Earlier in mid July we talked to Data Wagon Founder and CEO CJ to talk shop and today, as we continue our Interview style Q/A sessions, we’re chatting with Pavin Joseph, the Founder and Chief Engineer of Mailcheap, a leading email delivery service. Mailcheap has been featured on Low End Box in the past and is an active member of the Low End Talk community. So let’s get started with the interview!

What can you tell us about yourself, how you got to where you are today, and your role at your company?

Hi, I’m Pavin Joseph, founder and Systems Engineer at Mailcheap. My journey with computers began in the year of ’97 when my father who was working away from home at the time bought a Compaq PC so that my mother could email him. I later learned that did not work out as my father intended but it gave me a very early introduction to computers and I’m very grateful to him for that (among many other things). At that time, it came pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows and I was only preoccupied with playing games. I can fondly remember Road Rash, NFS 2 SE, Age of Empires and then later Microsoft Flight Simulator 1998. I was totally and utterly hooked on the latter and for the better part of my life I’d wanted to be a pilot. So in the year Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov and the web as we know it was still in its infancy (both of which I wasn’t aware of at the time), these games showed me the potential of what could be done with a computer and to a child the possibilities seemed endless (even now, it does!) and thus was born a lifelong fascination with all things computer.

My introduction to programming came later in life with Logo, BASIC and then Java/C in high school & university. At university, I was also introduced to the wonderful world of Linux and it truly was a turning point in my life. Up until that point, even though I knew how to program a computer, the underlying operating system was an enigma, a black box which I couldn’t really understand or even thought was possible to understand. From there, the fascination quickly grew into an obsession with experimenting and hacking together single-board computer (SBC) projects using Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi and later VPS’es. My first dip in the hosting pool was from these initial forays in securing a cheap VPS and experimenting with what could be done with it. This also gave me the opportunity to better understand web hosting and development by creating simple HTML pages with PHP for server-side processing.

The first time I setup a mailserver was after Edward Snowden’s global surveillance disclosures in late 2013, more as a personal challenge and to test my Linux skills than as a potential business. It wasn’t until 2015 when I became more familiar with bash scripting, working with APIs and KVM VPS/cloud servers that I considered I could create a business out of providing dedicated mail servers without the traditional per-user/per-domain limits imposed by shared email providers, namely Gmail for Business, Office 365, etc.

From the outset, I wanted to provide a service that was cheap, fast, and good. Some consider this to be an impossible combination, they say you can pick any two but not all three at once. It took almost 5 years of hard work and constant iteration to get to a point where I can confidently say Mailcheap became all three: cheap, fast, and good.

Today, I work as a Systems Engineer at Mailcheap with my day-to-day activities ranging from sales to development and system administration but most of my time is spent on design & development (using Python, Javascript, Bootstrap, Vuejs to name a few in the stack).

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