Announcing Cyniva Email Hosting

For the last couple of years I ran my own mail server. Postfix and Dovecot on a little VPS, full-service mail servers like Mailcow and Stalwart, etc. It started as a learning project and it genuinely was one, but what I didn’t expect was how much of it turned into ongoing maintenance. Running email yourself quickly becomes a full time job.

Here’s the short version of what that actually involves.

The stuff that actually breaks

Getting mail to send is easy. Getting it to land in someone’s inbox instead of their spam folder is the hard part, and it never really ends. You sort out your SPF and DKIM records, add a DMARC policy, figure you’re in good shape. Then Gmail decides your IP looks a little new and quietly routes you to spam for a month while it makes up its mind about you. You can’t even see it happening. The mail just vanishes into a folder nobody checks.

Then there’s the IP reputation game. My VPS provider had recycled an address that some previous tenant had used to blast garbage, so I spent a weekend filling out delisting forms for Spamhaus and a couple of other blocklists I’d never heard of. Reverse DNS records. TLS certs that expire at the worst possible time. fail2ban configs because the second your port 25 is public, the brute force attempts start rolling in and they do not stop.

I’ve used the big players as well. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 are fine, but they charge per mailbox, and the price climbs quick once you’ve got a few domains and a handful of addresses on each. As an IT guy, I have 6-7 separate mailboxes for different purposes so per seat pricing just wasn’t what I wanted. Especially when you want to use service accounts that don’t inherently need full access.

Eventually I quit looking for the right service and built it instead.

What Cyniva is

Cyniva is email hosting for your own domain, minus the server. You bring the domain, you get a control panel, and you run your mail without ever touching Postfix again. Everything happens through a panel where you add domains and create mailboxes. No account managers, no sales calls.

A few things I cared about while building it:

Your domain, your mailboxes, no per seat tax. Every plan includes unlimited domains and unlimited mailboxes. The only thing you pick is how much storage you need. Add you@yourdomain.com, team@anotherdomain.com, whatever you want, and the price doesn’t move. Storage is shared across your entire account (and upgradeable if you use it all!)

Deliverability that isn’t your problem anymore. The part I care about most. The infrastructure already has an established sending reputation, so you’re not warming up a cold IP and hoping for the best. You still set your DNS records (that part is unavoidable with any provider), but you’re not fighting blocklists on some recycled address a stranger burned before you. I have an absolute zero-tolerance policy for unsolicited spam/marketing email. It ruins the experience for everyone else using the service and no one wants it in their inbox anyway. My policy is strict and people who send unsolicited spam from my servers will have their service terminated.

A real control panel. You get access to a dedicated panel allowing easy access to manage all of your accounts. Configure outbound limits, per-mailbox size limits, etc.

Pricing

I kept it simple. Storage-based tiers, billed monthly or yearly, and you can cancel whenever.

The 25 GB tier is the one most people land on. If you need something bigger than 50 GB, reach out on my contact page and we can get a custom plan built.

Try it

Anyone who’s stared at a mail log wondering where their messages went knows exactly what I was trying to fix here. You can see the plans and sign up, and there’s a contact page for pre-sales questions and technical support. Whether you’re familiar with DNS records and mail hosting or not, happy to answer any questions or asisst with setup!