We use the word “email” for two jobs that have very little in common. Most companies try to cover both with one product and end up with something that’s just okay at each. We split them and use a tool built for each side.
Fastmail for your team
Your people need real inboxes: name@yourcompany.com, calendars that accept invites, contacts that show up on their phones, and webmail that isn’t quietly feeding an ad network.
For that we recommend Fastmail. It’s a paid service that has done hosted email, and only hosted email, for more than twenty years. No ads, no reading your mail, proper DKIM signing and sensible two-factor login. Most teams we move over are coming from Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, and they tend to notice how much less clutter there is.
Every domain we manage gets the DNS Fastmail needs:
- MX records that point to Fastmail’s servers
- An SPF record that lets Fastmail send for your domain
- DKIM CNAMEs so receivers can check signatures
- A DMARC record with a policy and reporting address
In Cloudflare these stay DNS-only. Mail records can’t go through the proxy.
Beacon for your apps
Your software sends mail as well. Order receipts, password resets, sign-up confirmations, product updates, newsletters. That isn’t an inbox problem. It’s about sending a lot of messages and making sure they land.
That’s what Beacon is for, Shipped’s own sending service, running on AWS SES. Each message is signed with DKIM for the domain it comes from. Bounces and complaints are handled automatically, sender reputation is watched, and there’s a proper newsletter editor for marketing mail. Your list, your reputation and your send history all stay with you.
Why not just Google or Microsoft?
Workspace and 365 try to cover both jobs at once, and it shows:
- You pay per person. Every new hire adds to the bill, forever.
- The vendor holds the data, including the patterns of who writes to whom and when.
- Delivery problems are a black box. When receipts stop arriving, you open a ticket and wait.
- Leaving is a project. Moving years of mail out later takes real time and money.
Fastmail plus Beacon is two products where you had one, but each does its job well. For the same team size, the total usually comes in under what people were paying before.
What we leave alone
We don’t run your own mail server. Hosting mail yourself means Postfix, Dovecot and a tall stack of spam filtering, plus a constant fight with blocklists and the big providers’ filters. For most small teams it’s far more work than it’s worth.
We’d rather let a company that only does email handle email. We like owning our stack, but not when owning it makes life worse for the people we work with.