Interesting and helpful thread!
Does anyone have any Mac-friendly suggestions in the low end for simple email providing? I registered a domain thinking I’d do a simple photo site for family and friends as well as having email backup to Apple. But never got past the initial stages on the site and now it’s only email in use and not much at that.
My registrar provides sufficient email for $20/year in my case, so with domain renewal, it’s around $35/year. Alas, the customer support is not what it used to be, most politely I can say I’m getting my money’s worth.
Fastmail, noted by many in this thread, is at lowest $60/year and all plans include email plus 3 modules I have no use for.
Tigertech was also mentioned, I used something from that company back in the 90s I think but their product range is also not it for me.
Any other suggestions, email only, nothing fancy, decent online help/customer support, possibly also domain registration, in that $35-$50 range, or email only around $25-30?
Not a user, but since I haven’t seen anyone else mention it, if you subscribe to iCloud+, you can set up a custom domain for use with it:
I investigated moving from a grandfathered gmail managed domain (or whatever they almost cancelled a few years ago) but after they backed down I lost motivation. I do remember there were one or two minor limitations with iCloud custom domains that made me hesitate. Might have been something about some limit on the number of aliases that you could create iirc.
Another option which might be more than you need, but I looked at for privacy/encryption reasons is Proton Mail. Not sure it can integrate with Apple’s iOS mail app, but it can with the desktop version.
Yes, we were just nattering about that. You might want to check out this thread:
https://talk.tidbits.com/t/email-domain-with-icloud-mail
To follow up on my move to FastMail, I finally have it up and running today after spending most of this afternoon trying to understand the instructions. Network Solutions was the major problem last week, and it took too much time sorting out how they operated. This week the problems were unclear instructions from FastMail which were not explicit where I needed to go to make changes. I bungled trying to follow complex instructions how to set up Apple Mail. Do not use the “Automatic” setup for the Mac, which I found hard to follow; once I switched the “Manual setup of Mail and Notes on Mac” the instructions became much more Mac-friendly and even I could follow them. I’m sure I was much of the problem because I never did much network management, but some instructions seemed unclear or opaque.
Thanks AngusC,
good tip about the custom domain feature!
Part of the reason I have this domain registered and email set up is as a backup to Apple products. Rarely their services go down yes but their email spam protection has intercepted legitimate emails to me in the past (as I understand it they delete some junk mail before it ever reaches the inbox).
As a career aircraft pilot I’m also fond of backup plans in many regards!
I looked at Proton maybe 9 months ago during another stab at finding alternate provider, and also saw articles they’d been hacked, so haven’t considered since.
Nice suggestions!
I think most email providers do this, and they also delete outgoing email they detect is spam. Fastmail certainly does. The likelihood of these messages being spam is virtually 100%, so it’s better to delete without notifying, rather than making a nuisance for users. It’s all part of the constant battle against spammers.
The problem is with mail that is probably spam but could also reasonably be a false positive. The criticism of Apple is its filtering is too aggressive so it mischaracterizes these messages as certain spam and just deletes them instead of sending them to the junk folder, and you have no ability to tune or turn off the spam filtering.
The worse spam filtering I have ever seen was at SiteGround, which developed their own spam filter after working with SpamExperts. The fatal flaw to me was that SiteGround’s filter would frequently ignore whitelisting. From the mailing lists that went missing from my inmail, I suspect they also were spam filtering emails if I deleted them after reading, which shows up in IMAP. I do that to avoid overloading AppleMail with emails I will never need again. I complained and they ignored me, so I went elsewhere. A good spam filtering service will let the user adjust its selectivity to meet their needs.
From months of looking through spam filters to deal with SiteGround, I also am sure that most spam filters send the most obvious sludge directly to the trash, because I didn’t see any really obvious spam. A more disturbing problem has been trashing all email from companies that have been compromised or used unwittingly in crime. That happened to Docusign, and Google kept trashing everything from Docusign directly to the trash, which included contracts my clients were sending me. Google’s only saving grace on that was that they left it in my email trash because I don’t empty it for a month, so I could find it.
That’s not been my experience. Hover, which does my email, deletes stuff that is explicitly not junk without ever letting me see or know about it. Password reset emails are particularly vulnerable to this, which can be a giant pain.
I wasn’t clear. I’m saying that there are messages where it’s virtually certain the user doesn’t want to see or deal with—for example, backscatter from spam where your address was used as the from or reply-to address. Email providers will often delete those without notifying users. The idea that providers should either deliver email addressed to you or let you know it’s been filtered out is a misconception.
You’re talking about messages of a different type: ones that are not spam but your provider thinks are spam. A spam filter that’s too aggressive may misidentify those messages are certain spam and therefore delete them. That’s the criticism of Apple’s spam filters and apparently of Hover’s. I’d say you should use a different email host.
How can you tell this is happening?
No, I understood your point. My comment was that ISP’s are not actually that good at determining which messages fit your profile and which don’t, at least in my experience with my provider.
I started losing messages – password resets, eg. I would ask for a password reset, the provider would say it had been sent, but it would never get to me. I’d check spam boxes, reach back to the providers, and nothing. I cross-checked by using a different email address and they would come through then. So I asked Hover and, frankly, got a bit of a runaround. Check your spam boxes. I did. Well, reach out to the providers. I did. Oh, okay, now that you mention it, actually, they’re on a blocklist* so you won’t get password email from them. Uh, okay, I’d prefer to decide who I get email from. Oh, that’s not how we handle things.
Uh, okay.
*it gets worse as I look at my email logs. They put my email (ie, the one that they handle) on an internal blocklist and that was causing problems – and no, no notification.
There’s no way to perfectly identify which messages are good or which aren’t, so any perspective on what does and doesn’t constitute spam is invariably questionable. I, for instance, believe there should never be loss due to filtering, only putting suspected spam mail in the spam box. I also think backscatter mail is interesting, because although it usually does indeed result predominantly from forgeries, it often gives you an idea of how your address is being (ab)used and, on rare occasions, actually tells you what you need to know about legitimate delivery failures, which is especially helpful if you are hosting your own email.
Clearly, people have legitimately different tolerances for what they’re willing to lose, vs what they’re willing to be required to dispose of (either in the Inbox or Spam folder, since both look identical to the sender). (It is possible to accept and then completely and silently discard a message without returning even an SMTP status code that is recorded in the bounce received by the sender, but such a system is broken, IMNSHO.) Some people think it’s the end of the world if they suspect loss of important email, and others would rather take the chance of losing mail (and having it returned to sender) if it means that on balance email is usable to them. Both takes are legitimate. I think the best policy for a mailbox provider is to let people decide what the policy should be, and limit that choice only when it would be technically difficult not to (because it makes the receiving mail system susceptible to other types of attacks or the system is being shared by other customers who would mostly benefit from near-certain spam protection that can’t otherwise be implemented before the message itself is received). I personally feel that all DNS-based blacklists should be used only for weighting, never blocking, and that does include lists that judge the “spamminess” of mail purely based on the “policy” that “dynamic” (including, in practice, cloud VPSs) IP addresses should never be permitted to send mail. In an ideal world, users of mailbox providers would get to make these choices so that they could arrive at their own preferred balance; in the current world, sadly the only way to have complete control is to run your own email server, and that’s sufficiently hard (in no small part due to all the blacklists) that people would rather use a host that can only do so much. Fortunately, for most people, that’s more than good enough.
What told me I was losing email at SiteGround was trying to whitelist mail I found in the spam filter only to find that the name was already on the whitelist. That happened repeated times with organizations like the National Academy of Sciences or other mailing lists. I also had to fish into the spam for verification codes.
The conversation seems to have drifted away from your question. I looked for this type of service a couple of years ago and came up empty. I found no one willing to provide and charge for email only. I wound up at Pair, paying (now) $8/month for email and for web hosting that I didn’t need. It has worked flawlessly for my email and support has been good. I wound up moving the web site of a small non-profit to my account, since there was no incremental cost to me. I consider part of my monthly payment as a donation to that organization.
If you do find an email-without-web-hosting service, be sure to let us know.
Mr. Rosenblum, indeed it has, albeit interesting territory at that.
Thanks for the feedback and link, I’ll check it out, and update the post if I ever find an affordable and more helpful provider.
Well, the joke’s on me. I just got an email from Pair that they are nearly doubling the price (to $13.99) starting January 1. There’s a sale for new customers that would cost $4/mo prepaid for a year (which holds off the increase until after that time), but I don’t think it’s worth moving to them and then moving again in a year. Meanwhile, I’m in the market again…
Update. From Adam’s list to Michael Tsai’s list to Proton mail, which is email only and this weekend is offering $2/month for a year, then $5/month. Worth looking into.
FastMail does not offer web hosting and its Business service is just $5/month.