I mean being able to set up [email protected] as a proper inbox that can send and receive mail without forwarding to another email. Having a web interface for it would be cool but I think a lot of people could also configure existing email clients to access it (at least at the start).

Google Suite is something like $5 / month per domain name so offering that as a free feature would be a pretty big deal.

Google Suite starts at $5 per email address per month; I think asking for free email accounts is beyond the product offering of domain registration/renewal.

And they probably want to reserve usage of their domain for email so you know it's a staff member you're dealing with, which is why google gives away gmail.com addresses, not google.com addresses.

Here are three less expensive email options for you:

1. get a VM and install exim/postfix 2. OpenSRS https://opensrs.com/services/hosted-email/ 3. AWS workmail https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/

To be fair he was asking for exciting and meaningful ways to make it better.

> And they probably want to reserve usage of their domain for email so you know it's a staff member you're dealing with, which is why google gives away gmail.com addresses, not google.com addresses.

These inboxes would be for your custom domain that you registered, not @cloudflare.com for everyone. I used that for his because it sounds like he works there.

Yours would be [email protected].

Looks like opensrs requires to pay a one-time $95 fee. Can one use just hosted email on their domains at $0.5/mo?

Most places and projects I've worked in the past 10 years or so have used GSuite or similar for inboxes, and Amazon SES or similar for programatically sending email. Those that didn't (shared-hosted websites on CPanel installations seemingly do still exist in 2018) had access to webmail in the hosting panel or as an installable application.

Yeah right now I use email forwarding and SES to send emails (which required setting up an address that belongs to my domain, such as [email protected]).

In this case I forwarded that email to my gmail account and it all works, but it's not perfect.

In either case, having at least email forwarding or an inbox is essential for a lot of common things you'd want to do on a domain. Forwarding works ok to avoid $60 / year for Google's offerings but has some limitations.

This is coming at it from the POV of just setting up a VPS to host some sites and wanting to accept email from your domain name without paying any more than what the domain cost to register.

I think this use case is super common, especially on HN.

No one thought Let's Encrypt would step up and offer a top tier free SSL solution. If it can be done for SSL, it can be done for real inboxes. :)