Ask HN: What email service(s) do you use for your side projects? I have a couple side projects that I use for my friends, family, and myself. I'd like to have both an email such as team@mysite.com to send and receive emails that I might want to type out. I'd also like to be able to send transactional emails, password reset ... I would think that I'm not the only one with this problem. What do you all use to achieve this? |
[1] https://github.com/mlhpdx/email-delivery [2] https://github.com/mlhpdx/email-origin
Nobody likes a cold call/email.
So I did the reasonable thing and signed up for Zoho. It's cheap and I don't have to worry about having a zombie spam server because I misconfigured something.
I use AWS SES for transactional emails (mostly send, but making use of the receive capability as well). Nice and cheap. And finally using MailerLite for marketing emails. Just surpassed their free tier so may look again, but not too bad pricing-wise.
One advice I've seen is not to mix transactional and marketing providers (and ideally domains). If you get a high incidence of unsubscribes or "this is spam" responses, don't want your app to be dead in the water for transactional stuff if the marketing provider suspends your account temporarily (can happen even if you're legit).
There's no extra cost for extra domains, on everything but their smallest account — and as we already have an account for all of our other domains, using Migadu for side projects as well is a no-brainer.
Decided to try out Cloudflare email routing[0], and have it routing to Fastmail and/or Gmail. I'm not using email workers for much yet, but it's a pretty cool feature.
I'd definitely recommend it as a super easy way to just get email working for a domain, and just route the emails to/from your existing email accounts.
[0] https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/email-routing/
EDIT: removed CF MailChannels integration note. Apparently it's been axed.
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/mailchannels-end-of-life-...
I remember looking into mailbox providers sometime ago and wanted to resell Zoho because they seemed like the best provider on the market at the time but their reseller contacts are a waste of my time. Awful sales channel. They willingly don’t understand plain English.
[1]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h4hgdBFEgOt7XQaTAR7Q...
Mailbox.org > https://mailbox.org/en/business-customers
Migadu > https://www.migadu.com/pricing/
Startmail > https://www.startmail.com/secure-business-email
All the above are hosted in EU.
If you are scared of abuse usw postfix+opendmarc (for sending), but IP/domain reputation takes time.
Otherwise one provider that offers sending+mailbox or two providers for the use-cases.
https://mwl.io/nonfiction/tools#ryoms
I'm writing my own how-to which includes finding suitable Internet providers and includes setting up smarthosting in case you can't get a good address for yourself.
Receive: gmail (custom domain)
For transactional email, I'm using Resend, a newcomer with a very quick and polished React/Next.js integration.
Both are free tier.
Email through purelymail ($10 yearly, no hard limits on anything).
I use dovecot for IMAP.
SMTP, there are tons of options...
You have to properly set up your DNS records so that all your sending servers authenticate properly.
As I wrote, either you work on improving your reputation (set up all the acronyms, send lots of test messages, tell everyone you know that uses Google for mail to look in their filtered mail and tell Gmail that your mail is not junk, keep sending, et cetera), or you smarthost through a reputable service.