previously mentioned i was using zoho mail for all of my mail services. now i have found an alternative that is cheaper and works better for what i need. it is called purelymail and its a simple mail service. i am currently using their free trial which provides me with fifty cents of credit. on their website it explains the pricing tables and there is no real “hard” limits, which is very nice. you pay for what you use, pay as you go pricing model. the switch was fairly easy, and it helped watching awesome open source’s video on it.

all you have to do is sign up by creating an email on one of their many domains, enter in some information and check the circle for the free trial. takes a bit to sign up and get your information processed, but once it is done it prompts for a phone number and type in that code. once created, you can login and manage your environment from the admin web page. adding domains is very easy, just follow their documentation of which records to add. i recommend that you setup two factor authentication for all your accounts and use app password for external use.

obviously, before changing all of my dns records, i used their imap tool to forward all my emails to the purelymail admin account. be sure that in zoho, imap is enabled for the user’s mailbox. after messing around i changed my dns records, verified they were propagated and i was off to the races.

the main thing i was interested in was setting this up with zammad helpdesk. i had previous issues, but were now resolved. though, i kept having issues with the email notification as it did not work for some reason. with purelymail it worked, but not without hiccups. it first gave me an error saying that i was not able to send mail from ‘[email protected]’ as ‘[email protected]’. which was interesting as this was a new error. turns out that zammad defaults to sending mail as your fqdn, whether it be sub.domain.com or whatever. it was always return as ‘@sub.domain.com’, and that had me stuck for a bit.

i however found the fixes, which were easier than i thought. my first idea was to add that subdomain to purelymail, and there is documentation on this. add the fqdn to purelymail and add the dns records as usual. where it says empty or ‘@’, that is where you put in that subdomain. you will need an mx record, dkim record, spf record, ownership record, and dmarc record. be sure to add notes or document this so that you know which one is which. once those dns records are added and propagated, purelymail now has access to send mail though that subdomain. and luckily this was the fix that i needed, now i was ‘authorized’ to send mail from a subdomain.

i did not need to create a separate mailbox as i can send mail from my root domain as that subdomain. i just needed those records to prove that i ‘own’ the subdomain and authorize purelymail to send mail from it.

i entered the credentials of my main helpdesk email and it accepted it. i did see in a video that it took the credentials the the person’s email just fine without the subdomain. not sure what the difference is, could be that i deployed it differently and the behavior is different.