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Comment by BostonEnginerd | Hacker News Reader

Congrats to everyone! Thanks for keeping pay for email alive. If you're not the one paying, you're the product!

Hey John! I agree. My email address's been the same since 1996 thanks to pobox.

I remember a pobox faq back then to the effect of "how do I know you'll still be around?" IIRC it asked, rhetorically, how do you know your bank will still be around?

Well guess what? New Brunswick Savings Bank got swallowed up by bigger and bigger players since then. But pobox has stayed the same. It's been so reliably the same I haven't even bothered to get a vanity domain.

I did once use FastMail too but their circa-2007 web interface was too clunky and I dropped them for that one that reads your emails...

I do pay for my personal account to FastMail, but I still predominantly use Gmail. In fact, I pay for FastMail just to keep the address. For some side projects, it gets really expensive for me and for that I use Mail-in-a-Box [0], which I still pay for, but much less if I have to use the business tiers of FastMail, which still don't give me as much flexibility.

[0] https://mailinabox.email/

> For some side projects, it gets really expensive for me

I'm curious what's making it expensive.

For what it's worth, I'm on the Enhanced $40/year plan and I use it for personal email as well as side projects.

I just setup a new virtual domain, a new profile, and a rule to move all mail addressed to that domain to a folder for that project.

Does that approach work well for you? I had been considering it, but I couldn't find anything concrete saying that would work. I never did put the time into doing the trial to find out.

I do this and it works fine though there are some limits to be aware of (see "Quotas for other services" https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/limits.html).

I have the same FastMail plan, but I want to create mailboxes for different users. In this case, FastMail is definitely cost-prohibitive for me.

I love the idea of mailinabox but I don't think it's particularly written / held together. Also I don't like the idea of PHP running on my mail server...

Well, true, but still has less stuff than Sovereign [0] and that's why I like it better. But I agree that they should probably split it into two (or more!) containers.

[0] https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign

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