Spacemail outage: stay or go?

Spaceship's house was on fire not long ago. The moment Spacemail's outage hit, I couldn't stop myself from writing about it. That post pulled the most traffic I've had in a single day, and I wrote it on a whim, with some anger still in me.

Read also: Spacemail is down, and I blame them, but mostly myself

Now that everything's restored, I wanted to look at the aftermath properly. Spacemail sent out the generic apology email, along with a list of everything that got affected.

The aftermath

When I wrote that first post, my instinct was simple: leave immediately. This had never happened to me, not once in 43 years of existence.

Then I saw how many other services went down with it, and that told me something different. The problem was never really Spacemail. It's that you shouldn't tie every critical piece of your business to one platform.

I spent some time on r/Spaceship on Reddit, and the anger there was wild. Same on X. Dozens of people are complaining because they host their websites, domains, and emails all in one place, with one provider.

I got lucky. I moved off WordPress a while back, and even when I was still on it, I never used Spaceship or Spacemail for that.

Where I went wrong

Looking back, I still want to support Spacemail. Everyone has outages: Vercel, AWS, Google, and other giants. None of them are bulletproof either.

What happened is I got swept up in the hype of negativity. My real mistake wasn't Spacemail failing. It was putting my most critical email domains in the same place as everything else.

The support inboxes, the transactional ones, the domains that need to always be reachable, should never live next to the low-stakes stuff.

I should have thought about this earlier. My mistake wasn't trusting Spacemail. It was giving one provider total authority over all the domains I own. That's a real single point of failure, the same way handing your entire backup strategy to one cloud provider ignores the 3-2-1 rule.

From a business perspective, dumping everything into one provider was a rookie move on my part.

The hybrid approach

So the verdict is simple.

I'll keep the casual, low-stakes, and forwarder domains on Spacemail, as long as the price and simplicity make sense.

I'll move the domains that cannot fail, the ones tied to my flagship SaaS, customer support, and primary identity, to a dedicated, battle-tested provider instead.

I don't see myself going through an entire cycle of changing DNS records, rebuilding email routing into my custom dashboard, and losing days moving things around, not while I'm focused on shipping a flagship MVP and planning content.

The hybrid approach works because it only means moving one domain off Spacemail. That's a trade I can live with.

Alternative email platforms

This isn't a post ranking the top five email platforms, but if I had to pick, it comes down to three:

• Proton Mail, based in Switzerland

• Migadu, my favorite alternative

• iCloud Mail with custom domains, which I already run on a few properties.

iCloud is rock solid, but it's not built for business use, so I keep it as a fallback rather than a primary.

Read also: Google Workspace Is Out. iCloud Mail and Spacemail Are In

My choice is Migadu. I like their approach: no-fluff, no bloated suite of tools I'll never touch. I don't need everything Proton or Google Workspace tries to bundle in. I just need the one thing to work.

One domain, moved

So, it's not a mass exodus, not blind loyalty either. Just the one critical domain, moved somewhere that can't take my business down with it if it goes dark again.