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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

You can still use the Gmail UI with a custom domain for free. All you need is a mail server. Once it's set up, configure a free Gmail account to fetch your email with IMAP and send from your domain with SMTP. Now you own your email but still get the Gmail UI as long as you want to use it, for free, with the option to use any other client you want as well.

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Why would you want to use the Gmail UI though?

I’ve found it to be one of the slowest, most bloated and resource-heavy web apps I use.

It’s nothing like the Gmail of 10+ years ago when Google actually cared about the product.

They've got a new UX coming down the pipe, remains to be seen what the performance is like, but looks more modern at least.

My experience with mail clients has been pretty poor in general. I haven't done a survey recently but all the others I've tried in the past have been slow too, and the search and spam filtering did not work as well.

Cloudflare's email routing offering seems to be a good fit for this as far as I can tell.

No SMTP though, so that fixes 50% of the problem.

Seems like it's not a replacement then. If you can't send from the domain, you'd be sending from your gmail, which is no good.

Oh yikes, good catch; I definitely thought they did smtp as well

Oh this is an interesting tip. Any guides? I'd imagine this could have deliverability problems being from a self-hosted mail server but maybe that's just been ingrained in me by email providers :)

I wouldn't self host a mail server, I'd go with a hosted option. Often you get one free with your domain registration anyway.

That's what I'm doing. Gandi provides two free mailboxes for each domain hosted with them.

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