For receiving mail, this is a pretty simple solution. The problem is sending. Cloudflare’s email routing is primarily designed around forwarding incoming mail, and sending mail from the custom address requires a separate solution. For my use case, the available options were either too expensive or too complicated. I also found that forwarded messages could sometimes take several minutes to arrive. It worked, but it wasn’t really the custom email setup I was looking for.
Mailflare: A few days ago, I stumbled upon an open-source project called Mailflare by hieunc299 on Git Hub. It is a self-hosted email inbox for custom domains, built around Cloudflare. Mailflare uses Cloudflare for receiving mail and provides an interface for managing the messages. For sending, it integrates with Resend, which handles the actual delivery. On paper, this was almost exactly what I wanted. In practice, though, I ran into problems with the sending side. Domain authentication, reputation, and the way major providers like Gmail and Yahoo evaluate incoming messages all become important. The setup I ended up with wasn’t something I was comfortable relying on for my personal email. So while Mailflare is a really interesting project, it wasn’t the solution for me.
Purelymail: The next option I found was Purelymail. Purelymail is essentially a personal email hosting service that gives you SMTP and IMAP access for a very low price. At around $10 a year, it was one of the cheapest options I found. It also supports unlimited addresses, has a strong focus on privacy, and offers a generous free trial. Since it provides standard IMAP and SMTP access, it can also be used directly with Apple Mail instead of forcing you to use a proprietary web interface. This was probably the most straightforward option I found. I ended up finding another option before fully committing to it, though. I’ll probably keep Purelymail in mind if I ever need a more dedicated email setup in the future.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing