A few email thoughts…

I recently switched to Purelymail, after mentioning a long time ago that I keep an eye on the service every now and then.

My first few days of Purelymail experience are now over and I must say I was not disappointed, I like Purelymail!

Hosted Mailcow was quite good too, but Purelymail is much more flexible (I can create as many users as I want, storage is not limited to a certain GB size, I don’t have to commit to one domain as main domain, but can set users, domains and routing flexibly). And it’s much cheaper: 10$ per year or maybe even cheaper with the usage based plan.

The only downside: hosting in the USA. But in the end, as sad as it is, most people do use Gmail and also the provider Fastmail has its servers in the USA. For truly private communication, end-to-end encryption has to be used.

Purelymail was discussed a few times on the orange forum: Once when Roland Szabo discovered my post and then blogged about his switch, and once when a direct link was posted.

Via that, I learned that behind the scenes, Purelymail relies on Apache James. A Java-based mail server that is modular in its design.

Why didn’t I know about this before, but made the effort to use mailcow-dockerized earlier instead (before switching back to a hosted mail service)? James can be run as a single Docker container, or as a “distributed” application with persistence in an S3-compatible storage bucket.

I’m pretty happy with Purelymail at the moment, but should I ever be persuaded to add, say, a newsletter feature to GoBlog or need to run my own mail server for some other reason, I’ll probably give Apache James a try.

Or alternatively the Go-based project maddy. But Apache James is probably much more mature.

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