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\nAt 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:
\nI 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.
\nThis 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.
\nCloudflare 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. I could have something like an address at jacobg.co automatically forwarded to my personal inbox without having to pay for another mailbox.
\nThe 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.
\nIt worked, but it wasn’t really the custom email setup I was looking for.
\nA few days ago, I stumbled upon an open-source project called Mailflare by hieunc299 on GitHub. It is a self-hosted email inbox for custom domains, built around Cloudflare.
\nMailflare uses Cloudflare for receiving mail and provides an interface for managing the messages. For sending, it integrates with Resend, which handles the actual delivery.
\nOn paper, this was almost exactly what I wanted. It was open source, used infrastructure I already had, and didn’t require me to run a traditional mail server myself.
\nIn practice, though, I ran into problems with the sending side. Getting reliable outbound email is much more complicated than simply having an SMTP server. 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.
\nSo while Mailflare is a really interesting project, it wasn’t the solution for me.
\nThe 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.
\nIt 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.
\nThis was probably the most straightforward option I found. If I wanted something that I knew would work and didn’t care about spending a little time configuring it, Purelymail would have been an easy choice.
\nI 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.
\nOf course, there are also the more traditional options. Google Workspace provides custom domain email through Gmail and is probably the easiest solution for most people who don’t mind paying for it.
\nThe problem for me is that I don’t really need everything that comes with it. Paying for a separate mailbox for a personal domain felt unnecessary when I mostly wanted a few addresses and the ability to send and receive through Apple Mail.
\nFor a business with multiple employees, Google Workspace makes a lot more sense. For jacobg.co, it felt like overkill.
\nWhile researching possible solutions, I came across Foundermail. It immediately stood out because it was basically everything I had been looking for.
\nFoundermail integrates with Cloudflare, provides standard SMTP and IMAP logins for external mail clients, supports multiple addresses, and handles verified outbound email. Most importantly, it was cheap enough that I didn’t have to think twice about using it for a personal domain.
\nThe setup was also surprisingly easy. Once the domain was connected, I could configure the SMTP and IMAP credentials in Apple Mail and use an address at jacobg.co like any other email account.
\nSo far, it has worked exactly how I wanted. Messages arrive quickly, sending works, and I don’t have to use a separate webmail interface every time I want to check my email. The UI is also much more modern than I expected, and the relatively small user base seems to help with speed and latency.
\nThere was one annoying limitation. I had to submit a special request before I could send emails to new addresses that had not previously messaged me. That’s not something I expected going in, although it was resolved and hasn’t been much of an issue since.
\nFor now, this is what an address at jacobg.co runs on.
\nAfter trying several different approaches, I’ve ended up with Foundermail for now. It isn’t the most well-known option, but it checks almost every box I started with: custom domains, multiple addresses, SMTP/IMAP, verified sending, and a price that makes sense for a personal domain.
\nThe bigger lesson for me is that custom email is surprisingly complicated. Receiving mail is easy. Sending it reliably is the hard part. Once you start worrying about spam filters, DNS records, authentication, SMTP, IMAP, and reputation, “just give me an email address” turns into a surprisingly deep rabbit hole.
\nFor now, an address at jacobg.co is running on Foundermail. I’ll probably stick with it until I find a reason not to.
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