Tuffmail shutting down Jan.1 2022
 

Just got the email from John Capo. Hate to see it go.

Are you able to share that email here?

I've heard that some people with forthcoming account renewals have been contacted in recent days, John Capo is supposed to be contacting everyone else this week.

At the time of writing, there's no mention of the closure on the Tuffmail website.

I've used Tuffmail for well over 15 years. Now looking for an alternative. The email I received is as follows:

---------------

Hello Tuffmail Customer,

Tuffmail will cease operations January 1. I'm very sorry for the hassle that this may cause for you and your users.

Customers with outstanding invoices were notified last week. Customers due to be invoiced will receive renewal invoices this week. If recurring billing is enabled for your account, you can change from quarterly billing to monthly billing if desired by paying the next invoice or let us know.

Recurring billing can be canceled and accounts can be deleted in the Manager.

https://manage.tuffmail.net/ Click Account -> Contact Info and scroll down to cancel recurring
Click Account -> Delete Account to delete an account

There are many options for hosting your domain(s). The least expensive being forwarding email from your domain registrar to a free Google or Hotmail account. Some registrars provide mailbox services at very low cost.

Other options include but are not limited to:

https://fastmail.com/
https://protonmail.com/
https://runbox.com/
https://greatmail.com/
https://mxroute.com/
https://zoho.com/

And of course Google and Microsoft.

Bing.com, Because Its Not Google, will turn up dozens of options.

For those of you that do not have their own domain, you should, you can always take that with you.

Thank you for being a loyal Tuffmail customer.

John Capo
Tuffmail.com

The worst news of the past 100 years.

This is very sad news. :( A unique service, developed and maintained by a unique personality will be lost.
I wonder if no one wanted to take it over. :confused:

I was sad to hear that too. I like Tuffmail and its functions. I once paid it for about two or three years? It just worked fine.

Very sad seeing another one go :(

As a long time user of Tuffmail (and nothing else), I've started to look around for a replacement. For the benefit of those of us now looking for a new home, in addition to those services mentioned by John in his email, what other similarly priced options are there that offer an equivalent service?

For anyone interested in moving over to Fastmail, if you use this referral link, you can get 10% off your first year:

https://ref.fm/u15257689

In addition to the options in the e-mail mentioned by John Capo, I would also suggest a look at Purelymail.They have a slightly different take on their pricing, but there have been good reports about their service. There's also extensive discussion on their service here on the forum.

Check also PolarisMail - https://www.polarismail.com - I use them for years with no problems.

Really Disturbing!
 

Not sure what to do for a replacement. I've been with them as long as I can remember. Three domains, tons of aliases, one account for me and one for my wife, ... John did not charge enough. I am getting sticker shock just looking around. Hate to go to the trouble of setting up my own email server.

I second the vote to check out Purelymail. For $10 per year you can't beat them if you want simple, reliable email. https://purelymail.com/

Of the options I've looked at so far, Purelymail certainly looks like a contender where it comes to replacing what Tuffmail offers.

Personally, I don't need lots of the fluff that many other services offer. I do, however, have almost 500 aliases that have built up over the years. On many services that would mean either a much more expensive plan, or having to buy a lot of packs of aliases to add-on, which isn't cost effective.

I'll check them out. Do they have limits on the number of email aliases? I can't see anything in their docs.

You could send a PM to George Breahna, he represents Polarismail here on the forum, or use the Chat option on their website.

The website has been updated, the message short but sweet:

And that's all he wrote!

A very professional message :eek:

I didn't expect anything else. ;)

Although this is the worst news in a long time, I must congratulate John Capo for

1) letting the users know well ahead

2) not having sold the service to the devil, e.g. to another email service or (worse!) to some clueless investor with deep pockets.

John mentioned GreatMail, which I never heard.
Do you have experience on this provider?

Greatmail caters to businesses. Here are some of its prices:

https://www.greatmail.com/email-host...dard-plans.php

Thank you Reuven!

While we have seen a small uptick in sign-ups from Tuffmail customers, it really appears this was a very specialized service catering to a very niche market. We don't have all the features that Tuffmail has nor do we strive to have them and honestly I don't think other big providers have them either.

That being said, I'm sorry to see them go, they've been around for a very long time but maybe their over-specialization turned out to be not so profitable :|

Yeah, well said. That's exactly true! I am finding that I need to replace my Tuffmail account with several others (Runbox being the main one) and use forwarding at DNS level, as suggested by John Capo.

I think Rollernet is coming close.

I think a lot of this is belts are having to be tightened as there’s less money for extras.

I’m not sure whether eumx.net would have you want with the more advanced web interfaces. If something like Microsoft Exchange have a look at tidyhosts.com. Alternatively for a year signup with Godaddy and get what you want for £18-£20 for the first year.

That's a very interesting suggestion. Their website lists several plans with fantastic features. Looks good on paper. Need to study in detail.

Not sure what the differences are between Rollernet's various offerings: Basic, Personal, Personal Plus, Standard, etc. Lots of obscure stuff on that website leaves me with many questions. They may be great at email services, but they certainly lack in communication skills!

Just thinking, how hard would it be for Tuffmail to be taken over by a willing enthusiast?

You obviously would have to continue payments to all the providers involved, and if that could happen, what skills would be needed to keep it all ticking over?

There must be some individual, or even a group of people that have the necessary experience between them to make it happen - if they would really like the service to continue.

What exactly is too obscure? There's one page on the website for mail services... everything is on there that I'm aware of.

Does the comparison table not work on your browser for the different service levels?

Rollernet is not for novices. ;)

John offered it to me (although the question remains how serious this was), but I don't know what time, skills and money (?) it takes. We didn't go any further on it. I also still have a full-time job. It's still profitable, he told me (February 2021).

There were folks that were interested but they ran away when the effort and time involved was explained to them.

It's semi-intentional because it keeps the tech support demand down.

At least on my desktop and phone (both using Chrome) there was absolutely no visual clue that you could scroll to the right in the table of features so I didn't see half the stuff.

I had the same problem and couldn't find the information I wanted.
The table needs changing - the columns and rows need to be swapped over.

As a bystander reading this thread, yesterday I went to your website to form a view of how easy it is to understand your information.

My first impression was puzzlement; I could see that "Basic" had fewer ticks than the rest, but that seemed to be the only difference. It didn't make sense.

It was only later that I noticed that the table can be scrolled sideways which was not /immediately/ obvious.

I think that's because the scrollbar is pale grey whereas everything else is a sea of more-eye-catching blue. Also (revisiting it just now) I notice that if one opens the page in a narrow view in a browser one is very likely to see a partial set of column titles, eg

"Monthly Price .... SMTP Redirection Mail Ho"

(note the last of those), which expands if you drag the window wider and at least hints that there's more info to the right, but if the window is wide enough one sees an apparently 'complete' set of column titles

"Monthly Price ... Outbound Mail Mail Content Filtering"

ALSO the background colour of the column title banner stops at that point which implies you've reached the rh end of the table. If you're focussed on the column titles (rather than looking to the foot of the table where the really expensive options are shown), you might never see the horizontal scroll bar.


At the very least you should add a hint (just /before/ the table) saying the table needs to be scrolled sideways to see all the differences.

I think it'd be better though if you reversed the rows and columns, so that one merely scrolls down the page to see more and more aspects of the differences between different cost levels.

Tuffmail is shutting down
 

Tuffmail is ceasing all operations on January 1.

What happened?

Cross post.
Read http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=78746

Moderator's Comment
 

Thanks for the suggestions, we'll look in to trimming down the differences and see if we can eliminate the table completely.