Self-introduction, Migadu.com / Gmailify.com founder
Hi everyone! Just joined, but long time lurker. I am Dejan, one of the founders of https://www.migadu.com email service as well https://www.gmailify.com
I won't be going into Migadu introduction, @Not_Oles (thank you!) did an excellent work on that at https://lowendbox.com/blog/fix-gmail-deliverability-problems-inexpensively-with-migadu/
If there is something I can answer, I am happy to do so! Also very happy to learn about email needs, what can we (as email providers, not just Migadu) do better!
Greetings to @jarland - all the respect for other bootstrapped mail providers.
Comments
Welcome
Have you tried turning it off and on again?@bikegremlin evo nam jarana
Amadex • Hosting Forums • root.hr
Hi @dejan! It's great to see you here! I remember the wonderful job you did helping me get onboard at Migadu. My Migadu account just recently renewed for another year without email problems! Always best wishes!
Tom
Nice to see an alternative, are you hosting your services in EU or CH?
What about outbound delivery? Does email stay within EU/EES or do you use relay services outside, such as Mail.baby/Mailchannels?
RIPE LIR
Migadu is a nice email product. I once was their paid customer.
Welcome!
How about an exclusive LES deal?
Team push-ups!
Welcome bro!
https://microlxc.net/
We don't do coupons etc, as they are very unfair. Reaching a checkout page and seeing a discount code field, to which you have nothing to give is short of irritating. If anyone from LES wants to use Migadu, we'll be happy to attach 50% off for life, just ask before upgrading via support mentioning me, I will let the team know.
Migadu has actually been around since 2014. We host about ~1mm mailboxes on ~200k domains globally. We don't advertise though, our growth has always been through word-of-mouth. Growing slow comes with many advantages and gave us time to optimize. Aside the (customized) mail stack, we build everything in-house.
We host in OVH datacenters. Someone is probably going to jump in to say how bad OVH is. Not at all. We've been able to build redundancies easily due to the amount of datacenters and predictable performance. This allows us to avoid any single point of failure in the infrastructure. Since 2017 we've also seen a great increase in OVH stability.
In the past we've tried also Hetzner, AWS, Vultr, and some Swiss hosting providers, but OVH could not be matched on price, stability and features (e.g. included DDoS protection, BYOIP). Kudos to OVH really (just not for their support tbh). Swiss datacenter/hosting providers mostly think that label [Swiss] is a feature which compensates for the lack of everything else and double price. That's why we stick with OVH.
Migadu is hosted in FR/DE in 5 different datacenters, with relays, replicas and backups split so even if a datacenter happens to burn down (again), we'd be still up and running with a possible short interruption of connections. Since the OVH incident in Strasbourg (we were not impacted), they are now statistically less likely to have a datacenter problem than the rest of datacenter providers. :-]
Gmailify.com is hosted in CA and FR split among 6 different datacenters. This one is a rather new service, aimed at using own domain names with Gmail - for those that prefer Gmail.
In both services, we maintain and use our own outbound relays, both IPv4 and IPv6 on our own IP ranges - in FR (EU) datacenters, (we are also RIPE NCC LIR). This is so essential, I do not see how it could be outsourced. We do our own spam filtering in-house so no need for outside relays.
Welcome to LES @dejan. I have been reading about gmailify, it looks like a very good concept. FAQ mentions that no hacks or trickery is involved. I am interested in knowing how it works, if you don't mind.
The service appears to use POP3 on gmail, does that mean any other POP3 supported email provider can be used? Will there be any delay in delivering mails? E.g. one time passcodes that some provisers send that expire in 5mins will still be deliverd in time?
Thank you @mee2 !
Gmail has built-in open support for POP3 fetching. It also has support for IMAP syncing, but only with Microsoft and Yahoo/AOL, a feature they call themselves Gmailify (not registered trademark though
. The second, IMAP syncing is useful only if you really use the two accounts in parallel, and you have folders.
Otherwise, both POP fetching and IMAP syncing do the same thing in Gmail. They pull in messages, de-duplicate them, pass them through spam filter and bring them into Gmail. This benefits Gmail as they start filling up storage faster so after 15 GB, paid plan should be purchased. No one really wants to go and clear up 10 year junk from their mailboxes, a fact which Gmail readily uses.
You can use any POP service with Gmail. The main reason why Gmail made this feature was to avoid being forwarded to (and to migrate existing mailboxes). I am tired of mentioning how forwarding is an email hack and it should not be relied on. Messages will get lost when forwarded, it's a fact that holds as gravity. The spam filters in Gmail are dynamic and will reject some messages for a multitude of reasons. Gmail postmasters know it themselves, but softening filters is not an option, so they made also POP3 fetching.
POP3 is very simple read-only protocol and it simulates picking up messages from a physical post office, unlike IMAP which was made for R/W accesses of a message storage. Fetching recent messages with POP3 is a very quick op, unless one is migrating a mailbox. Compare that to IMAP, which should sync all folders.
*POP3 fetches are made by Gmail periodically with dynamically adjusted intervals. They seem to fetch more often from mailboxes with more changes, e.g. every 15 mins, while with mailboxes that have less changes, they may reduce fetches to even once in an hour. (I could be wrong here, it may be load-based too.)
*IMAP syncs are more involved and longer running processes. Continuous syncs are out of the question even for Google, which is why I assume they limited their "Gmailify" feature to only Microsoft and Yahoo/AOL (Oath). They are most likely relying on a trigger from the remote service which notifies of folder changes and initiates sync. This would explain why this feature is not open to the public, but only select partners. With such triggers, messages appear faster in Gmail than through POP3 fetches.
Side note: Google, Microsoft and Yahoo/Aol, representing more than 75% of global email traffic, are all tightly cooperating in the background significantly to maintain their dominance. Just check the authors of last few standards proposed, e.g. RFC8461. They are intentionally making standards which only them can easily implement, raising the barriers of entry for new providers. (MTA-STS for instance adds no value compared to a more comprehensive DANE)
Back to Gmail, POP protocol has no support for folders, that was an IMAP invention. There is an issue obviously if you have a service which places spam messages into Junk folder. Those messages will not be seen in POP fetches, so one has to be careful with false positives. Best to change spam action to subject rewrite (e.g. add SPAM prefix), something most providers should support.
To compensate for all of this, Gmailify.com forwards [non spam] messages to Gmail and at the same time serves same messages via POP3 with message expiry of 7 days. Should forwarding for any reason fail or get deferred by Gmail, the POP3 fetches are still there. Gmail stores messages in BigTable, and seems to use the message-id as key. As such same message-Id cannot repeat. For us that means that no duplicates will happen even if we forward and serve via POP3.
An outgoing SMTP service can be also added to Gmail so it also can send / reply from the same address it is fetching from. There is a hack where their own smtp.gmail.com can be used for outgoing relay, but such messages will ironically land in other Gmail recipients' junk. Among other things, it has no DKIM signature, which is essential for Gmail itself.
Gmailify.com provides an own SMTP relay with dedicated ranges which can be accessed only by Gmail. It is inaccessible for standalone email clients; the whole service is built around Gmail.
Naturally, all of this can be done with any email service. Many use Migadu for the same, but we found it wasteful as the heavy lifting really happens in Gmail. That is why we also price it accordingly - $6.99 / year for the whole domain.
Probably more than you wanted to know
@dejan ChatGPT version, FYI.
(first prompt it started giving me a sermon on how I was wrong and how gmailify was a gmail feature..) we begin from Trial II.
My apologies for the confusion earlier. It seems that "Gmailify" is also the name of a separate service unrelated to the Gmailify feature by Google.
Gmailify.com is an email forwarding service that allows you to create a custom email address with your domain name and have emails forwarded to your Gmail account. This way, you can maintain a professional email address with your domain name while still enjoying Gmail's features and interface for managing your emails.
Here's a general outline of how to use the Gmailify.com service:
blog archives
Migadu vs mxroute in deliverability. How good is migadu?
It depends on many factors, starting from the sender's domain and content. It is not something that can be compared directly. I have noticed jared is active so probably takes good care of own IP space and abusers. We do too. Occasionally there is a bad apple here and there that gets us a blocklist entry, but we're quick to sanction and repair those. However, those that still depend on archaic blocklists today are probably not the ones whose deliveries matter. There is a good reason blocklists don't play well with IPv6.
The helping factor for Migadu is the limited daily quota. Spammers and abusers announce themselves quite fast. MXRoute for sure has own mechanisms.
just hearing about migadu and gmailify here from my cave.. seems a very nice concept, would love to try them in the near future
Thanks! It's wrong about that one though, focus is also on sending.
indeed, sometimes chatGPT gets drunk and starts imagining things. It does take feedback well. Not sure how often it updates the database though. Cheers.
blog archives
welcum!
Sorry, but the answer was from GPT? Please provide detailed description of migadu smtp architecture. Where can I find your RBL?
Gmailify, very interesting. Do you provide whitelabel solution so we can resell it?
UpCloud free $25 through this aff link - Akamai, DigitalOcean and Vultr alternative, multiple location, IPv6.
ChatGPT response was for gmailify in case that point was missed or overlooked inadvertently.
blog archives
Stay out of my caves ya weirdo! I am sick of having to chase weirdos out of my caves!!!
The Yeti has left the building.
No, it was authentic
We do not use or have own RBLs. We will block only temporarily crazy bursts but that clears automatically. RBLs are very last millennium.
We're working on it. I will announce it here when ready.
Of course gmailify is a great idea, but for lowend users it's a bit overpriced in case when he has more than 2 domains.
"Non-negative valued" LE-user with mxroute's promo can build his own gmailify for "unlimited" domains for $10-15/year. And "negative -valued" usually can set own mail-server for free.
So may be you can think about a more affordable offer for users with multiple domains on gmailify.
Thanks! Requested!
Domain aliases are supported and not limited. Separate domains though require separate accounts indeed.
Many users do this with Migadu's $19/yearly plan which has no domains limit. The issue is in reliability. If you want to forward to Gmail reliably, it should not go over generic forwarders. Gmailify is tied to Gmail only, both forwarders and outgoing relays. No direct SMTP access. There is a good reason for that.
But absolutely agreed. One can orchestrate that differently. We made Gmailify so one does not have to, and most users do that with a single domain.
Welcome! Love your services, keep being awesome
Interesting...
Android 14 | Windows 11 | Ubuntu 24.04
I've red self-indoctrination...
Hello and welcome.
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Welcome to the party
Hello
Gmailify seems interesting to me (with out going through all the hassle to use gmail with my domain)
I do not use gmail app because if you try to login that gmail in a browser, they will ask to verify a code in phone. Protection wise its good, But too much hassle for a non-work/play account.
To avoid the above mentioned hassle, I use a 3rd part email client/app (Aqua Mail).
If I buy a plan from gmailify.com, can I use it with 3rd party email client/app?
hey and welcome
what is your stance on Free Speech as E-Mail provider?
Would you drop a client because the domain contains some controversial content(despite you not having anything to do with it)?
Talking about situations where certain group may be upset over something they don't like(but is legal) and start to threaten the hosting provider. Also of course, journos...
Unfortunately not, the POP3 and SMTP accesses are sandboxed to Gmail. However, you can use Migadu for that, as the plans are flat.
As long as the email service is not used for illegal activities (spam, phishing, extortion, harassment - coming through a complaint), your business is your business.
Very sad lyf
I am sorry, I misunderstood your question. Of course you can. You are not accessing Gmailify but rather Gmail, and you can use Gmail on other devices and email clients using IMAP/SMTP. I use Thunderbird for instance on the desktop. Your mails for your custom domain arrive in Gmail and if you configure it right in own label too, which on other clients shows as folder.
Awesome. Will buy plan soon
I just want say, thanks for awesome service for long time. I use your service since free plan and upgrade to paid one and still using until now as business email.
Welcome! Hats off to a fellow email nerd ♥️
Do everything as though everyone you’ll ever know is watching.
Hi @dejan
Thx for your introduction and those interesting insights.
I do love your point of view on mails and being this kind of bootstrapped mail-provider.
As it's a few months ago now, is there anything new with Migadu.
I read Drew De Vault's recommendations concerning mail-providers https://drewdevault.com/2020/06/19/Mail-service-provider-recommendations.html
In 2020 he was talking about a new mail-system coming 'soon' to Migadu (Alps). Is there any update or will Alps never be available within Migadu and it's just an old post which hasn't been updated?
And wow - didn't know, that Migadu is that big as you said... 200.000 domains using Migadu really is a 'lot'!!! Cool.
Did you made any progress since your last posting - or is it more like a small growing company?
Hope you can give me a few answers.
Thx for your products!
We need more of those approaches.
Gmailify, how it works?
Host-C | Storage by Design | AS211462
“If it can’t guarantee behavior under load, it doesn’t belong in production.”
@dejan
How would you primarily explain the differences between Migadu and the following four email hosting providers?:
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Great to see migadu here!
VPS providers to check out:
start the trial at migadu today. solid so far. pure mail. i am looking for a email / calender solution for my family. i am not sure if migadu is the best for it. any suggestions?
I heard they will bring an update concerning $DAV implementations soon.
But as with every Swiss provider ‘soon‘ could mean in a few years 🤪 so I wouldn’t count on this.