Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

If you want to blow everyone away then I think you should start with giving free real inboxes for everyone (maybe with some sane limit, or a way to pay per month to increase it), and then introduce email forwarding in the future (because I'm sure some people will still want that feature even with real inboxes available).

If you GA'd with:

~$8 .com addresses, N real inboxes, free whois guard and a top notch DNS record API.

That's a compelling offer and I'd very likely switch from namesilo if that were the case.

To be honest, anything less and I'd stay with namesilo because the 15 minute timer can be worked around by using my web host's name servers (digitalocean pushes updates in a few seconds). I couldn't live without either email forwarding or a real inbox.

View on HN

It's compelling to you, but managing email infrastructure is a huge burden - users actively spamming, compromised users spamming, RBLs, security, myriad email clients - there seems to be little synergy here with the rest of Cloudflare's infrastructure (DNS + a big proxy stack).

I say this as both someone who worked at a hosting company doing managed email a long time ago, before the industry had consolidated to the extent it has now, and as an ex-employee.

At wholesale registrar pricing, N real inboxes - is that attracting the right kind of users at scale? At least with their current freemium + addons model, it's fairly hands-off, with the hopes of capturing rapidly growing startups in the process. I don't think you can replicate that with email at all.

When you say real inboxes, are you thinking webmail of some sort? Don't most people prefer to use Google Apps or the like these days?

Most places and projects I've worked in the past 10 years or so have used GSuite or similar for inboxes, and Amazon SES or similar for programatically sending email. Those that didn't (shared-hosted websites on CPanel installations seemingly do still exist in 2018) had access to webmail in the hosting panel or as an installable application.

Yeah right now I use email forwarding and SES to send emails (which required setting up an address that belongs to my domain, such as user@exampledomain.com).

In this case I forwarded that email to my gmail account and it all works, but it's not perfect.

In either case, having at least email forwarding or an inbox is essential for a lot of common things you'd want to do on a domain. Forwarding works ok to avoid $60 / year for Google's offerings but has some limitations.

This is coming at it from the POV of just setting up a VPS to host some sites and wanting to accept email from your domain name without paying any more than what the domain cost to register.

I think this use case is super common, especially on HN.

No one thought Let's Encrypt would step up and offer a top tier free SSL solution. If it can be done for SSL, it can be done for real inboxes. :)

I mean being able to set up zackbloom@cloudflare.com as a proper inbox that can send and receive mail without forwarding to another email. Having a web interface for it would be cool but I think a lot of people could also configure existing email clients to access it (at least at the start).

Google Suite is something like $5 / month per domain name so offering that as a free feature would be a pretty big deal.

Google Suite starts at $5 per email address per month; I think asking for free email accounts is beyond the product offering of domain registration/renewal.

And they probably want to reserve usage of their domain for email so you know it's a staff member you're dealing with, which is why google gives away gmail.com addresses, not google.com addresses.

Here are three less expensive email options for you:

1. get a VM and install exim/postfix 2. OpenSRS https://opensrs.com/services/hosted-email/ 3. AWS workmail https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/

To be fair he was asking for exciting and meaningful ways to make it better.

> And they probably want to reserve usage of their domain for email so you know it's a staff member you're dealing with, which is why google gives away gmail.com addresses, not google.com addresses.

These inboxes would be for your custom domain that you registered, not @cloudflare.com for everyone. I used that for his because it sounds like he works there.

Yours would be x13@whateverdomainyouregistered.com.

Looks like opensrs requires to pay a one-time $95 fee. Can one use just hosted email on their domains at $0.5/mo?

That would be awesome. Gandi has this (5 inboxes), but at $12.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com