Switching to Migadu

I decided to switch my mail host from the default supplied one to something that seemed a bit more reliable. Friends and family use emails on my domains, and I have received occasional feedback that mails were not delivered, mailboxes not accessible, etc...

The Search

• fastmail was an obvious first choice, but their pricing is a bit steep, as it comes with calendars, file storage etc, which I already have thanks to nextcloud.
• Migadu was recommended by a colleague, and it appears to be exactly what I've been looking for:
  • Focus on managing domains/mailboxes
  • cheaper price, as it only provides email
  • switzerland based, so out of reach of USA (ish)

Migrating

The migration of my primary email went pretty smooth, the Migadu team did an amazing job showing exactly which DNS entries to add (less so on the ones that should be removed), and provided plenty of guidance on what to put in fields, and which values DNS providers may reject and what to do then.

Setting up DNS was pretty straight forward, and email started arriving in the right mailbox pretty quickly.

My primary provider for hosting+domains, WebGo was pretty good in this, Netcup, which I used to purchase additional domains, not so much.

After updating netcup DNS entries, it took about 30 minutes for the changes to even be visible to migadu.

Second Impression

The interface is very powerful, but maybe a bit too much so?

There appear to be many ways of: - adding a receiving alias - adding a sending alias (that may or may not also receive) - adding a login alias (that also sends/receives) - adding a redirect (that does not send) - adding a catch-all - adding a rewrite rule (that may or may not be a catch-all) - adding forwarding (which is redirection + copying) - delegations (which I don't even understand)

Big plus that you can enable/disable various things per mail account (webmail, sending, receiving, imap, pop3, etc...)

Update after three months:

Service runs quite smoothly, and I have since onboarded some of my family. One thing to note however, is that the "20 emails/day" limit is very easily reached when managing calendar invites. Outlook at least seems to generate an email per recipient for every action on a shared calendar event. Fun stuff...