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CraneMail Honest Review - 2 weeks in
Setup: Very easy. Once the service is provisioned, you can easily add new domains, you get given the DNS records to set and that's that. The management panel is pretty easy to use, you can easily add users, manage aliases and optionally log into SpamExperts for more fine-tuned control over spam protection.
The webmail client it comes with is really nice to use as well. It has a pretty decent migration feature so moving multiple inboxes over to them genuinely is a piece of cake. It makes it very clear how to set up with external clients which - if you're helping less techy people set up on their devices - is just perfect. Very very good. The eM Client license with it is a nice bonus as well. I've been using that as my primary email client since moving and it's a nice piece of software to use.
Spam protection: genuinely excellent. I've had a couple of false positives and false negatives but support were pretty good at explaining me the best ways to train the system to identify similar spam in future. I get a fair bit of spam, my email address has been in a few places on the internet over the years so it's natural. The spam protection IMO is on-par with Gmail's, which is all I wanted really. Quarantined messages that are incorrectly flagged can also be restored and vice-versa. The actual SpamExperts interface takes a lot of getting used to as there are a lot of things to look at and a lot of things you can change, but the defaults seem to be pretty much doing the job with a couple of extra messages to train it here and there.
Service: mixed. This is the only real 'issue' I've had with the service so far. For anyone reading, this is me being completely honest as a completely legitimate user who didn't know he'd potentially done something wrong. I have no ill-will against any members of the support team, the people I've spoken to have been for the mostpart incredibly helpful.
For context, I'm using Namecrane for my primary personal domain plus a few business accounts (through work, separately, I found and recommended NameCrane and have been tasked with setting it up and migrating/managing when people need help). All good at first. Then last night I sent an email to my energy provider which started bouncing with a 550 error saying my account was locked.
The account in question is my primary personal email address, 14 years old. I have so much linked to this account that I can't go back to a free provider at this point without massive inconvenience. I moved away from Google Workspace when my renewal came up last month and wanted something more cost-effective with decent spam protection. Also, I really don't send many emails, I just receive them.
When the 550s started, I opened a support ticket. A few hours went by, I started to worry, and opened a second one (yes, I know that's not ideal). Eventually I was told my account had been locked because I was "email warming" which is a term I had literally never heard before. The only thing I'd done that might look unusual was sending a handful of test messages to deliverability/spam-check tools - which I typically do when moving to a new provider either for regular email or transactional to confirm they're not on any blacklists and that SPF/DKIM/etc. are all fine. Again, I'm not sure it was that. I'd also been testing the forwarding for my side project's email address to the helpdesk, seeing how signatures looked, etc. so was also technically sending a couple of emails to domains I own, so it could have been that. I'm still not sure.
The reply I got was:
"I've removed the block. You were knocked because you were using an email warming service. Don't do that."
No explanation, no context. Just that.
I'm not using any warming services, and the tests I ran exist specifically to verify deliverability for a new mail provider. To me that feels like a completely reasonable thing to do - especially after signing up for a 3-year plan. I wouldn't risk my main mailbox by abusing the service in the first two weeks.
I mean fair enough if the response was something like "Our automated system flagged your test emails as resembling warm-up behaviour - nothing you did wrong, the filters are just strict."
But instead I was basically told off with no explanation.
Work has already bought a lifetime plan and I've committed to three years personally, so we're hoping this was just an early bump. But the way the situation was handled definitely wasn't great so something to bear in mind for anyone considering them.
As a whole, my opinion is fairly positive of the service itself, other than what happened today and last night. I will continue to use them and to be honest, it's nice to see a provider like this that is taking decent email services seriously. Every time my renewal comes up, I test the waters with the offerings at the time and as a whole, the thing every single provider fails at is the spam protection, and that's something that NameCrane seem to have nailed here with the SpamExperts (I presume) partnership.
I just hope this helps others, they're definitely one to consider, and I'm more than happy for people to tell me that I'm wrong and was inadvertently "warming" lol, but if so, it wasn't intentional!
Comments
You're welcome to reply to the ticket and we can pull logs of what tripped it. There's the off chance you put a string in the email that matched the formatting of other 'warming' services, but that's pretty damn rare.
Thanks for the feedback!
Francisco
Thanks, I've done just that because I am genuinely curious. And to reiterate, I mean no ill-will with any criticism, it's just my honest feedback as a customer.
One of my email was rejected and that mail could not be restored .
Do you find that training has any effect? My experience is that training has little to no effect.
What is a 'warming' service?
It's where a service takes your SMTP and IMAP credentials, then sends email back and forth with a bunch of people who are going to blasting the absolute most obscene spam possible next month to create data correlations between you and those spammers, and marks the emails as "Not spam" at the various email providers those spammers host with (usually Google and Microsoft) to try to "train" those spam filters to see you as inbox-worthy.
It was basically invented by this guy: https://www.spamfighter.com/News-14638-Microsoft-Sues-Spammer-Mizhen-in-Federal-Court.htm
Just to update since my last post. I followed up with NameCrane and am still waiting to see the actual log entries showing what triggered the "email warming" block. I've been sent a vague list of domains and only one I recognise from their list is glockdb.com, which is just a legitimate email deliverability tester - not a warmup service (as far as I can tell).
Until I see the logs, the whole situation still feels a bit suspect. I checked the outgoing logs on the SpamExperts side to see which deliverability tests I sent to and that's the only one that matched so either there are crossed wires or something strange is going on.
Even so, all of the emails I sent were part of normal deliverability testing when moving to a new provider - something NameCrane's support explicitly said was perfectly legitimate. I'm still waiting to see the logs to confirm exactly what triggered the block, but from what I can tell so far, this feels more like a false positive than anything intentional on my part.
At the end of the day, it is what it is. Obviously my account's fine now so I have nothing to gain by lying about it and chasing it up but if I'm going to be blamed for something, I want to at least have genuinely done it.
Logs:
Seems to be the way they do business. BuyVM, then still under the same management as NC/CM is today (AFAIK), had the same rather terse customer service if you did something they deemed to be "suspect". In my case, that was having overlooked that the PayPal mail address and BuyVM registration mail address had to be the same.
The mail from their administration pointing that out to me was... rather unfriendly, for what is a pretty simple mistake to make. They should really learn to ask questions first, shoot later. And finally, also to actively communicate, whether that's to inform someone they're blocked from a service, they're going to do a migration, or there's a large outage.
Can confirm
Always had a good experience with Fran though
Similar experience back in the day, though I was using the correct address but they insisted I wasn't. Turned out that at some point I had changed my PP address but PP actually added it as a secondary address and I'd never realized.
I thought to argue that if PP considered my address correct and valid, who are you to disagree? But.. I try not to start a relationship with a confrontation. Going back to PP and rearranging primary/secondary addresses cleared everything up and I had a few services for years until I eventually replaced them.
It's the first thing that comes to mind any time I see a new ad for CraneMail though.
Except you used mailreach, a service that literally advertises 'email warming' as a service.
All of this stuff is automated. There's rules to catch and outright lock accounts that send to such places. Using mail-tester or places like that are cool and don't cause issues. Infact we whitelist all emails out to many of them to make sure they don't get caught by our filtering.
No ones sitting here trying to fuck you with you or your service, we just want to make sure we're not going to be on the raw end of someones phishing/spamming run. Mike works an unreasonable amount of hours fine tuning rules and the likes.
I'll believe your story that you didn't intend to 'warm your email'. Great. You still used a service that outright advertises that on their website though, and we have as a 'kill on sight' rule.
Francisco
Which service is this? I'm yet to see any actual logs other than a list of domains, of which I only recognise one.
I guess you did: https://www.mailreach.co/email-spam-test
And they saw: https://www.mailreach.co/email-warmup
Seems that way. I'm not concerned with the politics - I just want a reliable email provider that isn’t blacklisted and has solid spam protection. Checking deliverability is just part of due diligence, and that’s all it is.
The service itself is great - Mike, who helped me tweak the spam settings initially, has been awesome. It’s just a shame about the customer service side.
You sent an email to outreachrs.com, which is one of the domains mailrrewch uses. If you date your logs back to November 17 you’ll see it.
Francisco
I can't find it on my side but honestly, at this point I don't care. I believe you - if they offer email warming as well, fair enough. I've had my say on it, my intentions were explained, I've been told off and that's that.
This could be in the knowledgebase/documentation (if it is, I've missed it - please share).
Yup - the first impression is: this will take a bit of time (and googling) to figure out.
I suppose that real spammers abuse any kind of ways to avoid being caught & stopped, so maybe that is why it's better to give less information on how and why something was flagged.
Yes, for my account the email I registered with was auto-changed to my Paypal email - and I got an email notification about that after the fact on the given Paypal email.
I opened support ticket explaining that it's better to use a Gmail account so I can be reached if there's something wrong with the domain I am hosting with the provider (in case of any problems), but they just repeated the "must-be-like-payment-info" policy and called it a day.
I added my Gmail email as an additional contact that is authorized to open tickets and I hope that could help in case of any complications.
legitimate reference!
@Francisco - cranemail webmail ain't loading. It just shows a loading circle.
Should be all good to go
Francisco
Pretty much what everyone who hosts their own email server has to do to get their emails into inboxes.
Have plenty of Gmail, outlook, etc accounts (places to buy them online) and send emails back and forth to them and hit "not spam" until eventually you see your email in inbox instantly on a few in your list.