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CraneMail vs. MXRoute
Can anyone give me the lowdown on CraneMail versus MXRoute? I seem to recall once reading that CraneMail is a reseller account of MXRoute. (Correct me if I'm mistaken.) But that being said, what are the practical differences, if any, between choosing one over the other? Other than cost, obviously, which you can easily compare. Any technical, reliability, security, performance or other differences between them?
And getting back to pricing, assuming one is simply reselling the other, what accounts for the great discrepancy in the comparative pricing between them for, essentially, the same services? For 100GB CM is $10/year vs. $100/year at MX; for 250GB CM is $60/year vs. $150/year at MX (and only receiving 200GB at the latter); and for 1TB CM is $120/year vs. $550 at MX.
As an aside, I noticed inconsistent pricing for the CM 100GB plan on the Email Hosting page vs. the Email Hosting Deals page.
Comments
Cranemail is its own thing. It doesn't resell anyone, never has.
Cranemail focuses more on being a full business suite.
Francisco
Both are Prem services, and both of the operators are very well regarded in this community. Choosing either is a choice you won't regret.
@Jar is a certified Swifty, and @Francisco likes to dance with his pants off, but we would never hold that against them.
I use both. I like both.
Email is comically lightweight. Unless you're sending and receiving giant attachments daily then ignore the storage specs and pick one of the two by flipping a coin.
I've used MXRoute for several years under normal business usage and barely use a few GB of space. You're not going to be storing 100GB of emails in your lifetime unless you have some very specific needs.
I use NameCrane, too. Also good. Really can't go wrong with either service... Just don't get hung up on the storage unless you actually require it. Even for our business usage, I won't need to delete any email for probably 20 years.
CraneMail all the way!
I've tried to use mxroute in the past and am currently a happy user of cranemail, even resell their services, while this was never made possible for mxroute.
I have too many requirements and the folks at mxroute were not able to address them. Whenever I asked can you do that, the answer was invariable No, they are very strongheaded and think that theirs is the only right way to do things. And their support is terrible. The system works, but it cannot be the norm to take days to answer a ticket and then not really answer the original concern.
Cranemail on the other hand are really friendly and accomodating, even when they said no to some requests they fully justified the reasons behind their response, and their service level is really great, in particular taking into accout the price levels and price structure.
Having said that, I am based in Europe and they totally lack proper support for urgent things during out working hours, although they are offering a EU server in Amsterdam, built specifically for European customers, in addition to their US server in LV. They do have support staff around the clock, who do help with small things, but are absolutely unable to help when they are more urgently needed, i.e. if a user is blocked for spamming, or if an IP is blocked for bad logins, this will need to wait for US daytime to get resolved, and even then only when Francisco or Mike have some time to spare from other always too urgent stuff. As a reseller, this becomes a problem when I have a client calling me every 10 minutes during business hours and beyond asking when will their service be restored. I am sure namecrane do realize this situation and have promised several times over to take steps to make things better, but they always seem to have other priorities.
I am with cranemail to stay though, I really hope the situation will soon get much better. I would never look at mxroute again.
Thank you for clarifying what your requirements were for MXroute, very helpful. It helps everyone make a good comparison between them.
MXroute offer reseller accounts
Congrats on your first post
While I agree that there is a bit of stubbornness, and they occasionally reinvent the wheel (like their "ACL" system), their support is fine. A better understanding of Spamassassin rules would be nice, like disabling rules that do RBL lookups that they are blocked* from, removing KAM rules (maybe it is just me that hates them?), but you get far more than you pay for.
*They may have done this, I ended up adding custom rules.
I work with two providers. Both have their pros and cons.
MXRoute was very good at first; the support was great.
Now we're just pushing a cart around fixing some bugs.
Support responds when it wants to, but it usually doesn't.
You open a support ticket, and I wait a maximum of seven days for the problem to be resolved.
So, MXRoute gets a -1 for this approach.
With CraneMail, you generally handle everything yourself. I don't think there are many support options. While there are currently issues with some filters, the fact that they work and trigger is fine for now.
Regarding Namecrane, I've had support tickets where I waited perhaps seven to ten days for some of the services I've received, but the problem has been resolved.
Hey, of course it was and is possible to resell. Meeting my requirements was what never happened. In addition to my specific needs, I want support tickets answered and issues resolved, this is very basic stuff. I guess that's OK for many people, just not for me.
Francisco on the first floor has already replied to you. Yes, they have their own self-developed control panel. Although I haven't used it yet, I really like their products and plan to use them in the future!
As for MXRoute, it's also an excellent choice. I've used them before and am very satisfied!
The two are not in any hierarchical relationship at all—they are service providers on the same level.
MXroute is the right route to go. Solid, time proven, competent.
Since its the same question on the other forum ill write you the same answer
Both are cheap and good, just buy them both and you will have backup option all the time. BF is near so probably there will be 3 years for 10-20$. Atm i have both + zoho as i like them and continue to support them. But if i must choose for 1 i would go with mxroute, its simpler for me and easier to setup and use..
I've used MXroute for a looooong time. Always been happy. Never tried Crane.
I used to use MXroute, but I've switched to CraneMail now. CraneMail has been great for almost a year.
MXRoute works via customized Directadmin panel + Roundcube. Cranemail is based on Smartertools (Smartermail).
Both are having their own underlying infrastructure, well respected ip ranges, no shady neighbors - aka maximum deliverability. I have never faced a bounce with them.
Both can be used for light personal relay with conscious not to damage the service. I have not used support a lot, but in both providers, some tickets mostly for asking things, were answered no more than in a day, usually in some couple of hours.
Cranemail runs by Franciso, MX route by Jarland. Both are very capable, tons of years in business, very helpful in this community, very polite and sharp as persons.
Major downside with Jar is that he is so in love with Taylor Swift - OK, she is good, but give me
Crainmale
MXRoute
In what sense is the focus on being a business suite?
Why do you need or want two separate providers simultaneously?
And how do you reckon that space is only a small consideration? Free consumer Gmail accounts get 15 GB free and users blast through them within a few years and need to either purchase additional space or cleanup.
And that's just for a single mailbox. For domain based email services with multiple mailboxes, especially depending on how many mailboxes you use, you can blast through GBs per mailbox, let alone the combined total of all your mailboxes, relatively quickly.
Doesn't seem lightweight to me.
How have you been found them to be the same/different, pros/cons, of each, comparatively? User interface and whatever else.
Both
I use MXRoute for business, it was around since before Namecrane. My usage:
5.38 GB / 100 GB. I've never removed email to create space. That's tens of thousands of emails. (Automated system messages, uptime alerts, invoices received, occasional file attachments / PDFs for things like LOAs, etc)NameCrane is newer so I used it for some domains I setup in more recent time, because I wanted to test it out and to support a friend's business. It's also good.
Flip a coin. Both are good and easy to setup and both companies are ran by highly competent people who know what they're doing.
We moved to MXRoute because of Spamhaus reasons. We bought MXRoute as backup solution for that case LOL
MXRoute is a real good service. We had one issue as they blocked one of our server IPs. But you can remove it easy from their blocklist. All is very easy to setup and configure.
And the most important thing for us: no delivery issues.
Cranemail includes video conf, cloud storage, built-in chat, online document creating/editing (think something akin to google docs). We've put in a decent bit of time getting Exchange ActiveSync playing nice as well.
There's full email archiving built in and many other things.
Both products are good, its just about what you need/want.
Francisco
That 5.38 GB is for a single mailbox, only? Is this your primary mailbox? How much time have you been using it that it took to build up to that amount of space?
Who did you use previously? What Spamhaus issues did you experience there?
No, that's the accumulated total of all @incognet.io emails. My personal email, billing, abuse, the public-facing one listed on domain registration, etc. A few other domains also use the MXR account which contribute to the total, but their email use is minimal if existent at all. I created my account with them in April of 2021, so I guess we're closer to 5 years now.
But I just wanted email hosting and email hosting only. I don't use Crossbox with MXRoute or the file storage and other things Namecrane offers. For that reason, I say the amount of disk or price per GB doesn't really matter since it'd be very difficult to come close to even the smallest plan's limits with either provider if just using email.
I would love to try out MXRoute for some of my stuff. Mostly my own projects, but a few clients, too. What keeps me hesitating is the very strict "you spam once and we kill you" rule they have.
What happens if there's a false positive? OK, not too likely but it does happen.
What happens if a client thinks it's nice to send a christmas newsletter to his customers? They will all have opted in to such a thing but they may have forgotten and clicked "this is Spam" once too often and - boom. (Yes, I advise all clients to use specialised platforms for that but some just never learn)
What happens if a malicious competitor keeps reporting me or a client to one of the BLs just to hurt us? This actually happened to a client once and it is way easier to do than one would think, because most of the list providers don't verify the allegations made.
To sum it up - Losing all mails from me and my clients (that's what "closing the account" implies, doesn't it?) because of something beyond my control, and no chance to even find the truth and rectify the situation - that sounds too risky to me.
I don't know about Namecrane/Cranemail. Didn't find anything about it on their site.
Really, I don't mind being cancelled for being a crook - but I want to be properly convicted first, I don't want to be punished without a chance for defense.
https://namecrane.com/cranemail-email-hosting
Right at the top of the site
Francisco
@Francisco Why the discrepancy in price for the 100GB plan between the Email Hosting page vs. the Email Hosting Deals page? Is the latter price only available temporarily?
>
Ones a deal that might go away at any time
I think Mike will do some shuffling around on a few of those plans this month.
Francisco
Sorry I wasn't precise: I meant I found nothing about the policies regarding suspected spamming.
And to make this clear, too: I do not spam, never did, never will. But there are cases (see above) that are beyond my control and I don't want to lose all mail because of it.
Thats fair, some more docs would help on that
Francisco
I haven't tried MXRoute, but have been using Crane for a mix of personal and transactional emails for a month or so. Deliverability is perfect, my tickets usually get a reply in ~10 minutes and SmarterMail is worlds beyond that of RoundCube/DirectAdmin/cPanel. There are tons of features.
I'd suggest getting the 100GB plan for 3 years at $20 if its still available. They offer FTP access to the storage and a premium license of eM client too.