You own a domain. You want mail at it. A post this week on exactly that question (“All I wanted was a custom domain email”) reached the top of Hacker News, and the thread turned into a catalogue of everything people actually use. We went through all of it, listed every service in the directory, and put the facts side by side below. The lesson both the author and the thread agree on: receiving mail is easy; sending it reliably is the hard part.
What the web actually uses
Threads like that one over-represent the privacy-first hosts. Our crawler reads the MX records of the websites it indexes, and among those that publish one the picture is different:
- Google36%
- Microsoft25%
- GoDaddy16%
- Namecheap15%
- Zoho3%
- Titan2%
- Apple, Yandex, Proton, mail.ru, Fastmail<1% each
Two of the four big shares are registrars reselling mailboxes with the domain. The hosts the thread loves (Fastmail, Migadu, Purelymail, MXroute) are a rounding error in the wild, which says nothing about their quality and everything about defaults.
Mailbox hosting on your own domain
A real mailbox: storage, IMAP and SMTP (or the provider’s own apps), your domain on the address. Prices are what each pricing page showed on 5 October 2026, rounded; “see site” means the page did not answer our crawler. Check before you buy.
| Provider | From | Own domains | Addresses | IMAP / SMTP | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Purelymail | about $10/yr, then by use | unlimited | unlimited | yes | The cheapest full mailbox in the thread; usage-based above the base fee. |
| Migadu | $19/yr (Micro), $90, $290 | unlimited | unlimited | yes | Priced per plan, not per mailbox. Plans carry monthly send/receive allowances; a commenter reports mail over the allowance is refused, not held. No 2FA, per another. |
| MXroute | from $59/yr | unlimited | unlimited | yes | Storage-priced; lifetime deals appear around Black Friday (two commenters still on theirs). |
| Fastmail | $60/yr for one person ($5/mo yearly) | yes | hundreds of aliases | yes, with push | The most-recommended paid option in the thread; calendar and contacts included. |
| FounderMail | free tier; Pro $44/yr | yes | multiple | yes | Where the post ended up. New senders are approved by hand before outbound mail is enabled (hours, per the founder). |
| Proton Mail | paid plans from about $4/mo yearly | from Mail Plus | 10 on Mail Plus | only through Proton Bridge | Encrypted; sending addresses are counted per plan, so unlimited aliases are receive-only. |
| StartMail | $59.88/yr; own domain $83.88/yr | yes | unlimited aliases | yes | Dutch, privacy-first; one commenter says it ticked every box. |
| mailbox.org | from €3/mo | yes | aliases per plan | yes | German; office and cloud bundled. |
| Tuta | €3/user/mo | yes | per plan | no (own apps only) | End-to-end encrypted, so no IMAP. |
| Runbox | from €19.95/yr | per plan | per plan | yes | Norwegian, hydro-powered. |
| Mailfence | see site | yes | per plan | yes | Belgian; the site did not answer our crawler. |
| Kolab Now | see site | yes | per plan | yes | Swiss groupware. |
| Infomaniak Service Mail | see site | yes | per plan | yes | Swiss hosting; part of the kSuite bundle. |
| Soverin | see site | yes | per plan | yes | Dutch. |
| HEY for Domains | $12/user/mo | yes | per user | no (own apps) | The personal $99/yr HEY address is not on your domain. |
| Zoho Mail | Mail Lite $1/user/mo yearly; a free plan for small teams | yes | aliases | yes on paid plans | The fifth most used provider in our data (see above). |
| Google Workspace | $7/user/mo | yes | aliases | yes | The web’s default (36% in our data). No push for Apple Mail, as the thread notes. |
| Microsoft 365 / Exchange Online | Exchange Online Plan 1 $4/user/mo; Business Basic $6 | yes | aliases | yes | Second in our data (25%). |
| iCloud+ | from $0.99/mo with storage | up to 5 | 3 per domain | Apple Mail only in practice | Several commenters recommend it for Apple households; two report mail silently dropped on certain content. |
| Yandex 360 for Business | $3.99/user/mo | yes | aliases | yes | Fourth-largest in our data among non-registrar hosts. |
| Titan | through registrars | yes | aliases | yes | Sold by Hostinger, Name.com and others; 2% in our data. |
| Namecheap Private Email | from about $1/mo | yes | aliases | yes | Namecheap hosts mail for 15% of the domains in our data, mostly through this. |
| Hostinger Mail | promo from under $1/mo | yes | aliases | yes | Registrar-bundled. |
| IONOS Mail | from $1–2/mo | yes | aliases | yes | Registrar-bundled. |
| Rackspace Email | $2.99/user/mo | yes | aliases | yes | Plain hosted mailboxes for businesses. |
| Lark | free tier | yes | per user | yes | One commenter: the free tier does everything. |
| Greenhost | see site | yes | per plan | yes | Dutch, renewable-powered. |
Good hosts that do not do your domain
| Provider | Price | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|
| Posteo | €1/mo | Does not support your own domain. Listed because the thread keeps bringing it up. |
| Disroot | free | Addresses are @disroot.org only. |
Forwarding and aliases
No mailbox of its own: mail to your domain lands in an inbox you already have. Fine for receiving; sending from the address needs a relay or a mailbox host.
| Service | Price | Direction | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Email Routing | free | receive only | What the post tried first: forwards to any inbox; sending needs something else; forwarded mail sometimes took minutes. |
| ImprovMX | free for one domain; $9/mo and up | receive; sending via SMTP on paid plans | The free option a commenter pairs with Gmail. |
| Forward Email | free; $3/mo enhanced | receive and send | Open source; the paid tier adds mailboxes. |
| SimpleLogin | free; $36/yr premium | aliases, reply through the alias | Proton-owned alias service; custom domains on premium. |
| addy.io | free; paid tiers | aliases, reply through the alias | Open-source alias forwarding. |
| Your registrar’s forwarding | usually free with the domain | receive only | A commenter runs on Namecheap’s forwarding plus a Gmail “send as”. |
Sending: relays and APIs
The part the post calls a rabbit hole. These services hold the IP reputation so your messages reach Gmail and Outlook inboxes; pair one with a forwarder and you have both directions.
| Service | Price | How | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resend | free 3,000/mo; Pro $20/mo | API and SMTP | What Mailflare and the “Cloudflare + Resend + Workspace Essentials” recipe send through; one commenter had spam-folder trouble. |
| Amazon SES | about $0.10 per 1,000 | API and SMTP | The thread’s answer to “my self-hosted mail lands in spam”. |
| Postmark | $15/mo for 10,000 | API and SMTP | Transactional only, by policy. |
| Mailgun | from $15/mo | API and SMTP | |
| SendGrid | see site | API and SMTP | Now sold under Twilio. |
| SMTP2GO | free 1,000/mo; $10/mo | SMTP and API | A commenter’s low-volume outbound for a Cloudflare-routed domain. |
| MailPace | see site | API and SMTP | Privacy-first transactional sending. |
Run it yourself
Every box on the author’s list for the price of a small server, and the thread’s longest argument: deliverability. Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC, keep a clean IP, and most of it works; for mail that must arrive, commenters still relay outbound through a sender above.
| Software | Notes |
|---|---|
| Stalwart | JMAP, IMAP, SMTP, WebDAV in one Rust binary; the modern pick. |
| mailcow | The Docker suite most self-hosters start with. |
| Mailu | Docker-based, with webmail and admin UI. |
| maddy | One Go binary for SMTP and IMAP with DKIM and DMARC built in. |
| Mail-in-a-Box | One Ubuntu box, one script, one admin page. |
| Poste.io | A complete server in one container. |
| Mailflare | Receives through Cloudflare, sends through Resend; the post found outbound reliability the hard part. |
Things the thread warns about
- iCloud+ filtering. Two commenters report iCloud Mail deleting messages containing certain words, silently, on custom domains too, with neither side told.
- Proton’s address count. Catch-all receives everything, but each address you send from counts against the plan; third-party clients need Proton Bridge running.
- Allowances that refuse mail. On the cheapest plan of at least one host, mail over the month’s incoming allowance bounces rather than waits.
- Approval queues. FounderMail enables outbound sending by hand; the author waited hours, not days.
- Gmail’s “send as”. One commenter says Google is winding down custom-domain sending from a plain Gmail account in 2027 and is moving to Amazon SES for outbound.
- Self-hosted deliverability. Half the thread says it is fine with SPF, DKIM and DMARC on a clean IP; the other half ended up on SES.
How we chose and what to send us
Every service named in the post or the thread is here, plus the hosts our MX data shows the web actually uses. Each name links to its listing in the directory with the service’s own words and a current screenshot. Missing one? Submit it and it joins the Emails topic.