What does HN use for multiple domain email hosting? I realize I can create an alias/forward to an inbox, but I'm looking for something that lets you send as multiple domains but maintain a single inbox without having the dreaded outlook "Sent from XXX on behalf of YYY".
I already have email with unlimited addresses/aliases/domain with my hosting provider (a local-run no frills cPanel), I think most of HN will have similar setups.
Saw this on HN earlier in the year and have been slowly phasing into my life. I have mail setup for my domain and assign per-site aliases (hn@mail.com, fb@mail.com, etc). All of the mail just forwards to my gmail that I've had forever, though that is more of a matter of convenience and habit. The key thing is, I can spin up a new email whenever I want since I am the wildcard, and I control the host and am not tied to the whims of gmail so I am covered on both ends.
I use Fastmail, which provides very nice wildcard aliasing under a domain. *@mydomain goes to a single inbox. I can also create specific aliases such as foo@mydomain.
I use fastmail for this. It works great although my email address sometimes confuses people. For example, a small company I ordered something online from called me to ask why their business name is in my email address. I have 2 separate domains going to the same inbox, each domain can have any subdomain and email address I want. I can send emails from any of those addresses as well.
I personally do the last one (hn@mydomain.com with catchall). It works really well. I used to use gmail as my main address and all the emails from my own domain used to go through Mailgun with a catchall route for incoming mail (I also used it to send automated messages for my various projects from the same domain).
I now use Protonmail and on the 2nd paid tier you can have a catchall address.
The only downside of this approach is that if you ever want to reply or send mail from one of those alias addresses, it's a bit tricky. So if that's important for you, maybe try a different option, perhaps with the + method.
I use fastmail to host my own domain. I alias all users to myself. Any email I get to aliases that don't end in e.g. ".s" automatically goes to a filtered folder. So blah.s@example.com goes to my inbox, blah@example.com gets filtered. $5/month is cheap. I only use one domain, but presumably you could even host multiple domains using a similar setup.
I highly recommend Fastmail [0] for this purpose. I have been with them for 5 years, and they're rock solid. I have ~10 domains on it, they support wildcards (send/recv at anything@you.com), the composer has sane defaults for multiple domains (e.g. replies are sent from the address it was mailed to) that can be overridden when you need, and you can easily create masked emails using your own domain.
$50/yr for all that is a steal. They don't charge you per-domain or have any funky tiered pricing for the stuff that matters.
Disclaimer: I am not related to them, just a happy customer :-)
Note that if you're just using the domains for one user, you can set them up as aliases rather than seperate mailboxes to avoid stacking fees that way.
Using FastMail on my own domains. One account covers all the domains. Having more domains costs the same as one. They support several different kinds of address aliasing/wildcarding (including Gmail style '+' wildcards and multiple recipient). Their DNS is absolutely great with useful defaults.
> So, instead of doing johndoe+hn@example.com, I can do hn@example.com.
Fastmail has an interesting variation of this that supports multiple users on the same domain: hn@johndoe.example.com. My wife and I both use that feature heavily on our domain.
I point many domains to a mail provider. That mail provider allows me to create aliases otherwise known as email canaries. I also have my own email servers with a handful of domains and I can create unlimited aliases on them. My servers are great for inbound mail, especially canaries.
You can have multiple aliases for the same user. I have about 20-30 email addresses (across multiple domains) from my previous setup all aliased to my main FastMail account.
On top of that, FastMail has a killer feature if you like have different addresses for different things. For example, say your email is name@example.com and somewebsite.com is asking you to provide an email address.
You can just put in somewebsite@name.example.com and FastMail will automatically route that to your mail email as if you had used name+somewebsite@example.com. You don't need to do anything beforehand and can just create these emails on the fly when you encounter a sign-up form.
It simplifies things greatly and if you start getting spam on one, you can just block it.
Same here. I simply set up a catchall alias so <anything>@somedomain forwards to foo@regulardomain; very convenient. The fact that FastMail supports multiple custom domains, at least with standard accounts, is also nice -- even more so since you can (optionally) use their own nameservers and set up whatever DNS records you want (I use that for some personal websites), while they make sure SPF/DKIM records are always correct.
(Having a separate domain is not really necessary, but I registered it through nearlyfreespeech.net and use their WHOIS privacy service; at least J. Random can't easily figure out my identity based on the email address alone).
I use FastMail like this. They support both catch-all (comapny@domain.com) and user-specific forwards (company@user.domain.com -> user+company@domain.com) for domains with multiple users.
Is the only option to have multiple accounts?
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