Trying to find the cheapest SMTP and POP/IMAP email service? Here is my top 5 list!
There is a certain satisfaction from hosting your mail server. Over the past 15 years or so, hosting an email server has gone from trivial to very complex. It’s nearly always better to use a cheap email service rather than to host yourself. I have a short list of some of my favorite low-cost email providers.
If your website only needs to send outbound email, you really only need an SMTP provider. Many of the big bulk-email providers offer free outgoing email for up to thousands of emails per month. Check out Brevo or Maileroo and you are done. Both companies make it easy to set up outgoing email.
But this article is about full-featured email providers. Most websites need to send AND receive emails. At Maganda, we want cheap! Here are some of our favorite cheap email providers, in order, from worst to best:
Top Five
ZoHo Email: ZoHo creates beautiful, impressive, and well-thought-out apps. I can’t think of anything that ZoHo doesn’t offer. It offers business email for around $1/mo. It’s also excellent! However, I do not recommend this company at all. Take, for example, their email system. It’s so over-engineered that figuring out how to use it may drive users to tears. Even if you correctly set up SMTP, their finicky system may still not work for you. One pro: This provider is also the only company on the list with its own mobile email app.
Openprovider: Offers business email for less than $1/month; however, it tries to upsell something called “EASYDMARC” for nearly $7 a month. That looks like a scam. In any case, I couldn’t get their product to work at the time of writing; it appears to be buggy. But for only 70 pennies a month, you might want to give it a try. The UI seemed to be somewhat buggy. I didn’t bother trying to test if their email system actually worked. It probably does.
Namecheap is known for their low-margin products and services. Their business email starts around $15/yr. It is worth checking out. It’s been a few years since I tried their email service, but I can vouch that it is legit, and I had no problems with it.
Purelymail: If you need unlimited everything (especially domains), then give them a try. The UI isn’t fancy, but I had no problems setting up working email with them. Their service is really only for experts/developers for now—until they offer a more polished UI. This service is a winner for their honest pricing and unlimited domains. At $10/yr, it outshines all of its competitors.
Mailafiniti: I’m actually using this service now. For $15/yr, they offer a very polished interface. The one problem I see with them is they aren’t completely clear about the terms. Before I purchased a plan, their chatbox told me that I could host as many domains as I wanted. Indeed I can, but each additional domain is $15. After fighting with ZoHo mail for days, I will just feel relieved if their service works well for me. If not, I will check out Purelymail again.
Update: Mailafiniti replied gracefully to this article:
“I’d love to clear up the pricing: Mailafiniti does not charge per domain. You can connect as many domains as you like at no extra cost. Our pricing is based purely on the number of email accounts (mailboxes) you create, nothing else.
So if you connect 5 domains but only create 2 mailboxes, you only pay for those 2 mailboxes. That’s it. Plans start at $1.25/user/month (billed annually) with 10GB storage per mailbox.
It sounds like our chatbot communicated this poorly, that’s on us, and something we’re fixing. I’m sorry it caused frustration before you purchased.
”
Conclusion
I requested a refund from Mailafiniti because of the misunderstanding about the number of domains supported. I have a lot of domains. At this time, you can add 100+ domains, but they all forward to the same main mailbox email address. Therefore, you need a new “mailbox” ($15/yr) for each domain if you need full customization for any specific domain. So I went back to Purelymail and to my delight, they had revamped their UI just last week! The UI is now effortless to use and polished, and everything just works. My emails are going out without any fuss at all (i.e., auth errors).
I’m trying to run a business here. I don’t have time to fight with or debug other people’s email systems, nor do I want to be taken advantage of due to misleading or missing terms of service. Purelymail clearly wins here with its generous $10/yr tier. If you only have one domain to deal with, you should not overlook Mailafiniti’s superior UI.
PS: I do not get a commission from any links within this article.