All I wanted was a custom domain email

After two years owning jacobg.co the author wanted a bring-your-own-domain email that was cheap, supported unlimited addresses, verified sending, and worked with Apple Mail. Several approaches were tried: Cloudflare Email Routing handled inbound forwarding but left sending unresolved and occasionally delayed; Mailflare, an open-source Cloudflare-based inbox that uses Resend for outbound delivery, sounded ideal but failed to provide reliable, authenticated sending due to reputation and deliverability complexities; Purelymail offered a low-cost (~$10/year) IMAP/SMTP service with unlimited addresses and privacy-friendly defaults and would have been a simple, dependable choice; and traditional enterprise options like Google Workspace worked but were overkill and costly for a single personal domain.

The chosen solution was Foundermail, which integrates with Cloudflare, provides standard SMTP/IMAP credentials for Apple Mail, supports multiple addresses, and handles verified outbound email at a personal-friendly price. Setup was straightforward and performance met expectations, although one initial restriction required a request to enable sending to new addresses that hadn’t previously contacted the account. The main takeaway is that receiving mail is simple; building reliable, authenticated outbound delivery - DNS records, reputation, and provider trust - is the real challenge, so Foundermail is the practical compromise for now.