Hey guys,
after looking into selfhosting email it seems to me that it’s probably better if I use an existing email hoster like Namecheap or Porkbun.
Now I saw that Porkbun doesn’t offer catchall emails so I can’t use it for my usecase.
Do you guys have any recommendations for a reasonably priced email hoster for a custom domain that offers all basic features like catchall? The purpose is for one domain I use for my personal stuff and one for a small side hustle/ small business.
Thanks so much in advance for your help!
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.
Someone shared this post about ProtonMail the other day and thought I should share here as well.
I have Protonmail rolled together with AnonAddy and that gives me all the aliases I could ever want.
Not self-hosted, however Proton supports custom domains and catch-all. Their monthly plans are very reasonable IMO.
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 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.
Seconding Migadu! I’ve had them for about 3 years now and never had a problem.
I’ve been happy as well with migadu for the time I’ve been using it ~3 years. Have different mailboxes, and I used aliases for pretty much every website I sign up with.
I use Fastmail and it’s pretty reasonable, has some nice tie-ins with 1Password, alias emails, etc.
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I’ve been very happy with mxroute for quite a few years now. They have a summer deal going on for $40 a year for unlimited domains and accounts, you’re only limited by storage (100GB) and outgoing emails per hour.
t would be helpful to know what you consider basic features you want the host to support, but catchall works.How good is mxroute at blocking spam correctly?
Proton mail offers catchall, assuming you mean what I think you do. Basically I can receive mail sent to anything@mydomain.com, though my account only has 5 named accounts that I can send from.
I use Proton mail and Anonaddy.
For 24$/year porkbun has been really easy!
Mailbox.org is decent as well
Happy customer for years. However, they recently changed their price schemes. The cheapest plan (1 EUR monthly) no longer allowes custom domains, you need to pay more for that.
Yeah, that sucked :(
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.
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.
Again, perhaps with more clarity:
With imapfilter you can
- choose where you will host your “actual” e-mail, let’s say you choose according to best spam filter.
- choose where you will store your e-mail long-term.
- choose where you will access the e-mail for everyday use (this could be several separate accounts if you wanted to eg. use one on your phone and another one on your workstation)
- choose where you will run imapfilter and any script hooks
- start building your rules.
1-3 could be same provider or different providers, including your custom dovecot instance, you will simply choose based on convenience and limits. If you ever need to change one of the endpoints (providers), you just need to rewrite them in your ~/.imapfilter/config.lua. (And migrate, which can be done using imapfilter or manually using any sane client, eg. Claws Mail…)
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







