Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffpan
Just my thoughts you should have a paid plan otherwise it’s hard to continue the biz.
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At this moment the project is in a pre-alpha stage. I am offering some free accounts for kind of real life testing, and those who got email accounts also help me by telling me the problems that they encountered. This way I was able to tweak the server firewall, and some other settings, making the service better.
I started this project last summer, I tested all existing control panels, all email servers, all mail-in-a-box style sollutions, a lot of providers, VPS, dedicated, cloud, I learned a lot, I lost a lot of nights on this because it seems that this is my passion.
20 years ago I had an email account at postmark.net or postmark.co.uk, I can't remember. It was one of the first, I really liked it but for some reason the service went downhill and then the site was closed. Maybe now I can continue the story of Postmark as a mail service.
I plan to evolve with small steps, to be sure that every step is a solid one and will not create problems for me in the future.
If everything goes well, maybe in 5-6 months I will open the service for the public. Until then there is a lot of work (for example the automation of signups, the billing side and to be absolutely sure that the service is stable and the risk of downtime is minimum).
At that moment in the future yes, the email accounts will be paid, and the selling point will be the quality of the service and the domains that I will offer for email addresses, short and memorable. (for example: ana.im, m5.pm, pmx.pm, etc.pm, tnt.pm, nos.pm, noc.pm, v9.lv, x10.ro - I registered a lot of them
.)
Until then, I am glad that I quit smoking and those 300 euros I was spending every month on cigarettes will fund this project. I don't know what the future will bring, but the server is stable (and I plan to keep it that way) and is paid in advance, so in case something happens to me, at least for a few months the server will be up.
But if everything goes according to the plan, in the next 2 years the service will be funding itself.
I also use this server for my personal and my primary business email. I will keep my mxroute account (Jarland, your service is stellar and I just don't want to close my account from mxroute
), but I will cut the spending and close my accounts that I have at fastmail, mailbox.org, tutanota, protonmail, titan mail (was a mistake), zoho, posteo, soverin, inbox.eu, and a few others I don't remember them right now. I had paid accounts at all these services. So I am interested and motivated to have a solid service because my personal and business mail depend on it.
Worse case scenario: something happens to me or to the server.
If the server will crash, I have daily backups stored on Microsoft Onedrive, I will use a backup server (I have another 2 dedicated servers at OVH and 1 dedicated at Hetzner that I use with other projects), and I will restore the backup on one of these servers. Or in case I will not have those servers at that moment, I will fire up a cloud server at Hetzner, Netcup or OVH and I will use that one.
For backup I am planing to mirror the backup from OneDrive to a local storage service from Romania, Digi Storage. Also, I think that in maximum one week I will move the domains to use Cloudflare, because it has instant propagation (minus the cache from each ISP that knows my domain) and I don't have to wait in case I will need to change the IP.
Sorry for the long post, I just wanted to let each of you know what this project it's all about and to be as transparent as possible.