Alternatives to MXroute

JohnFilch123 · April 8

@elliotc said:

@cmeerw said:
Self hosting. It's easier than you might think.

No. It is nightmare.

It is not actually. I do it.

Andreix · April 8

@whynotlearn said:

@COLBYLICIOUS said:

@cmeerw said:
Self hosting. It's easier than you might think.

Any tips?

There is this https://www.xmox.nl/ which i use, setting it first up was a bit complicated but I used AI (one of the few cases where I liked it) which walked me through it and ended up hosting it, pretty cool if you ask me and I love its minimalist UI actually.

I dont use it too much often to be honest but it was just an experiment as I wanted to see how email hosting works.

Golang is awesome language.

"Mox - modern, secure, all-in-one email server
Stay in control of your email and keep email decentralized!"

As modern as an Opel Astra G from '99.

whynotlearn · April 8

@Andreix said: As modern as an Opel Astra G from '99.

Honestly I genuinely love the minimalist UI and it takes very little resources to run and I run it on a 512mb server running other golang applications too.

Nyr · April 8

@JohnFilch123 said:

@elliotc said:

@cmeerw said:
Self hosting. It's easier than you might think.

No. It is nightmare.

It is not actually. I do it.

So tell us: where are you hosting the main and backup MX? What is your volume and how are you doing outbound? What about backups? What about DDoS protection if you are a public internet person? How much time did you spend learning to do it, and how many hours do you spend on maintenance per year? What if your main server goes down in the middle of a Saturday night?

I think of myself as someone technically competent, I have administered mail servers in the past and could do it today, but have no desire to waste a significant amount of time, effort and worry on running an email server por personal use. It is just not worth it when there are reliable, good quality providers specialized on doing that, and the whole email industry has long accepted that small, independent, email servers are no longer a viable thing.

Andreix · April 8

@whynotlearn said:

@Andreix said: As modern as an Opel Astra G from '99.

Honestly I genuinely love the minimalist UI and it takes very little resources to run and I run it on a 512mb server running other golang applications too.

Well yeah, but minimalist =! modern.
Looks more like he.net website than he.net itself...

MannDude · April 8

I only use ProtonMail (using it for two domains) and MXRoute for stability for critical stuff. NameCrane for less important stuff. Self hosted experimental setup for others, with and without a relay for outbound (SMTP2GO is nice so far).

Not going to dump MXRoute over some dumb forum (Then hetzner, then trust pilot, then reddit) drama when the reliability is top notch. If the service goes downhill, then I'll dip too.

Samoht999 · April 8

Am I the only one who loves self-hosting mail servers?

JohnFilch123 · April 8

@Nyr said:

@JohnFilch123 said:

@elliotc said:

@cmeerw said:
Self hosting. It's easier than you might think.

No. It is nightmare.

It is not actually. I do it.

So tell us: where are you hosting the main and backup MX? What is your volume and how are you doing outbound? What about backups? What about DDoS protection if you are a public internet person? How much time did you spend learning to do it, and how many hours do you spend on maintenance per year? What if your main server goes down in the middle of a Saturday night?

I think of myself as someone technically competent, I have administered mail servers in the past and could do it today, but have no desire to waste a significant amount of time, effort and worry on running an email server por personal use. It is just not worth it when there are reliable, good quality providers specialized on doing that, and the whole email industry has long accepted that small, independent, email servers are no longer a viable thing.

Don't forget this is my own server. Not for the company, not even for a family.

This is what we are trying to find out - those quality providers. I have got the second server, which uses mxroute, so curious to know alternatives.

elliotc · April 8

@JohnFilch123 said:

@elliotc said:

@cmeerw said:
Self hosting. It's easier than you might think.

No. It is nightmare.

It is not actually. I do it.

Email service outage has far more serious consequences than a website outage. I have little confidence in selfhost reliability.

COLBYLICIOUS · April 8

Does someone use Mailcow though for selfhosting emails?

memok · April 8

Mailcow+SES

FatGrizzly · April 8

Doesnt fit the budget, but this is a nice one that i used in the past (covid era)

https://postale.io

if someone is free and is willing to spend some time reviewing this, would be great for the community

https://www.axigen.com/mail-server/free/#free-mail-server

closed source, proprietary

FatGrizzly · April 8

If someone is interested to run their own email servers, your best bet would be having some sort of incoming spam filter which also works for redundancy(retrying X times incase your mailserver dies), and routing all outgoing emails via Mailchannels or some good relay(SES?)

Edit: Some spam filters, SpamXperts, MXGuardDog etc

Nyr · April 8

@JohnFilch123 said:

@Nyr said:

@JohnFilch123 said:

@elliotc said:

@cmeerw said:
Self hosting. It's easier than you might think.

No. It is nightmare.

It is not actually. I do it.

So tell us: where are you hosting the main and backup MX? What is your volume and how are you doing outbound? What about backups? What about DDoS protection if you are a public internet person? How much time did you spend learning to do it, and how many hours do you spend on maintenance per year? What if your main server goes down in the middle of a Saturday night?

I think of myself as someone technically competent, I have administered mail servers in the past and could do it today, but have no desire to waste a significant amount of time, effort and worry on running an email server por personal use. It is just not worth it when there are reliable, good quality providers specialized on doing that, and the whole email industry has long accepted that small, independent, email servers are no longer a viable thing.

Don't forget this is my own server. Not for the company, not even for a family.

This is what we are trying to find out - those quality providers. I have got the second server, which uses mxroute, so curious to know alternatives.

The email hosting industry is small. There are not many alternatives serving the same market as MXroute.

Purelymail, NameCrane and maybe Migadu if you want to consider them. But all of them have big shortcomings.

JohnFilch123 · April 8

@elliotc said:

@JohnFilch123 said:

@elliotc said:

@cmeerw said:
Self hosting. It's easier than you might think.

No. It is nightmare.

It is not actually. I do it.

Email service outage has far more serious consequences than a website outage. I have little confidence in selfhost reliability.

Which is fine. I am not promoting self hosting but saying it has got its application is certain scenarios

COLBYLICIOUS · April 8

@Nyr said:

@JohnFilch123 said:

@Nyr said:

@JohnFilch123 said:

@elliotc said:

@cmeerw said:
Self hosting. It's easier than you might think.

No. It is nightmare.

It is not actually. I do it.

So tell us: where are you hosting the main and backup MX? What is your volume and how are you doing outbound? What about backups? What about DDoS protection if you are a public internet person? How much time did you spend learning to do it, and how many hours do you spend on maintenance per year? What if your main server goes down in the middle of a Saturday night?

I think of myself as someone technically competent, I have administered mail servers in the past and could do it today, but have no desire to waste a significant amount of time, effort and worry on running an email server por personal use. It is just not worth it when there are reliable, good quality providers specialized on doing that, and the whole email industry has long accepted that small, independent, email servers are no longer a viable thing.

Don't forget this is my own server. Not for the company, not even for a family.

This is what we are trying to find out - those quality providers. I have got the second server, which uses mxroute, so curious to know alternatives.

The email hosting industry is small. There are not many alternatives serving the same market as MXroute.

Purelymail, NameCrane and maybe Migadu if you want to consider them. But all of them have big shortcomings.

What email provider do you use?

Nyr · April 8

@COLBYLICIOUS said:

@Nyr said:

@JohnFilch123 said:

@Nyr said:

@JohnFilch123 said:

@elliotc said:

@cmeerw said:
Self hosting. It's easier than you might think.

No. It is nightmare.

It is not actually. I do it.

So tell us: where are you hosting the main and backup MX? What is your volume and how are you doing outbound? What about backups? What about DDoS protection if you are a public internet person? How much time did you spend learning to do it, and how many hours do you spend on maintenance per year? What if your main server goes down in the middle of a Saturday night?

I think of myself as someone technically competent, I have administered mail servers in the past and could do it today, but have no desire to waste a significant amount of time, effort and worry on running an email server por personal use. It is just not worth it when there are reliable, good quality providers specialized on doing that, and the whole email industry has long accepted that small, independent, email servers are no longer a viable thing.

Don't forget this is my own server. Not for the company, not even for a family.

This is what we are trying to find out - those quality providers. I have got the second server, which uses mxroute, so curious to know alternatives.

The email hosting industry is small. There are not many alternatives serving the same market as MXroute.

Purelymail, NameCrane and maybe Migadu if you want to consider them. But all of them have big shortcomings.

What email provider do you use?

Google.

rpqu · April 8

@Nyr said:

@COLBYLICIOUS said:

@Nyr said:

@JohnFilch123 said:

@Nyr said:

@JohnFilch123 said:

@elliotc said:

@cmeerw said:
Self hosting. It's easier than you might think.

No. It is nightmare.

It is not actually. I do it.

So tell us: where are you hosting the main and backup MX? What is your volume and how are you doing outbound? What about backups? What about DDoS protection if you are a public internet person? How much time did you spend learning to do it, and how many hours do you spend on maintenance per year? What if your main server goes down in the middle of a Saturday night?

I think of myself as someone technically competent, I have administered mail servers in the past and could do it today, but have no desire to waste a significant amount of time, effort and worry on running an email server por personal use. It is just not worth it when there are reliable, good quality providers specialized on doing that, and the whole email industry has long accepted that small, independent, email servers are no longer a viable thing.

Don't forget this is my own server. Not for the company, not even for a family.

This is what we are trying to find out - those quality providers. I have got the second server, which uses mxroute, so curious to know alternatives.

The email hosting industry is small. There are not many alternatives serving the same market as MXroute.

Purelymail, NameCrane and maybe Migadu if you want to consider them. But all of them have big shortcomings.

What email provider do you use?

Google.

😁

JohnFilch123 · April 8

I mean google is fine as long as you are fine with them. I am not hence looking out what I can do.

Michal212 · April 8

I’m not about to ditch a rock-solid service just because of some toxic back-and-forth on a message board. Moving providers over internet beef is a waste of time when the tech is this good. I’m sticking with MXroute until the service fails, not the PR.

Nyr · April 8

@rpqu said:

@Nyr said:

@COLBYLICIOUS said:

@Nyr said:

@JohnFilch123 said:

@Nyr said:

@JohnFilch123 said:

@elliotc said:

@cmeerw said:
Self hosting. It's easier than you might think.

No. It is nightmare.

It is not actually. I do it.

So tell us: where are you hosting the main and backup MX? What is your volume and how are you doing outbound? What about backups? What about DDoS protection if you are a public internet person? How much time did you spend learning to do it, and how many hours do you spend on maintenance per year? What if your main server goes down in the middle of a Saturday night?

I think of myself as someone technically competent, I have administered mail servers in the past and could do it today, but have no desire to waste a significant amount of time, effort and worry on running an email server por personal use. It is just not worth it when there are reliable, good quality providers specialized on doing that, and the whole email industry has long accepted that small, independent, email servers are no longer a viable thing.

Don't forget this is my own server. Not for the company, not even for a family.

This is what we are trying to find out - those quality providers. I have got the second server, which uses mxroute, so curious to know alternatives.

The email hosting industry is small. There are not many alternatives serving the same market as MXroute.

Purelymail, NameCrane and maybe Migadu if you want to consider them. But all of them have big shortcomings.

What email provider do you use?

Google.

😁

It works good, it is the industry leader in the west, and it is well integrated with Android.

But regarding my experience:

Fastmail is very good and very reliable. The benchmark for independent, personal email hosting.
I have a MXroute deal and it is very good for the very low price.
Zoho is crap.
Infomaniak deliverability is bad, and features are lacking.
Microsoft is worse than Google.
Self hosting is a nightmare.
iCloud is a decent option for personal use, which nobody considers. Particularly for users invested in the Apple ecosystem.

I have lots of experience with email really, the mentioned above are just a small sample of experiences for personal email.

cmeerw · April 8

@COLBYLICIOUS said:

@cmeerw said:
Self hosting. It's easier than you might think.

Any tips?

Don't have a single point of failure (build in redundancy into your set up) and pick your VPS/network wisely.

komdragon · April 8

I think I'll stick to MXRoute.

Obelous · April 8

@Nyr said: It works good, it is the industry leader in the west, and it is well integrated with Android.

Google Workspace is really good but the price increases haven't been very fun.

Started in 2019 at €5 to €6.50 to €8.63 to now €10.13.

One reason I'm still with them is that I realized you can't convert a Workspace account to a regular Google account so when you cancel Workspace you've lost everything bound to that account (in my case, stuff like Play Store purchases).

komdragon · April 8

@Obelous said:

@Nyr said: It works good, it is the industry leader in the west, and it is well integrated with Android.

Google Workspace is really good but the price increases haven't been very fun.

Started in 2019 at €5 to €6.50 to €8.63 to now €10.13.

One reason I'm still with them is that I realized you can't convert a Workspace account to a regular Google account so when you cancel Workspace you've lost everything bound to that account (in my case, stuff like Play Store purchases).

It's just far too expensive. Personally, I feel MXRoute's past deals here have been unbeatable. Particularly if there's many domains with emails required.

rpqu · April 8

@Nyr said:

@rpqu said:

@Nyr said:

@COLBYLICIOUS said:

@Nyr said:

@JohnFilch123 said:

@Nyr said:

@JohnFilch123 said:

@elliotc said:

@cmeerw said:
Self hosting. It's easier than you might think.

No. It is nightmare.

It is not actually. I do it.

So tell us: where are you hosting the main and backup MX? What is your volume and how are you doing outbound? What about backups? What about DDoS protection if you are a public internet person? How much time did you spend learning to do it, and how many hours do you spend on maintenance per year? What if your main server goes down in the middle of a Saturday night?

I think of myself as someone technically competent, I have administered mail servers in the past and could do it today, but have no desire to waste a significant amount of time, effort and worry on running an email server por personal use. It is just not worth it when there are reliable, good quality providers specialized on doing that, and the whole email industry has long accepted that small, independent, email servers are no longer a viable thing.

Don't forget this is my own server. Not for the company, not even for a family.

This is what we are trying to find out - those quality providers. I have got the second server, which uses mxroute, so curious to know alternatives.

The email hosting industry is small. There are not many alternatives serving the same market as MXroute.

Purelymail, NameCrane and maybe Migadu if you want to consider them. But all of them have big shortcomings.

What email provider do you use?

Google.

😁

It works good, it is the industry leader in the west, and it is well integrated with Android.

But regarding my experience:

Fastmail is very good and very reliable. The benchmark for independent, personal email hosting.

I have a MXroute deal and it is very good for the very low price.

Zoho is crap.

Infomaniak deliverability is bad, and features are lacking.

Microsoft is worse than Google.

Self hosting is a nightmare.

iCloud is a decent option for personal use, which nobody considers. Particularly for users invested in the Apple ecosystem.

I have lots of experience with email really, the mentioned above are just a small sample of experiences for personal email.

Thank you for your extensive explanation, I appreciate it. I am not disagreeing you on your choice. But, rather smiling, knowing what led you to the decision

whynotlearn · April 8

@Michal212 said: I’m not about to ditch a rock-solid service just because of some toxic back-and-forth on a message board. Moving providers over internet beef is a waste of time when the tech is this good. I’m sticking with MXroute until the service fails, not the PR.

The service is absolutely rock solid from what I have heard, I personally might fall on the other camp of this thing because I feel like I wish for my E-mail provider to have less controversies overall and the optics didn't look good but I of course wish jar the best in life and his business :-D

To me within E-mail, Trust is the single largest factor. We can have completely different priorities though and I don't wish to prolong the discussion so I hope that the service by jar stays good quality wise and he improves in PR skills.

(I wish if there was a do not respond feature in LET as I respectfully don't wish for you to respond to this or any continuation of it basically.)

@Obelous said: Google Workspace is really good but the price increases haven't been very fun.

Google workspace has some of the most nightmare stories that I have heard. Even just to cancel Google workspace you can't scroll with your mouse, you have to use the browser scroll bar on the side to scroll down to cancel (someone had made a vid about it too)

Google workspace is strictly the definition of evil. I can recommend literally any other provider including might as well MXRoute even after this drama over Google workspace.

Pick anything else except Google workspace. I have heard many thousands of dollar horror stories online

Smigit · April 8

@whynotlearn said:

@angstrom said:

@whynotlearn said:

@Nyr said:

@cmeerw said:
Self hosting. It's easier than you might think.

Maintenance is a headache. It is not "hard" in the sense of the technical competence required, just a headache.

Also anyone who is like the average MXroute customer needs to rely on a third party relay for good deliverability anyway. There is just no way in 2026 to have good, consistent deliverability with a low volume, independent mail server.

It depends, Scaleway is a bit expensive at 0.25 euros per thousand mails but I think that personally send less than 1000 mails in a whole year.

Also hetzner's mail servers feel reliable. I can be wrong, I usually am, but doesn't jar host things on hetzner themselves?

He used to, but that was a while ago. His recent deployments aren't on Hetzner

In any case, he has his own IPs that he uses for MXroute

Oh I didn't know that he had his own IP's. IIRC jar is currently using Onidel rather than Hetzner for the MXRoute servers.

Believe Onidel is one of three hosts he’s using. There was a comment he’d added them to diversify a bit.

Anyway as to the question, won’t meet the OP requirements I don’t imagine, but I’m using FastMail and very happy with it and no real intention to look elsewhere. Was on Google Workspace before that. Fastmail’s going to be a lot more than many of us would be paying for MXRoute or other providers mind you.

elliotc · April 8

@Michal212 said:
I’m not about to ditch a rock-solid service just because of some toxic back-and-forth on a message board. Moving providers over internet beef is a waste of time when the tech is this good. I’m sticking with MXroute until the service fails, not the PR.

I am still using it but will not promote it to others anymore.

Obelous · April 8

@whynotlearn said: Google workspace has some of the most nightmare stories that I have heard. Even just to cancel Google workspace you can't scroll with your mouse, you have to use the browser scroll bar on the side to scroll down to cancel (someone had made a vid about it too)

Google workspace is strictly the definition of evil. I can recommend literally any other provider including might as well MXRoute even after this drama over Google workspace.

Pick anything else except Google workspace. I have heard many thousands of dollar horror stories online

I haven't really heard any. Sucks for those people if true but in my >7 years of using I can't recall having a single issue with... anything. It just works.

Feel free to link those "thousands of dollar" horror stories though, I'm curious.

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