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What are some (paid) alternatives to using G-Suite for emails? Context: We're a small but relatively old SaaS company. Been happily using G Suite's free tier
by herodoturtle 5y ago
What are some (paid) alternatives to using G-Suite for emails?
Context:
We're a small but relatively old SaaS company.
Been happily using G Suite's free tier since day 1 - only for email.
This announcement is a tad disappointing, but as other commenters have said, 10 years of a free product is pretty great.
We'll likely upgrade to Google's paid tier, but out of curiosity, since we're switching to a paid service, we may as well explore alternatives too.
Just need cloud email accounts for around 8 users, and with minimal risk of being flagged as spam.
Thanks!
- petemir 5y agoI used zoho for a long time, free tier.
- MPSimmons 5y agoI use Zoho for some personal projects, and enjoy it. It's very full featured with a la carte pricing for additional services.
- ValentineC 5y agoI used Zoho for an event's domain, and didn't like how they removed POP/IMAP for their free version without any prior notice. I'd trust them not to pull the rug any further even less than Google.
- killerpopiller 5y agoI am happy with MS 365
- sigzero 5y agoI already pay yearly for the apps. I can roll that cost in and it might be fine.
- cpach 5y agoFastmail.
- klaussilveira 5y agoFastmail is great. Clean, simple pricing. Efficient, stable. It never gets in your way.
- jason0597 5y agoSeconding Fastmail. I pay about £45/yr for it and I am very satisfied with all the features it provides. What I most value however is the no-bullshit attitude from the Fastmail team. No random killing of features, no ads, no sudden UI changes. It might feel simple and old, but I like it simple and old.
- herodoturtle 5y agoHeya we're looking into migrating to Fastmail based on the recommendations here (including yours). Have you had any issues with your outgoing mails being flagged as spam? That's a (perhaps slightly paranoid) concern of ours, given Google's clout. And to be clear, I'm not talking about spammy / bulk emails. I mean your standard day-to-day personalised emails (customer support etc.).
- Hard_Space 5y agoI just moved my domain mail to Fastmail, and everything arrives perfectly. I'm annoyed that I was bullied into this by the fact that 'unknown' mail servers are third-class citizens, but at least the problem is solved. Some paranoid thread in me fears that Google will find a problem with Fastmail's IP range and credentials this spring (among others), in order to consolidate the Gmail upgrade cash avalanche, but I'm hoping that's just me with my tinfoil hat on too tight.
- techsupporter 5y agoI use Fastmail for personal e-mail for myself and two family members and where I work uses Microsoft's Office 365. I've never had issues with mails I send from Fastmail landing in spam, even to Google users, and I prefer their webmail UI over Outlook for the web or whatever it's called these days.
- 422long 5y agoAlso looking for recommended paid/simple alternatives. Email only. Been using it for family email on a custom domain and am not looking forward to funding a dozen accounts every month for eternity.
- grzaks 5y agoWe have migrated 150+ accounts from GWorkspace to M365 last year. Better price, more features.
- wodenokoto 5y agoIf you’re not using the productivity suite (docs, drive, sheets and whatnot) why not go with the little guy and use Fastmail? $5/user with 30gb or 100gb per user for $9/month Their support replies faster than google :)
- herodoturtle 5y agoFastmail looks great, thanks for the recommendation. And I see they support custom domains too: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058753394-Custom-Domains-with-Fastmail https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058753394-Cus... Ticks all our boxes (admittedly our needs are very basic).
- dangoor 5y agoI switched from gmail to Fastmail a couple of years ago and the gmail import worked really well, too!
- herodoturtle 5y agoThis is a really helpful tip, thanks!
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoDoes Google support ever reply???!
- area51org 5y agoRarely if ever, AFAIK.
- zippergz 5y agoI think they have always replied to me (as a paying customer). Now, whether their reply has any relevance to the question I asked, let alone solves my problem, is another issue entirely. I have at times wondered if they just have a random reply generator that doesn't look at anything except the subject line of the request.
- dekoruotas 5y agoIn my case for a personal email account I'll try DNS email forwarding: https://improvmx.com/ https://improvmx.com/
- punkspider 5y agoAlso an https://improvmx.com https://improvmx.com user. Recently Cloudflare also started enabling email forwarding. I believe it's still in Beta, and with the sites I've got in Cloudflare I got approved 2 weeks-ish after applying. As for sending emails, I think you can use something like how ImprovMX suggests https://improvmx.com/guides/send-emails-using-gmail/ https://improvmx.com/guides/send-emails-using-gmail/
- techsupporter 5y agoThis looks a lot like a direct clone of https://forwardemail.net/ https://forwardemail.net/, except that ImprovMX isn't open source. I wonder which came first? I like simplelogin.io (also open source, so can be selfhosted) because the aliases can be used to send and receive, though you do have to set the domain up on their platform first.
- cx42net 5y agoI can answer that easily (I'm the founder of ImprovMX). Forwardemail was created well after us (ImprovMX goes back to 2013). We are not Opensource, but that doesn't mean we track user's email (we don't, we wrote about it: https://improvmx.com/are-you-reading-my-emails/ https://improvmx.com/are-you-reading-my-emails/). On the contrary, screaming to anyone that one uses Opensource doesn't mean they respect user's privacy (like Forwardemail does): take their way of forwarding for instance: you need to add your email in the DNS settings, publicly available... they have a odd definition of privacy. And don't get me started on their homepage full of misleading messages ... ;)
- pcarolan 5y ago[Basecamp](https://basecamp.com/ https://basecamp.com/) + [Hey](https://www.hey.com/ https://www.hey.com/)
- brnt 5y agoPretty satisfied with Postale.io
- uallo 5y agohttps://protonmail.com/ https://protonmail.com/
- herodoturtle 5y agoThanks will check this out. Hand't heard of them before. Slightly more expensive than Fastmail but seems like better security / privacy considerations. That said, the space per inbox seems far more limited. Seems we have some interesting options here!
- arbitrage 5y agoDidn't proton's compliance canary die not too long ago?
- wayoutthere 5y agoSure, but let’s also be realistic that any service large / secure enough to trust your email to will also be large enough to have drawn the attention of entities that can force them to do things against their will.
- mdcfrancis 5y agoAmazon WorkMail, part of the AWS suite of tools, $4/month/user last I looked. If you host your domain on route53 setup is painless. It's an exchange server compatible service and provides some MDM functionality.
- herodoturtle 5y agoThanks, will check it out! For those that are reading this too and are curious: https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/ https://aws.amazon.com/workmail/
- fbn79 5y agoAruba. Biggest hosting provider in italy has a very competitive mail service. Domain + 5 mailbox x 1gb each at 9 euro/year. At 20 Euro year you can create unlimited mailboxes x 1gb each. https://hosting.aruba.it/en/email.aspx https://hosting.aruba.it/en/email.aspx
- thinkindie 5y agoI don't think you can compare in any way Aruba mail service against Gmail. Even just for the webmail or the mobile app.
- fbn79 5y agoWhy not? It's an IMAP service, you could use it with the client you prefer. Obvius GMAIL far way better for mail classification (promotional, transactional, spam). But I doubt any other service can do better than GMAIL with features.
- thinkindie 5y agogmail webmail client and spam/classification filters are already something above by far any other competitor. This is the added value I would like to see in a mailbox, not just another IMAP service.
- TheSocialAndrew 5y agoWe're switching over to Zoho for our latest startup. If you have more than one Google account the switching between personal and business is a nightmare. Some features are unavailable for one or the other, and it keeps switching between the two accounts seemingly randomly. It constantly asks for a password when you want to switch back. It's more headache than it is worth to be signed in to Google.
- tipsysquid 5y agoThe only issue I have with Zoho is that their calendar solution falls well behind Google's. Between the scheduling, the Android widget, and notifications, it just really doesn't feel to have the same clarity as Google's. Could just be my experience, but I'm considering moving back to Google for my personal email just for that.
- SergeAx 5y agoG Suite Business Starter is $6/user. Even if you find something viable for, say, $3/user (and I really doubt so), it just not worth the fuss with migration.
- rssoconnor 5y agoFrom what I've read, Rackspace Email is $3 per user per month. And iCloud+ is $1/month for up to 5 users for 5 domains with up to 3 addresses per domain per user.
- SergeAx 5y agoIs it available for customers without iPhones?
- lmz 5y agoYou'll need an Apple device to set up Family Sharing (for the 5 users part), but if you don't need that you can set it up in a browser.
- rssoconnor 5y agoFortunately one of my 5 has an Apple device. I haven't gone through the process yet, but it additionally looks like I will need to borrow a Mac or Windows machine to start up iCloud Email. Once it is enabled I should be able to use IMAP or their web client.
- SergeAx 5y agoOkay, so I have to count the device cost in. And I don't see an official Android client in Google Play. Seems like showstopper for me.
- rssoconnor 5y agoFrom what I've read, on Android you just go to Settings / Passwords & accounts / Add account / Personal (IMAP) and you can use ICloud email through IMAP. That said, if you don't have anyone in your family with an Apple product, this iCloud+ thing may not be right for you.
- searchableguy 5y agoHighly recommended against m365 unless you are a big company with a separate IT department. I setup a trial with plan to use it long term but I got locked out of my own admin account with no way in (I use a password manager, yes) and the support page that was supposed to work kept crashing my browser. Their Twitter account redirected me to that support page after explaining the situation to them. The quality of the service itself is horrible for an individual to manage compared to gsuite or any other service I have touched.
- yannikyeo 5y agoiCloud+ purelymail mxroute Migadu Mailbox.org
- pronoiac 5y agoI've had exploring mxroute as a low-priority todo item for a while, I like that pricing is roughly per gigabyte, not per domain or per user. Do you use it? Does it deliver to gmail and others ok, or does it go to spam?
- z0f 5y agoI've used it for years, no issues with delivery to gmail or outlook.com / o365. They've got a bit about their delivery system mentioned here: https://mxroute.com/docs/#/Presales/ipreputation https://mxroute.com/docs/#/Presales/ipreputation It's pretty basic in terms of webmail/core functionality but it receives and delivers mail well from the various IMAP clients I use, which is all I need.
- beagle3 5y agoIIRC migadu.com is $9/month, but that includes essentially unlimited domains and mailboxes (but only mail, nothing else, which seems to fit your use case). Which means, if you like to set up new domains for specific projects, there's no extra cost (other than registering the domain of course). Have never had a spam problem, but they stress that they don't consider themselves mission critical. I went with fastmail for my personal email, after a small-ish provider I had used (and liked very much!) between 2001 and 2018 was unable for a few month, in 2018, to avoid getting my mails sorted by gmail into spam -- no delivery problems since mail. Alas, despite wishing to support the smaller players, silent non-delivery of emails is a huge problem.
- snowl 5y agoIt's actually only 19 dollars a year :)
- max49 5y ago>but they stress that they don't consider themselves mission critical I'm new to shopping for email hosting and using your own domain. I know sending emails and not get flagged as spam is a hard, but is there any risks when it comes to receiving emails?
- beagle3 5y agoOnly operational risks as far as I know (uptime, routings, network speed, tls certificate validity, ….) How hard it is depends on how many nines you want in the uptime guarantee.