At this point, I have owned the domain jacobg.co for over 2 years. For the longest time, I have been trying to have a custom email address at my domain without paying a fortune for a service that isn’t widely used. Here are some of the things I was looking for:

• Bring-Your-Own domain
• Cheap pricing
• Unlimited addresses
• Verified email sending and receiving
• Integration with Apple Mail

I tried a few different solutions, from Cloudflare’s built-in email routing to completely self-hosted options. In this post, I’ll go over what I tried, what didn’t work, and what I’ve finally settled on.

This site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, and the DNS records for this domain are routed through Cloudflare. Naturally, my first instinct was to use Cloudflare’s own solution for custom domain email: Email Routing.

Cloudflare receives each email sent to your domain and forwards it to an address of your choice. For receiving mail, this is a pretty simple solution. I could have something like [email protected] automatically forwarded to my personal inbox without having to pay for another mailbox.

The problem is sending. Cloudflare’s email routing is primarily designed around forwarding incoming mail, and sending mail from the custom address requires a separate solution. For my use case, the available options were either too expensive or too complicated. I also found that forwarded messages could sometimes take several minutes to arrive.

It worked, but it wasn’t really the custom email setup I was looking for.

A few days ago, I stumbled upon an open-source project called Mailflare by hieunc299 on GitHub. It is a self-hosted email inbox for custom domains, built around Cloudflare.

Mailflare uses Cloudflare for receiving mail and provides an interface for managing the messages. For sending, it integrates with Resend, which handles the actual delivery.

On paper, this was almost exactly what I wanted. It was open source, used infrastructure I already had, and didn’t require me to run a traditional mail server myself.

In practice, though, I ran into problems with the sending side. Getting reliable outbound email is much more complicated than simply having an SMTP server. Domain authentication, reputation, and the way major providers like Gmail and Yahoo evaluate incoming messages all become important. The setup I ended up with wasn’t something I was comfortable relying on for my personal email.

So while Mailflare is a really interesting project, it wasn’t the solution for me.

The next option I found was Purelymail. Purelymail is essentially a personal email hosting service that gives you SMTP and IMAP access for a very low price. At around $10 a year, it was one of the cheapest options I found.

It also supports unlimited addresses, has a strong focus on privacy, and offers a generous free trial. Since it provides standard IMAP and SMTP access, it can also be used directly with Apple Mail instead of forcing you to use a proprietary web interface.

This was probably the most straightforward option I found. If I wanted something that I knew would work and didn’t care about spending a little time configuring it, Purelymail would have been an easy choice.

I ended up finding another option before fully committing to it, though. I’ll probably keep Purelymail in mind if I ever need a more dedicated email setup in the future.

Of course, there are also the more traditional options. Google Workspace provides custom domain email through Gmail and is probably the easiest solution for most people who don’t mind paying for it.

The problem for me is that I don’t really need everything that comes with it. Paying for a separate mailbox for a personal domain felt unnecessary when I mostly wanted a few addresses and the ability to send and receive through Apple Mail.

For a business with multiple employees, Google Workspace makes a lot more sense. For jacobg.co, it felt like overkill.

While researching possible solutions, I came across Foundermail. It immediately stood out because it was basically everything I had been looking for.

Foundermail integrates with Cloudflare, provides standard SMTP and IMAP logins for external mail clients, supports multiple addresses, and handles verified outbound email. Most importantly, it was cheap enough that I didn’t have to think twice about using it for a personal domain.

The setup was also surprisingly easy. Once the domain was connected, I could configure the SMTP and IMAP credentials in Apple Mail and use [email protected] like any other email account.

So far, it has worked exactly how I wanted. Messages arrive quickly, sending works, and I don’t have to use a separate webmail interface every time I want to check my email. The UI is also much more modern than I expected, and the relatively small user base seems to help with speed and latency.

There was one annoying limitation. I had to submit a special request before I could send emails to new addresses that had not previously messaged me. That’s not something I expected going in, although it was resolved and hasn’t been much of an issue since.

For now, this is what [email protected] runs on.

After trying several different approaches, I’ve ended up with Foundermail for now. It isn’t the most well-known option, but it checks almost every box I started with: custom domains, multiple addresses, SMTP/IMAP, verified sending, and a price that makes sense for a personal domain.

The bigger lesson for me is that custom email is surprisingly complicated. Receiving mail is easy. Sending it reliably is the hard part. Once you start worrying about spam filters, DNS records, authentication, SMTP, IMAP, and reputation, “just give me an email address” turns into a surprisingly deep rabbit hole.

For now, [email protected] is running on Foundermail. I’ll probably stick with it until I find a reason not to.