Click here to read my previous post about setting up email on a custom domain with WorkMail.
Earlier this year on 1 Apr, I received an “AWS Health Event” email that read:
After careful consideration, we have decided to discontinue the Amazon Workmail service, effective March 31, 2027.
I was somewhat surprised by this, as the WorkMail web pages were redesigned less than a year ago. Nonetheless, it remained a frustrating experience on mobile and there was never an app for it. After a protracted period of uncertainty it has finally gone the way of all software.
Well, at least I had a year to switch to something else. The suggestions in the email were:
You can migrate to third-party solutions such as Kopano Cloud, Zoho Mail, and Zoom Mail, each providing WorkMail-comparable capabilities and frictionless onboarding for easy migration.
I tried a few alternatives. Proton Mail is very popular with a reputation for reliability and privacy. Plus, they’re Swiss! You don’t get much better political independence than that, surely. Any international legal challenges submitted by a naughty government trying to snoop on my communications will surely be ignored in a very diligent and punctual manner.
Custom domain DNS records
Unfortunately, what is not particularly diligent is Proton Mail’s custom domain DNS record checking. All email domains require an MX record for identity, and additional DNS records to verify that the sender is trusted and not a spam sender.
As I explained in my previous post, you can create the necessary DNS records with a single click for Amazon WorkMail, if you use Route 53 in the same AWS account. Using a different email provider makes this a little more complicated, involving copying and pasting special values into manually-created Route 53 records.
I attempted to set up my custom domain again using Proton Mail, but found the process quite frustrating. I checked and double-checked the records it told me to create, but they weren’t being detected. Eventually, I yielded to the message it gave me after telling it to verify the records:
Note: DNS records can take several hours to update.
This seems a little ridiculous. I don’t think anybody really expects to miss out on email for “several hours” because of a change of provider. Any automated system sending an email to me during the outage may very well take the bounce response to mean that the address no longer exists and remove me permanently from its list. Besides, I have never known DNS records to take more than 10 seconds to propagate globally. But knowing that, if I attempted to contact support, this would be the first thing they would tell me to do before actually attempting to fix my problem, it is what I did.
Fastmail
It did not work and I went with Fastmail instead, which appears to offer everything that Proton Mail does for a dollar more a month. The DNS records worked first time and were verified in seconds. The downside is Australia doesn’t have quite as much political clout as Switzerland, so I guess I’ll just have to keep my nose clean.
Pretty disappointing for such a reputable product! Maybe I gave up too easily, but if Proton Mail’s DNS checker is that unreliable, who’s to say the email function works any better?
Out of curiosity I tried to register an Instagram account again, and it worked this time! I’m not sure it’s anything to do with the change of email service though.
I thought I would finally be granted an insight into the lifestyles of the rich, famous, and people pretending to be rich and famous, but sadly it appears to have turned into just another wellspring of clickbait garbage.
Leave a Reply