Best alternative to selfhosting email? E.g. email hosting provider for a custom domain

ProtonMail has been my go to, really fantastic service, you get simplelogin as well and can add custom domains up to 10 iirc. And the VPN is top tier too.

I recommend fastmail.com though they do have done shortcomings that you need to consider such as the fact that they're based in Australia (five eyes country) and have servers in the USA. Their advantage is a slick interface, fantastic app based on JMAP, and just generally being super convenient. They allow catch all addresses, masked emails, custom domain etc. I find them super convenient.

Proton and fastmail you can use custom domains. I only have experience using fastmail. They provide great instructions for the settings in cloudflare (mx records, etc). My domain is purchased through namecheap.

I can receive mail on *@mydomain.com and I can send email from any thing I want ad-hoc (anything@mydomain.com or anything@anything.mydomain.com)

I thought about selfhosting as well, but the internet concensus was it can be a hassle with your email getting rejected.

I've been very happy with mxroute for quite a few years now. They have a summer deal going on for $40 a year for unlimited domains and accounts, you're only limited by storage (100GB) and outgoing emails per hour.
t would be helpful to know what you consider basic features you want the host to support, but catchall works.

Microsoft365. It’s like $6/user/month and you get access to the whole MS suite (Word, Excel, etc.). Email is managed by Exchange Online. Crème de la crop as far as email goes.

If you’re in the Apple ecosystem and just want something barebones then you can use a custom domain with your iCloud account. I think it’s called iCloud+.

I’ve just moved my email hosting from Fastmail to Migadu, very competitive pricing if you have a lot of users/mailboxes/domains but not that much email traffic

I have a couple domains that are very low volume for outgoing mail. I use Migadu. I'm happy with their cheapest tier ($19/year for both domains). They have catch-alls and many other nice features.

Edit: They have no hard limits on the number of addresses, users, or domains and such. They just want you to be reasonable. You choose a tier based on your average quantity of outgoing mails per day. Again, there are no hard limits; they won't cut you off unless you abuse the system.

I use Fastmail and it’s pretty reasonable, has some nice tie-ins with 1Password, alias emails, etc.

Purelymail.com has been great for me for years. Insanely cheap and just works.

Honestly any service that offers cPanel can allow mail hosting and a catchall.

If you just want a basic IMAP/SMTP service with nothing fancy I know these guys do allow catch all mailboxes https://hostinguk.net/email

ProtonMail for regular email + smtp2go for services to send outbound email.

If it is just for email forwarding maybe a service like https://anonaddy.com/ or https://simplelogin.io would work. Catch-all is even included in the anonaddy free plan as that is something you actually do not want to have enabled 😄 For your custom domain you have to have the lite plan at least though.

Proton mail offers catchall, assuming you mean what I think you do. Basically I can receive mail sent to anything@mydomain.com, though my account only has 5 named accounts that I can send from.

For 24$/year porkbun has been really easy!

Mailbox.org is decent as well

I use Proton mail and Anonaddy.

I can highly recommend purelymail.com. They allow multiple domains, users and catch all accounts. They are great value, with a flat rate $10 per year ‘simple’ price, or you can pay per resource which for most people works out cheaper.

Been with them for over a year and been really good. Had a slight issue setting up one domain and their support were friendly, emailed back and sorted it out straight away for me.

I self host my imap Server that my clients access. I have a minutely cron job that first fetches, then deletes, the emails from my mail provider.

I don’t self host smtp.

With that I have all the advantages of self hosted email, but no integration problems.

Maddy

I can't recommend Migadu enough. I'm on the $99/year plan and have dozens of domains and clients with their own domains too, it's easy to manage and does everything I need it to.

I've enjoyed runbox.com for years but don't think they offer catch-all, at least not when I last checked. You might look at mxroute.com, I heard about it later and might have gone with them first and they somehow seem more likely to support that

Protonmail for actual hosting and Cloudflare for free catch-all forwarding.

Whatever hosting service you're going to use, if you're not afraid of a little bit of Lua coding, consider using imapfilter -- it's a swiss knife for backups, pre-sorting, hooks and migration.

imapfilter is a (criminally underrated, IMO) tool for writing e-mail rules in Lua, which allow you to do tons of things, but my favorite is migrating e-mail, regardless of account.

See, unlike most filtering/sorting systems which are either completely proprietary or limited to single account (exportable as Sieve, if you're lucky), imapfilter does not care where each "end" of the rule is: you can write rule that migrates from account1/folder1 to account2/folder3.

This allows you to completely decouple any sorting, pre-processing, hook or backup system from the actual locations or providers you happen to be using, as well as it allows you to combine any number of locations in any simple or complex way you need. Whatever system you will end up creating will stay with you as long (as you can use IMAP locations), so you can really focus on making it work long-term and have it fit into the big picture.

I've been using it for almost 10 years and ever since it has changed my whole world of e-mail. I have constant set of rules that take e-mails from set of inboxes (each box for different purpose, each on different provider, for reasons) and sort them to folders on my "actual" account, where I get to read them on my terms. I also have several of rules that run custom scripts exporting CSV's, etc. (The rules are Lua programs, after all, so sky is the limit.) If I ever need to migrate my domain to another service (believe it or not, happened more than once in 10 years), all I need to do is set up the new account as base for the rules, but all of my rules are always going to be preserved.

In my past work I actually used imapfilter to move all IMAP from company Gmail to a locally maintained (on company laptop) Dovecot instance so that I could eventually use a sane client to get my work done. (And because the instance was local, I could access my e-mail offline with best possible speed.) One could do a similar thing with personal/freelance e-mail -- just run Dovecot somewhere at a trusted place (you won't be sending/receiving e-mails here, you will be only using IMAP to IMAP commands, so none of the horrors of self-hosting e-mail apply) and use imapfilter to route all email there, then back up your dovecot folder and you're all set.

Except for need of coding, the disadvantage is that, I need an independent machine that runs 24/7 in order to keep sorting the e-mail (I do it cron-based but you can also do it continually) but that has not been a problem for me as I'm the self-hosting-nerd that's going to have such machine anyway.

I like and trust Proton Mail, and they support setting up custom domains while hosting your email data (for subscriber users).

You can then access it via their web mail box, via their Android and iOS apps, or via a desktop email client if you install their "bridge" application. The bridge application basically maintains the secure encryption ethos of their email system by ensuring all email traffic between your desktop and their servers remains encrypted, but can still be accessed via your preferred email clients such as Thunderbird or Outlook. The bridge is available for Windows, iOS and Linux.

I personally recommend Protonmail as it's primary focus is security and encryption, yet it does this in a very well developed and slick interface, so you get the best of both worlds. I'm a subscriber and moved from Gmail about 2 years ago as I wanted better privacy and security (they even have great tools for importing your old emails from major web providers). I don't have a custom domain but from my experiences of everything else they provide, I'd be confident it works as intended.

EDIT: In terms of cost, its €4 a month for the first tier which includes support for 1 custom domain, 10 email addresses, and 15GB of storage, or €10 for 500GB, 3 domains, 15 emails. They also include VPN, calendar, drive storage and a password manager in both.

I found mxroute, it works very well for me. I can't say much about specific features since I just wanted a simple email host.

What about Microsoft 365? The tenant itself is free and per account and month you pay about 5-10$ (depending on sibscription level).

With this you have the full MS Exchange experience, you get 1TB of OneDrive space and all the shebang.

It's not self hosted but I use Tutanota. I have my own domain anything that comes to that domain shows up in my box. It might be better than the alternatives because it's an encrypted mail service.

I use free tier of Zoho Mail and it works well enough for me. Need to use their app though but it's not too bad (the cheapest tier has imap iirc)

Check out PurelyMail. It's $10 a year, unlimited custom domains, unlimited emails, privacy focused.

Side question. Does anybody know of a decent service that basically works as a smarthost for outgoing and will MX incoming emails back to a mail server I host? I've been self hosting email since the '90s and just don't want all of my email stored elsewhere. The IP reputation chasing is just too much to deal with now.

Funny 😄 pretty much asked myself the same thing, the day before yesterday.

Specifically, I have been looking for encrypted mail hosters supporting your own domain. Also, hosting in Europe on dedicated Hardware (or at least guaranteed European VPS), GDPR compliance and some sort of certification/ verification of the said requirements and their claims!

What I came up with:

• mailbox.org (never heard of it before, but pretty much has your requirements covered) <- Tor nodes, anonymous accounts(no personal data at all!)
• proton mail
• Tutanota (pretty young - but interesting concept)

I won’t cite their individual plans - that’s for you to figure out in detail.

The thing that bugs me with the Proton Mail and Tutanota, to effectively make use of their threat model/ encryption you have to use their Apps/ Software. EDIT: I’m currently using Microsoft365 - with it you are pretty much locked in - I fear with Proton or Tutanota it’s the same. Migrating is a pain.

I’m trying mailbox.org at the moment - they got a 30-free trail.

uberspace might be what you are looking for. you get a fully maintained mail setup, 10GB of storage, a dozen preconfigured services, a nice wiki and a very cool team of nerds. starts at 5€/month and you can buy your own domain elsewhere (i use inwx).

I've been using Tutanota. They are kind of similar in principles to Protonmail, but until recently were dirt cheap at €12/yr (now €36/yr). The only "drawback" is that you can only access your mail through their app, this is a feature, not a bug, according to Tutao.

I use Porkbun with Gmail and ForwardEmail.net. They do a great job.

As a single user or small household setup - I'm using Cloudflare email routing, with catchall, forwarded into my Gmail account for receive. For SMTP, I'm using a combination of mailjet.com and brevo.com, which both have fairly robust free tiers for personal/small business use and allow sending from anything@domain.com.