Better Options for Free Hosting?

Hi Infinity Community,
Just putting it out there to see how everyone would feel bout asking InifinityFree to offer 2 options for it’s free hosting.

  1. As it is now with NO ability to email (yes I understand undesirables using it for spam), but it’s easy to limit outgoing mail to a number which leads to me option 2.
  2. Offer free hosting, but with a footer banner for infinityfree and 1 email account to send/receive mail without having to set up smtp mail. Having a limit on outgoing mail to a reasonable amount to service subscribers or allow registrations for blogs would be awesome. A simple auth code attached to the logo png and embedded in the footer would allow your server scripts to verify a site has your logo or not without infinityfree hijacking the page midload and adding their own possibly breaking the site or reducing readability.

Personally I like the idea of letting people know bout infinityfrees’ free hosting, having a banner in the footer would perfectly fine if it meant sending and receiving email from the site without smtp.

I couldnt find this topic in the community, soz if it’s been brought up previously

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Hey, Welcome to the community!

Personally I have no feelings about free email, I am happy using yandex, zoho or my own email!, As many previous email [issues] say it was buggy, awful, and was mostly down, even a limit of emails, 50 emails a day, for however hundreds of thousands is a lot of emails. :slight_smile: And there are options in the reselling system InfinityFree uses to force code onto users websites, so admin could easily force a banner or something on, but from my experience;
a, It messes with scripts like wordpress
b, It doesn’t look nice

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If your wanting to send emails from your website, just use something simple like PHPMailer and the GMail SMTP.

https://pepipost.com/tutorials/send-an-email-via-gmail-smtp-server-using-php/

The short answer: email accounts have always been a dumpster fire, and we won’t torture people again by bringing it back. I posted a very expansive reply about why it was removed, and why it won’t be brought back.

Just note that sending emails from websites and email accounts are different systems. Even when we had email accounts, email sending from websites was restricted. The reason for this, like you said, was to prevent criminals from abusing our servers to send spam email.

But then I hope you can also understand why installing a banner is not really enough to stop the spammers. A spammer could just setup a blank page with the footer logo, which would never be seen by anyone. They could then send unrestricted email to anyone to funnel traffic to their scam site on another domain.

Email providers would catch onto this and ban our network (again), meaning nobody can reliably send email.

I can’t ask iFastNet to go through the effort to build a system like that which is so trivial to exploit.

This should be working already. Like the KB article says, PHP mail is extremely limited, but it’s there. Registration emails for popular CMS are generally whitelisted.

Activity notifications are not allowed because they can get very spammy very quickly if you have a large number of registrations, reasonable amount of activity and send unsolicited notifications to every subscriber about every post, like and share.

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I’m 99.8% sure InfinityFree is powered by MyOwnFreeHost.

MOFH actually removed email from their VistaPanel, not InfinityFree.

So without having a valid email address for the domain on infinityfree (like NOREPLY), is it possible to send an email from my website saying “thanks for subscribing” to the subscribers email, using SMTP - with the “from” email field showing “[email protected]” instead of “[email protected]”? It would look better subscribers seeing emails with the actual domain name instead of my smtp email.

You can.
Just set up “from email address” setting on your SMTP script.
This is an example from Easy WP SMTP plugin:

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I will try that plug in now and let you know. The one i was using was POST SMTP.

Hi adisp007.
When i enter the details, using ‘alias’ type email address from the “from” entry at the top of the options screen of that plug in, I get this

The following From address failed: [email protected] :
MAIL FROM command failed,Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable
Sender address is not allowed.

If I enter the correct my actual gmx email details in the from email, it sends.

Also the screen shot you posted is different to the current version of the plugin.

Is there something else I have to enter, or click to enable using the dummy email like you have in your screenshot?

I mean, is email forwarding available to free hosting accounts? I believe I can then use an alias on gmx email account (i did see alias in the settings on gmx) so that the “from” address matches the domain. I know gmail wont allow alias without signing up to G Suite, but it’s all irrelevant unless email forwarding is allowed in InfinityFree.

Thanks but I have found out email forwarding has also been removed from freehosting plan. Appreciate the information you provided anyway.
you can close the topic.

Correct.

The admin may have requested Ifastnet to disable it because it would give him and all people who use the email service a headache.

Read here:

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Some email providers allow specifying custom FROM email addresses, others don’t allow this. Some mail providers may rewrite the sending address to match your own email address (AFAIK Gmail does this), and some may block the email entirely. It seems that GMX.com does the latter.

If that’s the case, you can’t send email from your own domain with GMX.com. If GMX won’t let you, it won’t work with GMX.

Instead of using Gmail, GMX or another free email account provider, you could also use a specialized email only service. SMTP2GO provides such services, has a generous free tier and can be used with our hosting.

4 Likes

Hi admin,

Yes, I learned that after I saw the alias list for gmx last night.

You see, I am writing a complete how to (which actually works, not like most) get a website for free, free domain which has free privacy, free ssl, free cloudflare, 1st page ranking, and reasonably fast loading times. It was just the part for sending emails with the custom free TLD that was the missing piece of the puzzle as I have only ever worked with hosting that offers at least 1 email account. There’s so many negative posts about free hosting services like infinityfree that are just completely false which is why I started the whole ‘get it online for free’ vendetta to prove it can be done easily, just takes a bit of time on the backend side of things.

So, GMAIL offers the upgraded to the paid platform for alias as per all the other providers, but information I read on posts saying they didn’t offer that for free was obviously outdated, hence looking at other email providers like gmx.

However last night when I was trying to get it to work I found out, gmail let’s you have I think 3 free alias email addresses to use with your custom domain for sending emails. Then using the free opensource forwarding site of forwardemail.net to handle any incoming emails (after making the MX changes on cloudflare ofcourse) negates the need for infinityfree to offer 1 email address. Had to use their 2 factor auth to get it to add the alias without flagging an error (even though it seems you can as it doesnt specially ask for the 2 factor code in the password section of setting up the alias), but that’s probably a good thing.

As a lazy programmer, if email was offered on infinityfree, it would make my life easier, but understand from any misuse by a user, it would make your life harder lol. Yeah i get it, using your free hosting, your life should be easier, but it never hurts to ask haha. Which was the original subject of this topic I created here.

Yes there are issues using a free email forwarder with email addresses being publicly visible (there’s other email forwarders that have a free side I believe with emails hidden from public like app.improvmx.com or similar but I just used forwardemail for testing).

Now that infinityfree seems to have fixed the no zip ability issue after the php upgrade, and it seems to no longer flag a resources violation just installing an app (like wordpress) from your cpanel, I think infinityfree is awesome for small sites. The email work around is possible, even though a lot of work and involves a few third parties which is acceptable on a free hosting site like infinityfree.

It all can be done for free if someone does not want to pay for a domain and hosting and domain privacy (and all the renewal fees). Is it worth saving money? Depends on the individual, but a lot of people starting out might not be able to afford all those fees. Most hosting companies and domain registras take your credit card details and store them and can automatically debit that card at any time, or their servers compromised and those card details stolen. That’s the part I don’t like about paid hosting. I believe in Australia it’s offense for a business to store credit card information without consent, but still every hosting company I have seen, stores credit card information without consent, or option to allow the customer to allow the company to store those details or not.

A lot of free hosting companies like Infinityfree offer limited bandwidth but at 50,0000 visitors to a site a day before being suspended (I guess that is a guide figure, it would be php calls etc as a deciding factor to that I presume) and a conversion rate of 1:100 ad clicks (1 click per 100 visitors), depending on a websites niche, over time, the effort could pay off if the website is just for LEGIT marketing/affiliate purposes.

So that was the reason for posting the topic anyway. As I put up last night, I had sorted it out, and thanking you and the others for their replies and suggestions. It good to see a helpful community, and an admin who offers help. Even on paid posting through other hosts, getting support can take days or weeks for them to reply.

When I have finished the editing, I am happy to post the complete guide on infinityfree or just a link if that’s easier.

Make sure your [email protected] email has mailbox/MX record.
If you have no idea about this, you can read this discussion: E-Mails & create it.

Gmail allow to set up email alias/from address up to 99 emails. Check this: Send emails from a different address or alias - Gmail Help
G Suite only if you need alias+its mailbox.

You may be misinterpreting the 50,000 a day figure, so check carefully what it means before telling other people: I think from memory that it’s for page loads, and if a page has other files connected to it, each of those may count towards the total too, so a site could be suspended for 24 hours if it has 500 visitors who look at ten pages on average with those pages having content stored as separate files with an average of nine of those per page. It may not be a good idea for people who will inevitably break that limit to sign up here and then moan about their site being suspended and write bad reviews about the service, completely undermining what you’re trying to do. The limit appears to have been set at a reasonable level though in that you should be able to generate enough revenue to pay for webhosting costs if you keep breaking the limit, so long as you’re prepared to have adverts of some kind on your site or sell some product. The good thing about free hosting here is that it lets you test your ideas and experiment with how to generate money from the site before you start paying out much more money than your site actually costs to host.

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