Ask HN: What email service(s) do you use for your side projects?

Zoho is pretty cheap and not bad. They also own Zeptomail [1] that is meant for transactional emails, also cheap and you can even buy credits in advance. Haven't tried it yet though.

[1] - https://www.zoho.com/zeptomail/pricing.html

It's a mix. I use my registrar's (Porkbun) email service for human communication (name@, support@, etc). Added those accounts to my personal Gmail inbox so I can send/receive using Gmail instead of logging into the registrar's webmail. Eventually will move to something like Google Workspace most likely, which is a bit more expensive.

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).

I've found Mailgun's services to be pretty good. Admittedly I haven't tried many of the alternatives in recent years, but we use Mailgun to send a few hundred thousand transactional messages per month at my day job and they have been good. For my personal side projects, their free plan has been sufficient enough that I've never paid for usage.

We use Migadu for everything.

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.

Others have mentioned Fastmail, and it really is great. But I don't think it's the final stop if you want transactional emails.

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-...

PurelyMail (purelymail.com) has been great for me! And very affordable.

SES from AZMN. Also mailgun. Even out of the free tier I see these as a good value for low volumes of mail (less than 10k per month)

If it is under 100 mails per day just use gmail.

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.

You can self host email. There are plenty of how-tos, prepackaged packages, even books:

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.

Transactional send: Recently switched to Amazon SES from Sendgrid (for my volume, SES is free while Sendgrid was ~$20).

Receive: gmail (custom domain)

I can second using AWS SES, which I've built on for inbound (pretty solid) and outbound (still a work in progress) email for about a dozen domains now. My needs are very-much automation focused, so perhaps not main-stream but more developer oriented. This kind of solution keeps the data in your hands, is _very_ inexpensive to run, has some respect for privacy and compliance like GDPR, and is essentially maintenance free.

[1] https://github.com/mlhpdx/email-delivery [2] https://github.com/mlhpdx/email-origin

Fastmail

Been using the cheapest package on https://purely.website for a few months and it’s been pretty good. £12 for a year.

Fastmail can work with multiple domains, but isn’t interchangeable with something like Google Workplace or Office. Zoho works really well for that though.

A VPS @ Hetzner, exim4. No problems with deliverability.

I use namecheap right now, but I'm planning to move to hetzner when my contract ends.

Custom domain through porkbun ($1.5-12 yearly, depending on the TLD).

Email through purelymail ($10 yearly, no hard limits on anything).

For small scale stuff, it's not difficult to run a mail server on a VPS.

I use dovecot for IMAP.

SMTP, there are tons of options...

iCloud+ accounts support bring your own domain. Then use SMTP connections from your app to send messages. I suppose there's no native support for any type of hook connection but could probably achieve that effect if you wanted to pay for Zapier or a similar service.

OP wanted to send and receive, which afaik neither Mailgun nor SES does. Recommend Fastmail.

I use postfix and dovecot for sending and receiving email

mxroute for real projects, or migadu for tiny things

AWS SES and WorkMail. It gets the job done. listmonk (self-hosted) for mailing lists because it comes with double opt-in and GDPR compliance. Proton Mail and SimpleLogin for experiments.

Mangomail. Unlimited domains, unlimited email addresses, 10GB for $18 annual. Perfect for side projects. Setup took 5 minutes.

https://mymangomail.com/

https://www.fsf.org/resources/webmail-systems

I’m also curious about this, because we have clients whose back office web services just use sendmail and for the most part, we don’t have trouble.

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...

Proton Mail > https://proton.me/business/plans

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.

I'm using Zoho for the custom domain email team@mysite.com.

For transactional email, I'm using Resend, a newcomer with a very quick and polished React/Next.js integration.

Both are free tier.

EmailJS linked to my gmail account. So far it is enough. When it won’t be enough, I’ll use Mailgun.

[dead]