I tried a few but eventually decided to run my own (for incoming).
Fastmail was the best. They have IMAP integrated with contacts and calendaring. Sieve filtering and good webui. The main reason I left them is that they were rejecting (not just spam-folder) important mail, even if I whitelisted the domain by adding a contact. I contacted support and it took them forever to get back and when they finally did they basically said "nope, we will reject those, you are wrong about what spam is". It didn't leave a good taste in my mouth.
Migadu was pretty good but I had trouble getting my catchall accounts working how I wanted too.
MXroute was very opinionated and I didn't agree with all of their opinions. They pretty readily block large blocks of IPs or senders so you will miss mail. They also don't believe in Bayesian spam filtering and it shows as a lot of spam ends up in your inbox. So not only was I missing mail I wanted I was getting a lot of mail I didn't. They also have 5 webmails that aren't well integrated as well as 2 address books and 2 calendars. They seem to really like trying new things but miss out on integration such as using my address book for spam filtering. On the upside the support was fast and direct. I appreciate the clarity of the responses. I think there are some people who would love this provider but their choices don't work well for me.
While I can't recommend it I ended up managing my own incoming mail. Spam was surprisingly barely an issue. RSpamd with default settings is working excellently. Basically I dumped my spam folder (1 month) and archive (many years) into the spam learning and it has been doing an excellent job. The flexibility of running your own mail-server is also nice because I can do things like signed addresses for giving out different emails to different companies.
I've been quite happy with MXroute. I've only once had an IP blocking problem with them, with a friend who hosts using Migadu. It was cleared up in under a day.
"Opinionated" is a very good word for them, though. I think Jarland Donnell is legitimately passionate about running a good email services, and has strong opinions about what that means. In my experience, it's meant something no-nonsense, with good technical transparency, that delivers exactly what it promises and nothing more. Perfect for my needs.
Honestly if it wasn't for the spam filtering I may we'll have stayed with them. I did configure Thunderbird's spam filtering and it did bridge the gap quite well but it wasn't ideal to have to sit it up and train it on multiple machines and then have less filtering on mobile when my computer was off. It also had some poor interactions such as setting the unread count for my spamd folder which I find very annoying because the message was moved there.
> I contacted support and it took them forever to get back and when they finally did they basically said "nope, we will reject those, you are wrong about what spam is". It didn't leave a good taste in my mouth.
This is worrisome; are you able to share any more information as to the nature of what was being rejected?
I don't recall the exact details but it was something like reverse DNS not being set properly combined with some other spam scores. While this is a best practice it definitely isn't followed by everyone I want to receive mail from.
Not judging on the mails itself, but actually rejecting is the right way. Spam folders tend to get ignored, if one doesn't know he misses an email, he won't look there. When a mail gets rejected, the sender is noticed, so he can take measures to ensure the recipient gets the info.
In practice roughly 0% of senders will react, except for maybe add you to a blacklist of bouncing addresses. If it is in my spam folder at least I can find it if I know I should have it.
I've wondered if it would be useful to reject + store in spam. This way I have a copy and the sender can know that I likely won't see it.
I always thought rejecting spam was bad because it gives information to the spammer. So I have always routed it to a crap folder. Good mail almost never goes there. Unfortunately I made some mistakes with wildcard addresses long ago that I'm still somewhat saddled with.
In practice I'm using Fastmail for everything, but in theory self-hosting an IMAP server should be pretty easy. The main usefulness of hosted email services is deliverability for outgoing SMTP, with inbound spam filtering in 2nd place. So if you can separate those functions, you can do all your mail storage on your own IMAP server without suffering from much headache. I haven't tried to actually do this though.
I too run my own, but for ingoing and outgoing. I did my due diligence and selected a host with good IP reputation, warmed up the domain and IP manually, and have good deliverability to Gmail and outlook and other big players as far as I can tell.
Happy to test with anyone from hn. Email address is in my HN profile.
I am using postfix, rspamd, dovecot and restic for backups. I didn't track the time but it was evenings for almost a week including transfer. So maybe 15-20h? I'm hoping the maintenance now should be near-zero.
Fastmail was the best. They have IMAP integrated with contacts and calendaring. Sieve filtering and good webui. The main reason I left them is that they were rejecting (not just spam-folder) important mail, even if I whitelisted the domain by adding a contact. I contacted support and it took them forever to get back and when they finally did they basically said "nope, we will reject those, you are wrong about what spam is". It didn't leave a good taste in my mouth.
Migadu was pretty good but I had trouble getting my catchall accounts working how I wanted too.
MXroute was very opinionated and I didn't agree with all of their opinions. They pretty readily block large blocks of IPs or senders so you will miss mail. They also don't believe in Bayesian spam filtering and it shows as a lot of spam ends up in your inbox. So not only was I missing mail I wanted I was getting a lot of mail I didn't. They also have 5 webmails that aren't well integrated as well as 2 address books and 2 calendars. They seem to really like trying new things but miss out on integration such as using my address book for spam filtering. On the upside the support was fast and direct. I appreciate the clarity of the responses. I think there are some people who would love this provider but their choices don't work well for me.
While I can't recommend it I ended up managing my own incoming mail. Spam was surprisingly barely an issue. RSpamd with default settings is working excellently. Basically I dumped my spam folder (1 month) and archive (many years) into the spam learning and it has been doing an excellent job. The flexibility of running your own mail-server is also nice because I can do things like signed addresses for giving out different emails to different companies.