I learned this with my email forwarding app (https://hanami.run) as well. I have tried to bootstrap a few ideas, and just like the ops, I got married, I got kid, family problem, change jobs.
Then COVID happens and I promise myself to wake up at 3-4AM everyday to write code and ship https://hanami.run during that period.
I don't even worry about competitors, I just want to build a platform that I enjoyed to use and iterate every single day. Many small features were take for granted.
Such as we auto refresh DNS constantly so users with like 100 domains don't have to check DNS one by one to activate domain. I then supported cloudflare auto config dns to make thing even easiser. And auto refresh DNS means we're easily to got block by CloudFlare DNS servers, but I put the cost on me to make our user's life easiser.
Another effects of this showing up everyday is you are allowed an unlimited time budget and can try out cool thing.
Such as I recently expriment with OpenResty autossl to make our URL redirection work with HTTPS. Other day I experiment with leaky bucket rate limiting.
With a time budget, I'm probably won't work on that, but sometime I feel down, and knowing I have tomorrow I can use today's time on something that make me happy.
I had great delivery with zoho for year even use their free plan. They used to offer SMTP/IMAP on their free tier few years ago and continue to granfathering those my account.
If you like consistent UI then no one can beat gmail. Even fastmail/protonmail/outlook cannot beat gmail in UI/UX to me.
Stay away from iCloud is my advice. Their proofpoint spam filtering is the worst to deal with. Lots of people are going to have trouble reach iCloud inbox.
Anything but not iCloud. That isn't their primary business and consider level of Apple support and randomly ban/block people out of iCloud(you will find some here), I would advice against using them.
Give zoho I tried. They are very reliable, their spam filtering isn't as good as gmail so sometime legitimate emails go to Spam but that's a problem with any mail provider. Time to time you have to train spam system. Especially if you got a lot of email from people with a new domains email you first time. New domains that are created within 7 days and send out email are more likely to be flagged.
Then COVID happens and I promise myself to wake up at 3-4AM everyday to write code and ship https://hanami.run during that period.
I don't even worry about competitors, I just want to build a platform that I enjoyed to use and iterate every single day. Many small features were take for granted.
Such as we auto refresh DNS constantly so users with like 100 domains don't have to check DNS one by one to activate domain. I then supported cloudflare auto config dns to make thing even easiser. And auto refresh DNS means we're easily to got block by CloudFlare DNS servers, but I put the cost on me to make our user's life easiser.
Another effects of this showing up everyday is you are allowed an unlimited time budget and can try out cool thing.
Such as I recently expriment with OpenResty autossl to make our URL redirection work with HTTPS. Other day I experiment with leaky bucket rate limiting.
With a time budget, I'm probably won't work on that, but sometime I feel down, and knowing I have tomorrow I can use today's time on something that make me happy.