FranklyMail

I started this on 10 August. Three weeks later there are 12 people paying for it, 44 domains and 61 mailboxes on the box.

Yesterday one of them moved a live domain over and sent mail by hand to see what would happen. Gmail took it, inbox, faster than they expected. Zoho, same. Outlook and MSN filed it as spam.

That's the honest result of the day. Nothing looks misconfigured. The records all check out on both v4 and v6, IMAP through Thunderbird worked first try. It's reputation, which means it's time, which means there's nothing clever I can ship tonight to fix it. The customer noticed before I did and told me not to chase it, which was kind of them and somehow worse than being yelled at.

Quick context on the product: $9 a year, unlimited mailboxes and domains, 10 GB pooled. One plan. It can be that cheap because a mail server costs storage and bandwidth, not headcount, and everyone else bills you per human anyway.

Working right now: signup, payment, domain verification, webmail, IMAP, and outbound through a relay.

Not working: the IMAP import. Until this morning it could not finish a real mailbox. The biggest thing it ever copied successfully was two messages, and one dropped socket meant the retry duplicated 1,850 of them. I spent today on that, and this same customer is going to be the first person to point it at a fifteen-year archive, so I'll find out soon whether the fix is real.

They'll come back with proper feedback in two to four weeks, after they've lived in it. I'll post what they say, including the parts I won't enjoy.