How to host email for custom domains for free (or almost free)

bikegremlin

@ralf said:

@bikegremlin said:
I think it's safer to use any decent shared hosting and configure Gmail to POP3 import emails from it.

I have recently transitioned from forwarding to gmail to getting gmail to collect via POP3. Overall, it has improved many cases, and mails that frequently behaved weirdly now get through fine. An example, for some legitimate mail with correct senders, gmail would sometimes accept then fail sending a spam bounce mail and I'd end up with only the copy of the failed bounce message (with the original quoted) but not the actual message.

But what does suck now is that gmail has some annoying heuristics that mean that your mail is only checked between every 15 minutes to an hour, depending on how many mails it found last time. So, when you really want an e-mail, like a signup validation email, it's now annoying as you have to go into settings, accounts, scroll down to the thing and then select it. There used to be a simple way of forcing a check via labs, but that's gone now. Apparently, there's some hack of sending a lot of junk to your mailbox with cron, and then filtering it in gmail to delete it, but because then gmail thinks you get a lot of mail, it syncs more often. But to me, that's a worse solution.

Or, even better, use an MXroute lifetime.

For a single domain or two for personal use, MXroute seems way too expensive as it's clearly aimed at resellers. Although, I might try the onepoundmail reseller just so I can see if the MXroute webmail client is really as good as they claim. I'm very used to gmail now, and while I don't really like being tied into Google, all the open source webmail clients all seem pretty bad.

You could use a shared hosting provider's SMTP for sending, configuring Gmail in a similar way.

I updated my exim4 config to accept mail with TLS on my OVH dedi, only took a couple of hours. Haven't noticed any delivery problems yet, but provider's SMTP is probably safer if it's available. Or else MXroute as otherwise mentioned if you want to be really sure.

Same experience - and it is annoying that Gmail email-pull thing.
As far as I can tell, when you hit the refresh from Gmail's interface (not the browser page refresh), it treats it as:
"Refresh Gmail, and consider refreshing other POP3 stuff."

When you click on the alias label and then hit refresh, it treats it as:
"Refresh Gmail, and really consider refreshing the POP3 account."

So yes, the only way to be sure is to go through the settings menu.

On the other hand - Gmail has brilliant virus and spam filters, and emails just never get deleted/lost. You can back it up too, of course, but it's among the most reliable solutions I've tried.

Regarding MXroute - their lifetime is worth it IMO on a sale, but sure, @MichaelCee is hard to beat (you could get over 5 years of emails for the price of MXroute lifetime, and paid monthly, not all at once).
Good point.