I use AWS SES for sending and receiving (awkwardly) email for essentially free on several domains. I put together this repo to share how it works, which isn’t for everyone (but I certainly enjoy it). While it isn’t a polished experience it is very, very robust when deployed to multiple regions.

https://github.com/mlhpdx/email-delivery

I use zoho with a custom domain, it's pretty good.

I thought postale.io was free -- it must have been when I signed up because I'm not paying for it.

It isn't free anymore so it is not an answer to your question, but it is fairly cheap for the base plan: https://postale.io/pricing

I wonder why so many providers have stopped giving away free email recently?

It couldn’t cost them that much to provide a single free email box could it?

Hey! You can send up to 12,000 emails for free with mailersend, you just have to use your own domain, and edit its DNS records. They also check if you don't send spam to get you approved and up your sending limit.

I use fastmail with a custom domain and I'm happy with it. At least, in the sense that it just works and I never have to think about it.

I'm looking at it and there is no free version. Is this correct?

It's not free, but you can register multiple domains to a single Fastmail account. So I pay Fastmail for my personal email hosting, and any side projects can reuse this same account at no additional cost.

I have a domain registered with fasthosts and I get free email redirection, which I use with a Gmail account. It is a simple passthrough.

I may look at doing just this, and then writing a simple plugin for fasthosts.

I have noticed that a large number of my signups so far are Gmail accounts, so it’s may make sense for them to have a simple integration to their gmail box.

Thank you for your input!

Sadly Gmail won't let me send using that email address. Something to consider.

Looks that way to me. For email, I'd rather be the customer than the product...

Zoho has a free plan with custom domain but it forces you to use their email client.

For very cheap email plans with POP/IMAP I use Zoho and Namecheap.

Does the name have to be registered with Zoho first?

I have a long account history with GoDaddy, so I just jumped on a cheap domain for my latest project without realizing email wasn’t included anymore.

It’s unfortunate because GoDaddy has been a decent domain provider for us for over 10 years. We have domains connected to services across AWS, Google Cloud, and Digital Ocean, and never had any issues before with their domain services. It was always great to buy a domain, and have a free included email out of the box that we could set up as a help/support catch all box.

> Does the name have to be registered with Zoho first?

No, you just need to add some DNS records.

Nice, thank you’all for this info!

No, you can use GoDaddy or anything else. Like the poster above, I use Namecheap.

Thank you thank you!! Much appreciated!

proton, tutanoda, hushmail, gmxmail