Anyone have experience setting up an email provider platform?

Hello,

I'm interested in providing some email hosting, but would like to consult with someone (either free or paid) before even attempting this project. If anyone has experience with setting up an email service (similar to gmail), please respond! Here's what I'm looking for.

I want to set up an email service focusing on catchall addresses. (I THINK I've seen another website do it, but it doesn't seem to be too popular so I figure I could give it a shot) If someone could link me to the service I've seen doing it, that would be great. I have no idea where I saw it and I can't find it.

Target Audience:

- Personal Use/General Audience who are interested in tracking who has their email. For example, if I want to sign up for LET, I use the email let@myusername.emailservicename.com (or custom domain). If I want to sign up for a Vons membership, I use vons@myusername.emailservicename.com.

Pros:

- Allows you to easily see what companies are selling/sharing your information

- Allows you to easily block a specific email so you no longer receive it. If I find out Hostwinds has my email, I can just block the email they obtained and report them to spam agencies.

- It's cool? Giving people personalized email addresses could be cool.

- Could have prioritized inboxes, with specified emails having higher priority, etc.

Cons:

- Spammers will often guess random things like admin@domain.com in order to try getting a valid email. A catchall domain will catch those emails as well

- Requires you to be a little more "hands-on" with your email. Not for all consumers. Must be somewhat tech-knowledgeable

- Will cost a little bit more to set up a customized platform

Sending:

- Email sending will be done through a 3rd party like mandrill/sendgrid. I realize this is expensive, but I figure this is probably the most reliable way to get best delivery.

- Setting up my own solution may not be a bad idea either

Receiving: This is what I want the most consulting/help with

- Needs to support catchall

- Needs to be able to blacklist emails from catchall

- Needs to support dynamic subdomains

Webmail:

- Considering using RainLoop and modifying it.

- Still haven't put too much thought into this one

DNS

- Not sure if it should be self-hosted or not. Thoughts?

- Needs to support dynamic subdomains

Obviously there's a lot more to be discussed/planned, but I just listed a basic outline of what I feel would be a helpful service. If anyone has experience with something similar perhaps @Jar with mxroute? it would be great to see any concerns/comments as well as help.

And finally, I hate that I have to put this sentence here, but this is LET so: If you do not have substantial experience with a similar system (with proof), don't expect me to take you seriously. I don't mind paying for consulting, but if you're going to pull a (weknowwho) and say "pm me for pricing i can do this for you", I'm not interested.

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