MXroute is an email hosting service whose blog covers pricing, docs, deliverability, and policy topics like 2FA and IP reputation.
Commenters recommend it as a cheap host for email across many domains, and say the owner takes deliverability seriously, with no mail landing in spam.
There is definitely a market, but I'd say it's a difficult nut to crack. You first want to do a quick cost-benefit-analysis first to make sure you're making an informed decision.
We won't be factoring privacy, working with a big company, or other concerns in this thought. We will only focus on the numbers.
Lets look at email/productivity market real quick.
Google's base package is 6 dollars a month per user with all the backups, support, and infrastructure in place (realistically, you'll want the 12 dollars a month package).
Since email is critical infrastructure (I believe it's one of the most critical elements of a business), lets say two DigitalOcean VPSes at 6 dollars a month each (one primary, one failover) with a license of HostinaBox/Vesta/Whatever Open Source Solution you use with DigitalOcean's backups enabled. Not the "best" design but something I'd say is OK and within scope for a small business. That's 12 dollars a month base costs + your consulting time for a sizeable capacity.
For a small business of 1 person, they get a better deal by just going with Google. Google has their applications and softwares easily integrated with their other services, comes with their productivity suite (GSuite == Google Docs, Drive, etc.), and as a small business who is probably risk adverse in their decisions when it comes to these things, feel more comfortable working with Google.
For a small business of 5 people, I'd say it's still more worth it for them to use Google…
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[Wow! --first time I've hit HN's post character limit!]
Now, someone said they have this kind of attitude as a way of targeting their offering towards more tech-minded people and deterring the more needy users. And, at first, I thought; "OK. Fair enough". But, the more I thought about it the more it started sounding a bit like Steve Jobs. If I sign up and find it's not to my needs, I basically get told to fuck off because I'm obviously 'holding it wrong'.
That attitude might be fine for someone offering a free product. But it's not acceptable for a paid service. As I've said on here before, I think there are far too many developers about these days, who've seen Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds and think that being an obnoxious arrogant arsehole makes you some kind of techie rock star. When, in fact, it just makes you an obnoxious arrogant arsehole.
So there's where I'm up to at the minute. Anyone got any comments re the three mentioned above, or know any other email services which are using this kind of business model, as opposed to per email account charging?
The way things are going at the moment, I can see myself ending up spinning up a Mail-in-a-Box[5] server. As nothing I've found out there so far seems worthy of giving my money to.
[0] https://www.migadu.com
[1] https://postale.io
[2] https://mxroute.com
[3] https://www.migadu.com/use
[4] https://postale.io/about-us
[5] https://mailinabox.email/
Nice, I built an internal tool like this once. Love what you've got here. IME the next priority is supporting alternate providers to SG (and I see from the thread it's on your roadmap).
Another option for the SMTP part is using an upstream mail provider perhaps https://mxroute.com/ works for folks.
Oddly, I've had pretty good success with sending from my own Postfix+OpenDKIM based infrastructure for many years (in Linode). I suppose it's mostly because my volume from that box and those domains is so low and is primarily transactional rather than news-letter like things (I send service announcements maybe quarterly). I mentioned it elsewhere in thread but I like Postmark for those newsletter & drip-campaign stuff.
I had heard of mxroute previously, but for some reason, i only thought they focused around transactional email...like sendgrid, etc...and not what others might refer to as conventional mail hosts. Their price is really compelling, and the honesty of their documentation is refreshing! Take a gander at some of their commentary around hosting calendars, contacts for example: "...Just know, that’s not where the bulk of our time and energy is going." [https://mxroute.com/docs/#/General/Do_You_Sell_Calendars] Granted i have the need for email as well as calendar and contacts, but damn that level of honesty is compelling for me to at least consider them for my short list. Kudos to the MXRoute folks for being honest!
After paying Vultr way too much for my personal toy OpenBSD hosting, let me share my host TinyKVM [1] as a happy customer. Obviously look at the terms, they clearly recommend not using it for any critical purposes. It's a service offered by RAM Host [2], based in Dallas.
A bit out of the blue, I'll say that I'm also a happy customer of MXroute [3], which are also in Texas. I like these folk's no-nonsense approach. I can only think of SpongeBob's friend Sandy, and the experience have reinforced this stereotype :) No affiliation, I'm sorry for this regional digression, have never been to Texas unfortunately, but good job, guys!
[1] https://tinykvm.com
[2] https://ramhost.us
[3] https://mxroute.com
Having just done this myself I would HIGHLY recommend transferring email using a IMAP based tool. Any POP based tool will not retain any of the folder organization you may have in your Gmail mailbox.
Gmail implements folders via labels, and the only way that I know of how to pass these through to the new mailbox (whether it be Gmail or not) is by using IMAP.
I used:
https://imapsync.lamiral.info/#install
This one is free if you don't need support. There are others.
The email hosting service I settled for is:
https://mxroute.com
Use them only for forwarding, so their cheapest package is OK for me.