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Comment by throwaway81523 | Hacker News Reader

Gandi email has been useless from the start. They say right in the contract that they don't back up their email servers. Isn't the host handling chores like backup part of the point of a hosted product? Of course you can and should distrust the host's backups and have your own in addition, but that's way different than the host not doing them in the first place.

Maybe they have fixed that (I don't see it on their site any more) but I have a screen shot of the old contract provision and I complained to them about it in 2017, and they ignored the complaint.

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For email it is sometimes useful to only have a host handling things like reputation and crypto/protocols (DKIM, SPF, DMARC, DANE, MTA-STS, etc.) while doing the actual handling of data yourself.

I'm not sure that gandi's email fits that purpose, but specifically for email it can be a bit more tricky to roll your own than things like HTTPS, so having a hosted solution to handle that can help.

Pretty sure gandi doesn't do much of the above either. Gandi email hosting is generally not worth paying for.

As a bundled service it was fine, I have a complete copy of my emails on my client(s) anyway so what it really did was give an IMAP interface to use for sending and receiving emails under my domain that dealt with the entire "Google et el are pretty evil about personal email boxes".

Its not worth £3 a month per box when previously the Gandi markup was £4 a year or so for the extra services on top of the raw domain price.

I've been using Gandi's free mailboxes since 2019 when I de-Googled, they provide easy setup for SPF/DKIM/DMARC. Not sure about the other two. No significant deliverability issues to report. They offer IMAP and a choice between two web UIs which is all I need.

I'd be more than happy to pay for their service in general, just not under duress. If they'd have given me 6 months to onboard I'd have been perfectly fine with $3/mo for email. If I'm going to be abused with a false sense of urgency and pushed to make a quick decision, I'll just leave.

ah ok, it must have changed since last I looked into it.

I'm not familiar with Gandi's email specifically, but with most of these email hosts, the lack of 2FA is a problem.

It exists but you have to use their web UI: https://docs.gandi.net/en/gandimail/common_operations/manage...

I used Gandi's SMTP servers to relay outbound mail only (through postfix). For inbound mail, I pointed the MX record to my home IP address, where I received it directly on my postfix server.

This avoided my ISP's block on outbound TCP port 25, and it also gave me a reputable sending IP address economically.

Just to be clear, Microsoft and Google don't back up their e-mail services, it's a common misconception about "cloud" services.

In 2011, Gmail accidentally some people's email and restored it from tape. https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/02/gmail-back-soon-for-eve...

They'll restore from backups if they screw up but won't restore them from customer request: https://support.google.com/a/answer/9223653?hl=en

Not sure that anyone need a backup if you know how to configure your email clients. Mines gets and keep all the emails so between my smartphone and my 2 laptops + their own backups, I have enough copies.

Well it's a nice way to have a no-reply@ for my side projects and a smtp to send emails from those webapps.

Probably not worth paying the asking price for this usage though.

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