FranklyMail vs self-hosting

Mailcow, Mail-in-a-Box and Stalwart are free, mature and genuinely good software. Past a few dozen mailboxes, a VPS you already pay for is cheaper than any hosted plan including this one. Nobody can change the terms on you, raise the price, or decide your account is now a tier.

And you will learn an enormous amount. Email is one of the last protocols an individual can hold in their head end to end, and running one for a year teaches you more about how the internet actually works than most jobs do.

We are not neutral here and it would be silly to pretend otherwise — this service is Stalwart, on servers we rent, doing exactly what you would be doing. We like it. It is a good way to spend your weekends.

You can have mailcow running in an afternoon. The install is not where people come unstuck, and the tutorials that stop at “now send a test message” have finished before the interesting part starts.

The interesting part is that a brand new IP address is guilty until proven innocent. The large receivers have no history with you, so they assume the worst, and the way you fix that is not a configuration flag. It is weeks of sending small volumes of well-behaved mail until the reputation exists.

We are living that right now. Our outbound cap starts low and a human raises it one rung a week, after reading the previous week’s delivery metrics, over roughly six weeks. It cannot be compressed by sending harder. That ladder is the thing you are outsourcing, and it is the reason the price of hosted email is not zero.

One of your accounts gets compromised and sends spam for four hours. Now your IP is on a blocklist, some of them run by people who do not answer email, and the delisting form asks you to describe your remediation.

Your DKIM key needs rotating and the old one has to stay published long enough for mail already in flight to verify. Your TLS certificate does not renew and nothing tells you, because a mail server that cannot start TLS does not put a red banner on a website — it just quietly stops being trusted.

A receiver starts deferring you and the queue grows. Everything looks fine on the box. The problem is a reputation signal at somebody else’s company, and finding that out takes an afternoon of reading headers. None of this is hard, exactly. It is just yours, permanently, at whatever hour it happens.

We are a very small operation. There is no overnight rota here and we are not going to imply one — if what you need is a support contract with a phone number and a response time in it, that is a real requirement and Google or Fastmail will sell you one.

What we do is the operational work: reputation, key rotation, patching, watching the queues, and being the party who has to care when a receiver starts deferring. Whether that is worth nine dollars a year to you depends on what your weekends are worth.

And if you decide to self-host later, you take everything with you. IMAP means the archive was always portable, and the four DNS records that point at us point somewhere else just as easily.