MXroute, Migadu and Fastmail alternatives: what all three share

MXroute, Migadu and Fastmail are three of the few mail hosts I recommend without adding caveats. They also share one structural property: your stored mail lives on their servers, in accounts they administer, under the law of the country their company answers to. If that is the thing you want to change, moving between the three does not move you. Nisdos Mail is built the other way round — we route, verify and encrypt, then write the message into storage you own: an S3 or R2 bucket in your own cloud account, a WebDAV server, even a Git repository.

What do MXroute, Migadu and Fastmail actually have in common?

Custody. All three run the mail server and hold the resulting bytes; all three give you IMAP so you can pull a copy out; all three are considerably better than the mass-market default. What differs between them is the pricing model, the polish of the software, and which jurisdiction you inherit. What does not differ is who is holding the archive.

None of the three has done anything wrong. This is not a page about a scandal, it is a page about a boundary — and it is worth saying that the boundary only matters to some buyers.

Why do people look for an MXroute alternative?

Usually because of where the servers are, occasionally because of the shared-hosting model, almost never because of the operator.

MXroute has hosted mail since 2013 with unlimited domains and unlimited accounts on every plan, a three-page website with no marketing funnel attached, and an operator who answers technical questions publicly under his own name. Their headline — email hosting for people who are tired of thinking about email — is an accurate description of the product. Lifetime plans sold in past promotions mean some customers paid once, years ago, and are still running. That is an unusual amount of accumulated goodwill for this industry, and it is earned.

The arrangement underneath is classic shared hosting: your mailboxes are accounts on servers the provider owns, places and administers, alongside other customers, managed through a control panel. That is why “mxroute european alternative” is a search phrase that exists. When bytes have to physically sit somewhere specific, server placement being the host’s decision is the wall you hit.

Why do people look for a Migadu alternative?

Migadu prices by what you use rather than by how many mailboxes you have — unlimited mailboxes, domains and aliases on every plan, bounded instead by storage and daily message volume. That is the sanest pricing model in mail hosting, and the philosophy around it (no ads, no tracking, plain documentation) is the real thing rather than a marketing register.

Migadu is Swiss and hosts in Europe, which answers the residency question for most European buyers. “migadu gdpr” is a live autocomplete query, and for the overwhelming majority of people asking it, the honest answer is that Migadu is fine. Where it stops is the same place MXroute stops: the mailboxes are on the provider’s servers. A requirement written as “in an account we control” is not satisfied by a provider being in the right country.

Why do people look for a Fastmail alternative?

Fastmail is the most finished software in this comparison, and the reasons people leave are jurisdiction and per-seat pricing rather than quality.

Running since 1999, Fastmail has first-party iOS and Android apps, calendars and contacts that actually sync, aliases on your own domains, masked addresses, and support staffed by people who understand mail. Fastmail’s engineers wrote JMAP — the modern JSON protocol for mail synchronisation, published as RFCs in 2019 — and shipped the first serious implementation. If someone needs mail that a non-technical colleague will not complain about, this is the recommendation.

Two structural facts follow from where the data sits. Fastmail is an Australian company storing customer data in US datacenters, so data in the US is within reach of the US CLOUD Act while the company answers to Australian law. And the bill scales with people, because the plans are per user. Neither point is a criticism of the product; both are properties you take on when you buy it.

How do the four models compare?

	MXroute	Migadu	Fastmail	BYOS email (Nisdos Mail)
Custody of stored mail	Provider’s servers	Provider’s servers	Provider’s servers	Your own bucket or server
Jurisdiction choice	Server location set by the host	Europe, set by the host	US-stored, Australian company	Your storage region and operator
Own domain	Unlimited domains	Unlimited domains	Supported on paid plans	Unlimited domains
Addresses	Unlimited accounts	Unlimited mailboxes and aliases	Aliases on your domains, users billed per seat	Unlimited addresses and aliases
Export	IMAP copy, after the fact	IMAP copy, after the fact	IMAP, JMAP, data download	Nothing to export — the archive is already yours
Apps and polish	Webmail plus any IMAP client	Webmail plus any IMAP client	First-party mobile and desktop apps	Webmail today, no mobile apps
Pricing basis	Per plan, accounts unlimited	Storage and daily message volume	Per user	Stored volume

Row two decides procurement documents. Row six decides whether your colleagues like you.

Who should stay where they are?

Most readers of this page. Specifically:

If you hold an MXroute lifetime plan and the server location satisfies you, stay. Nothing I sell competes with already paid for.

If Migadu’s usage-based model fits your team and European hosting meets your requirement, stay. Migadu solved a real problem — per-mailbox billing — and solved it before we existed.

If the mail has to work well on phones for people who do not want to think about email, Fastmail, and it is not a close call. We have webmail and no mobile apps.

And if nobody on your team knows what a bucket policy is, custody is a liability rather than a feature. Storage you own is storage you can misconfigure.

What does taking custody actually cost you?

Operational responsibility, plus some software polish.

Your bucket is yours to break. A permissive access policy publishes your mail; a deleted bucket deletes it; expired credentials stop delivery until someone fixes them. Our receiving edge refuses to acknowledge a message until your storage has it, so the sending server retries rather than dropping mail — but a broken bucket is still a broken mailbox, and the person who fixes it is you.

Spam filtering also has to read plaintext before anything is encrypted at rest. That is true of every provider on this page, ours included, and any service claiming otherwise is describing something that cannot work.

Custody is worth buying when a written requirement — residency, jurisdiction, or the sentence “the archive stays in an account we own” — is the thing a vendor promise cannot satisfy. Short of that, three good providers already exist, and I have just spent most of this page recommending them.