Ask HN: What's the best way to receive email via a custom domain in 2025?

[rockbruno]

Despite having always owned a couple of domains, I've always used plain old Gmail accounts as my primary addresses.

I've been wanting to change this in favor of using my actual domains, but I recall that a couple of years ago this used to be a challenge because getting the big e-mail providers to not immediately treat your domain as spam was not trivial, unless you paid big bucks for Google's own custom e-mail solution.

Is this still the case today? If not, what are the best current ways to receive and send e-mail via my own domain?

[tobinfekkes]

I'd love to leave the Gmail/Outlook universe as much as the next guy, but I don't think a Google Workspace account at $8/month counts as "big bucks" does it? And a custom-domain in Office365 with Outlook is $4/month(?) for the Web-only version (without the Office suite apps). Seems like a reasonable price for reliable email.

Fastmail, Proton, and Tuta exist as well.

[rockbruno]

Ah, for some reason I recalled Workspace being a lot more expensive than that. That seems fine for me indeed.

[tobinfekkes]

They keep raising the prices, of course, so maybe it's different if it's a new account today? I started at $6/month, then it got to $15 within a few years. Because of the forced Gemini this last week, I downgraded my Workspace account yesterday back to "basic" for $8.

[rendx]

It's not that the big players make it difficult for you to send/receive from "your own domain". It's more the underlying provider infrastructure. If you pick basically any mail provider, it'll work out just fine also with your own domain. And yes, even if you were to completely run your own mail stack it works okay if you follow all the best practices.

[andrewguru]

I run Mailcast (https://mailcast.io) which will forward email on your domain to your Gmail account. We have domain aliasing to make it easy to add multiple domains with the same addresses, and you can configure sending on your domain as well.