You're right, the wording is a bit humorous and certainly contradictory. I should rephrase the statements to say:
1) "free for as long as the service exists"
2) "we currently have enough funds to support 226 more days of hosting given that no one supports the server costs
Hosting a simple email service such as Pawnmail is cheaper than the cost of hosting many individual mail servers for each domain, so the incentive to donate exists as long as individuals and companies value the service. Being financially open is an attempt to fix the problem met by Google and Microsoft, who have suddenly discontinued their free custom domain email hosting services within the last year.
Agree. If you have a domain, you presumably have web hosting, and it seems to be usual for this to come with mail. My hosting provider will host email for any domain (presumably works like pawnmail...) and it doesn't cost any extra. Now, if hosting were $50+/mo then I could see the value of a free service, but you can get it for $10/mo, where the tradeoff makes (to my mind) a lot less sense. After all, you want to pay for services like these, if only to ensure they don't suddenly stop in 226 days' time :)
My ex business partner would argue with me about this sometimes. "You always take the piss out of my daily coffee [which cost £2, mostly to pay for coffee shop overheads]", he'd say. "You're so tight. But you make us pay for hosting and email, like it's a good idea. We could use Google for free." I'd just shrug noncommittaly as I supped my tea [total cost about £0.03, mostly to pay for electricity]. How could he not see? Over time these free services always get rolled back, sometimes without any warning.
(Obviously that happened to Google Apps, or whatever. Maybe that was while we were working together... I don't remember. I wasn't really paying attention, because I didn't have to worry about it. That's what you pay for.)
I received the announcement email today. I understand and appreciate them offering the email service for free for many years. It's a lot of work and I was always wondering how they manage to offer email hosting for free.
You are right but unfortunatly, hosting + emails ( via mailgun ) are not free, so at one point we will probably have to charge for the service if we have lots of users. We are not a company and we are not funded, this is a week-end(s) side-project :)
Because of the domain registration costs, using emailing with Pawnmail is not free. This should dramatically reduce the incentive of using Pawnmail to spam.
Btw, @vortico I'm using Pawnmail for my new domain name and it looks quite nice so far, thanks!
I don't understand the problem. Why is free so important? For $1/month you can get 5 email accounts with 2GB each at 1an1. If you go to $5/month, you can host your domain on Lunarpages and have unlimited email accounts. There are other services that offer similar possibilities at the same price points. With email accounts so cheap, why is free so important? Am I missing an obvious use case?
Except for the fact that there's no improved performance as a result. You don't get preferential mail queue access, there aren't dedicated mail servers, etc.
That seems to be much more what he's asking for or expecting out of a paid service, not "here, take some money for what I don't currently pay for".
exactly, thats just too costly. I mean it should really not be this expensive. Why email hosting is being charged per mailbox I do not understand. The maintenance is not per mailbox. Its per mail server and hence should be the costing.
> As a side note, maybe this is a good idea for startups. :)
But you said you don't want to pay for it. Rackspace Mail hosts the mailboxes on my domains at $1/mailbox/month with a 100% uptime SLA and 24/7/365 phone/chat/email support. There are plenty of other options when you're willing to pay.
Free is not possible. Someone needs to pay for email, servers need to be repaired/replaced every few years, the power bill needs to be paid, someone needs to ensure that the latest exploit doesn't compromise the server. You are paying for your email, the only question is how.
I use fastmail because the payment is direct: I give them a few bucks each month.
With free email (gmail) the payment is not direct. They are doing something to get money, but what is unknown.
If this service weren't free and weren't advertised as free forever (see the original ToS [1]), more people would run their own email server and e-mail would be less centralized.
Basic Fastmail is 3$/month. My com domain is ~12$/year. That's 50$/year for one of, if not the most important internet service tied to your identity.
Sorry to put it this bluntly but pay up or shut up and take it. Or do the work and host it yourself. Or make friends with some IT people and have them host it as a favor. Or whatever. You are not entitled to both free and good services. Google has to make money, what a surprise.
Whenever there's talk about privacy, support, ads, etc about a product or service here everybody's saying that they would pay for the clean thing. Well for email you absolutely can.
That's because providing a service like this really sucks the life out of you. The theory was that we could either drive people towards the paying accounts, or monetize the accounts some other way.
The stats said - free accounts very rarely converted to paying accounts. All the monitizing options for people with free accounts are pretty creepy, even text-only ads were bad. We hated that.
So we turned off free accounts. FastMail only provides paid accounts, and in exchange we don't need to look for another business model - we take payment in exchange for providing an awesome service and everybody is happy.
... and per the estimated price of $0.30/yr for 2Gb storage - our costs are much higher than that. On the other hand we have 3 full copies of every email store, two in one datacentre and one in another - and each of them is on RAID1 SSD and RAID6 SATA, all encrypted - with enough CPU and RAM to work fast. Metadata and the current week's email is on SSD, the rest on SATA. There's a reason we're fast, and it's because people pay us enough to be able to invest in full time engineers working on optimising our usage of the hardware resources we have. Feel free to read the source code for our IMAP server at:
(or have a look at the git repository at git.cyrusimap.org where we are pushing many of our contributions back into the master branch in preparation for the public 2.5 release soon)
I feel no guilt at not offering free service. We provide value for money to our customers.
Free is a marketing gimmick. It was never free but included in the domain package = domain registration + dns hosting + email boxes. The domain prices were generally higher than some concurrents. Now all of a sudden the domains see a price hike of 20-40% and each basic mail box that was included costs 57€ VAT included. So if you use the mail box this is essentially x3 or worse on the price. God forbid you used two mailboxes.
> Certainly until today the $ size of the addressable market in the small business email space was practically $0 given Google's position.
Rackspace Mail (formerly MailTrust) has about 200k paying customers for small business e-mail hosting. I've been paying them to host mail on 8 of my domains for years -- Gmail was never appealing to me for various reasons -- so the 24/7/365 support, daily backups and 100% uptime SLA easily made MT/Rackspace the right choice.
It's $2 per mailbox per month, or less than half Google's price, but there's a minimum of $10 a month -- so it's only cheaper if you have at least a couple mailboxes/users.
As an aside, Google also gives away web analytics for free, yet there's still a billion dollars a year spent at other web analytics firms. There are always ways to compete with free.
1) "free for as long as the service exists" 2) "we currently have enough funds to support 226 more days of hosting given that no one supports the server costs
Hosting a simple email service such as Pawnmail is cheaper than the cost of hosting many individual mail servers for each domain, so the incentive to donate exists as long as individuals and companies value the service. Being financially open is an attempt to fix the problem met by Google and Microsoft, who have suddenly discontinued their free custom domain email hosting services within the last year.
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