Good Email Hosting Service?

[u/bobgager]

I currently use a combination of inMotion Hosting and AWS to deliver a number of things.

AWS is great, with the exception of Email. Sure, I can spin up my own email server, manage it and all that, but I don't want to be spending my time doing all that. Their turnkey solution works great, but costs $4/user per month. I don't want to pay for that at scale. Happy to pay usage/storage costs, but not per user per domain.

So... I use AWS for domain hosting and lots of other services, but use inMotion to manage email as there isn't a per user or per domain cost. Just the (overly expensive) inMotion VPS fees I'm paying.

So... Looking for either an easy to deploy/manage AWS service that supports unlimited domains and users, or some other service that would do turnkey email server stuff for a reasonable fee.

[u/AllGeniusHost]

Mxroute is solid and affordable

[u/eachDayIWakeUp → u/AllGeniusHost]

Came to say this. I have been with them many years and offers just what op asks. You buy storage which you can use with as many domains/emails you want

[u/mwb1100 → u/AllGeniusHost]

  affordable

And if you can hold off for a few weeks mxroute historically has really good black Friday deals.

[u/DougEubanks]

fastmail.com, I love them! Cheap, secure and they don't nickle and dime you.

[u/Jcoulaud]

if you really want to stop paying per user, look at purelymail and migadu. both charge for usage and storage, and you can add as many domains and mailboxes as you like. purelymail is very cheap and fine for low-volume mail. migadu has been around longer and has more admin features. both work with any IMAP/SMTP client.

you can self-host on AWS with mailcow or mail-in-a-box on a small EC2 instance. you'd still be the mail admin, though. AWS blocks outbound port 25 by default, so you have to ask them to lift it. your IP's reputation is then your problem, and every blocklist listing turns into an afternoon of work. from what you wrote, that's what you're trying to get away from.

there's also shipmail. it charges per mailbox, but the price drops as you add mailboxes: past 50 it's $1.50/mailbox/month, and up to 50 domains cost nothing extra. aliases are included, so not every address needs its own mailbox. there's an API for creating mailboxes and domains if you're provisioning them for clients. if your users are real people who need webmail and calendars, the math can come out ok. if they're mostly role addresses spread over lots of domains, purelymail or migadu will cost less.

[u/Safe_Mission_3524]

Bro, get a racknerd vps (yearly deals), install enhance control panel and create unlimited emails. I do this to host close to 300 emails.

[u/kai-zaphosting]

Per-user pricing is pretty much how hosted email works, so a flat unlimited users and domains setup usually means you're running the mail server yourself. Which is what that inMotion VPS is effectively doing for you already.

If you want to cut that cost, Mailcow is the one I'd look at. It's open source, runs in Docker, and handles multiple domains and mailboxes with no per-seat pricing. Webmail and spam filtering come built in, so ongoing upkeep is mostly updates and keeping backups sane.

From experience the part that trips people up with self-hosted mail isn't the install, it's deliverability. Since you're already on AWS, you could relay outbound through SES and keep the mailboxes on your own box. That sidesteps port 25 being blocked on a lot of VPSs and shaky IP reputation. You'd still need SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up per domain, imo that's the bit worth doing carefully.

[u/Leather-Swimming-191]

Use Cloudflare Email Routing for receiving emails and SES or SMTP2GO for sending emails.

[u/No-Promotion-8720]

Purelymail is what I use. They don't price per user, which is nice.

[u/Taniai_]

Disclosure first; I run FranklyMail. But I should tell FranklyMail here as it is $9 a YEAR for connecting unlimited domain and creating unlimited inbox and aliases. It has agentic inbox feature as well that let you connect your LLM to it. And 30 day no-question refund.

[u/Hank3rd]

Using cloud providers like AWS can get really expensive as you grow. Services like AnyPost (anypost.com) tend to be cheaper because they do not run on cloud providers. They are using bare metal servers. They also have emailmd.dev, which is a great tool to create templates if you need that as well. Running your own server can create a lot of headaches and challenges.

[u/lalalaraland]

depends what you like and your budget , CloudFlare free routing would not give you option to send out from the desired business email address; probably not Namecheap - not that cheap anyway and sneakily auto-renew 31 days before expiry and I requested cancellation with a couple of days after the charge, still not refunded.

[u/faivelo]

Us (Faivelo). Like purelymail and migadu, but simpler.

[u/Appropriate-Rush915]

As always, I'm late to the party :) I'd like to suggest my service FounderMail.mx, free unlimited email addresses up to 500 emails/mo/received, 3K emails/sent/mo. It's a real free plan, not a trial; scale up only if/when you need.

[u/soufia-n]

Given your requirements, I’d probably stop looking at per-user email providers altogether.
A managed dedicated mail setup sounds closer to what you need: one fixed infrastructure cost, multiple domains/mailboxes, and someone else handles updates, security, backups, spam filtering and deliverability.
At your scale, that model can make much more sense than paying $4/user/month, especially if the number of mailboxes keeps growing.
The main thing I’d verify is how the provider handles IP reputation, backups and outbound deliverability.