[itnerd]

The market is FULL of hosted providers. Every single one has its ups and downs.

I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the technical knobs that Google Workspace and MS Office 360 provide over mail routing. Clearly they have enough large customers with in-house IT staff that demand this level of control and “the rest of us” get the benefit. Once you leave their platforms it’s easy to be disappointed. I can’t say that their platforms are good just technically feature rich; Google’s insistence on silently discarding “duplicate” messages is infuriating but other platforms will have a different set of problems.

If you don’t need enterprise control… Lately, I’ve been on MXroute.com, mostly because the team seems dedicated to trying to make something good. It’s not polished yet. They are opinionated. It’s designed for you to point your MX at them and check your mail via IMAP and send via Authenticated SMTP, that’s it, nothing more. Sure, they have extra features that will work but clearly that’s not their focus.

iCloud+ is also worth looking at and is often underrated. Many folks already have a paid iCloud+ account. Here, you can just turn on “Custom Email” as a set it and forget it option.

While I’m writing non-sense, I’ll ask what others are doing for inbound mail control and spam filtering. Prior to moving to MXroute, I was using SpamStopsHere that offered incredible flexibility and control. It was acquired by Zix and then dismantled.