Selfhosted

Im pretty happy with protonmail. Email is kind of important you may not want to go with the cheapest option.

Moved from ProtonMail to iCloud+ last year since I was already paying for iCloud+. Proton’s lack of IMAP support on mobile devices is another reason I left. Their reason for that is privacy, which I understand. Privacy is important to me, but this is email we’re talking about. It will never be private considering the majority of people we email use Gmail, Outlook, etc.

All that being said, iCloud+ has been solid for email. No major issues at all on my end. The spam filter is quite strict for me, but I would consider that a good thing.

mailbox.org and skiff are „too expensive“ with 3€/month.

Ah... I do use mailbox.org and I've self-hosted with docker-mailserver before.

I agree, selfhosting mail is a really big pain, and at least where I live most ISPs don't open the ports necessary for mailservers, so I had to spin up my own server & it was more expensive than just using a mail provider. Could potentially be the cheapest option if I could host it from home & just use a RasPi or something

I'm happy with mailbox.org; the Standard Tier price is 2.50 Euro/mo if paid in full if that helps. Probably not the cheapest option especially since it's not unlimited, but they do allow domain matches at Standard tier or above, and there are other goodies like calendar/video conferencing/cloud storage & stuff.

I haven't seen anyone recommend Infomaniak Mail. I think it's great option. It's €1.50/month for 5 mailboxes with unlimited storage. You can add multiple domains and mailbox aliases for free. (no limit on either as far as I can tell) You get calendar and contacts as well. They also offer entire office suite, but that's going to cost more.

They offer pretty good webmail interface, that's not just Roundcube or other OSS webmail solutions. (which are okay, but usually limited by the fact that it's IMAP on the backend) They offer apps for mobile calendar/contact sync and they also have (quite new, but already very good IMO) email app. These are all open source. You obviously have IMAP, CalDAV and such if you want to use your own client.

It's not some one man show provider, they are pretty big cloud provider in Switzerland. So you also get custommer support that from my experience is pretty fast to respond.

Try mxroute.com. Full price is already not bad, and they have ridiculously cheap promos around December.

I've been using https://www.migadu.com/ - can recommend

I have used Fastmail for years now and it's always worked well. I use it with Mac/iOS. It has everything.

I've been using purelymail. 10 dollars a year and you can add as many domains and make as many accounts as you want.

I've been using Zoho for email on my domain. My residential service blocks port 25 so being actually self hosted wasn't going to work. I had rented a cheap VPS for $4/mo to run it on, thinking I'd have other uses for it. Eventually I just went to the Zoho free email hosting with my domain. It's been fine for years and I'm reasonably sure it has a catch-all as well.

Proton does have SMTP via Protonmail Bridge

Sounds interesting. Never heard before. On their page I see the "ksuite standard" for free with 2 emails/15GB. The next upgrade to 5 adresses/3TB(!) would be 3,29€.

You can use posteo for 1€ a month. For more aliases look at mozmail (mozilla) or simplelogin. Or try runbox if you dont care about encryption at rest

I've used mailbox.org for the last few years. They are a privacy-focused provider out of Germany. They aren't restrictive on the app you use, like proton, and offer an integrated PGP-signing solution.

I use protonmail with their family plan, it’s not terribly priced when you consider it comes with calendar, vpn, and drive storage as well. The biggest annoyance is probably that you have to use their mobile apps due to the encryption and they are not the greatest, but it does encrypt everything which I find outweighs the forced use of just their app.

I’ve been using Posteo with my own domain for a few years.

You do need an email forwarder in addition to the hosting since, as you noticed, they don’t support that use-case natively.

My DNS provider, LuaDNS, does that for me. I pay for their Basic tier (US$29/year) but only because I’m using a lot more than what the free tier provides. I did get away with free for about a year though, so that could in fact be sufficient for you, if you decide to go that route.

You don't need a mail server if all you want is a custom email domain. You can just use something like CloudFlare DNS to have them forward all emails to your domain to another private email address (e.g. Gmail).

I use mainly Protonmail, lately also digging Skiff a lot. It's a shame Startmail doesn't support own domains (yet?).

In the past also tried Tutanota, Mailbox.org, Fastmail, Posteo but never really liked using them.

Late to the party on this one, but Tutanota has been great for me. I prefer the fully encrypted storage. They recently put their prices up, though. It was €12 a year.

Just switched to iCloud last week. Yes, it does catch-all (although it needs to be enabled through a checkbox in one of the settings menu). It also does sub-addressing / plus-addressing natively (no menu setting needed), which doesn’t seem to actually be documented but it works flawlessly for me.

I’ve been extremely happy with it so far. Pairing plus addressing with some of the filtering rules allows me to direct bulk mail to the right place automatically. For whatever reason, filtering rules can’t be done on iOS but need to be set through icloud.com (not sure if they can be set on macOS).