Lifetime Email Hosting

One benefit of having your own domain name is getting a cool vanity email address to go with it. Before I set up a website for drake.dev I had an inbox at drake@drake.dev it was the coolest! Since then I’ve changed to using me@drake.dev as my primary email handle and gone through a couple of email hosting services: G Suite and Hey. After a long time considering my options I made the leap (for the last time in my life?) to a new email host!

Goodbye Hey

I have been using Hey email since 2021, and I really love their client app. When I switched from G Suite to Hey the cost was about the same: G Suite’s cheapest offering is currently $7/mo and Hey $12/mo. I appreaciated the screener and with it this philosophy of curating what I see in my inbox. No adspace for marketing notifications like in gmail. This client also has a dedicated section for newsletters: the feed that was great too! It got me reading more newsletters once I had a dedicated spot in my email client for viewing them. Eventually these features became less exciting to me. I’m able to manage emails in a similar (less fancy) fashion to the Screener to keep my inbox cleaned, and I started using Readwise Reader which replaces my need for the feed feature.

For a long time this app was great for me, user-focused, no clutter, and importantly I was getting only what I wanted: email. Others may find G Suite attractive for all the other applications you get bundled in for “free” but I really, really, only want email. Eventually the $12 I was paying monthly started to feel too expensive for “just” email. Hey does offer more, but I don’t need a fancy calendar app too. I only want email.

Weighing Options

One attractive option for me was purelymail. The name implies I’d get only what I’m looking for which is great, I really love the idea of a small team focused on delivering 1 stable service for a great price. In this case, purelymail will give you email for only $10 a year! For less than I was paying monthly I could get service for a whole year! Of course I am taking on more responsibility as a user and losing functionality offered by Hey or Google, but I’m a nerd I enjoy that responsibility; I want to sit around configuring and finely tuning a series of applications to fit my exact needs. After some more research I finally landed on what is now my new email host…

Hello MXRoute

MXRoute is my new email host, and I decided to go with their unique offering of a lifetime plan. This did run me $200, or 20 years of purelymail time, but there is something special about buying lifetime access to a thing. A corner or my heart is warmed knowing I can receive emails until the day I die and I’ve already paid for it all. With this migration I have moved back to the regular Apple mail applications on my phone and laptop. In the future I plan to try TUI email with himalaya.

Migrating was not as hard as I thought it would be. I was able to get all my DNS records in place pretty quickly, my main concern was losing emails or having to access them outside my regular email client whenever I needed an old message. Hey has a nice offboarding UI to request downloads of all my calendar events, contacts, and emails. My 3 years of email with Hey resulted in only 900mb of data! Going off this number I have plenty of time before I reach my 10gb storage cap with MXRoute.

Additionally, MXRoute allows for unlimited domains under an account. I don’t have a current need for this right now, but I like that in the future I can potentially spin up a side-project email inbox for free on my account.