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Ask HN: What are options to replace “G Suite legacy” when it's retired in May?
If you haven't heard yet, Google is retiring the free version of G Suite. See more here: https://9to5google.com/2022/01/19/g-suite-legacy-free-edition/
I have been using G Suite legacy for a decade with my extended family, and have about 12 active accounts.
I am looking for either free or low cost alternatives to keeping email addresses active. My main priority is to be able to send and receiving using my own domain with multiple accounts without any deliverability issues. Still being able to use the gmail web interface would be nice as well.
I'd love to hear experiences from someone who has either gone through this recently or is planning to do it soon.
- mikebos 5y agoIf it's cost you’re worried about there are some creative options: - Use Cloudflare mail beta with your SMTP - POBox.com (fastmail lite in essence) - Migadu - Servermx - Host your own solution on a VPS and use for example postmark for sending e-mail.
- Commodore63 5y agoThanks for posting this, am also curious.
- vhodges 5y agoI am using Migadu (https://www.migadu.com/ https://www.migadu.com/) For one domain and I am planning to move my Google For Domains domain over to it as well. It supports multiple domains and mailboxes (it prices on message volume inbound and outbound). For us our usage fits into the 19USD/year price point. Everybody else seems to charge per user/address.
- PenguinCoder 5y ago> it prices on message volume inbound and outbound Sounds good on paper, but then you get charged for spam emails inbound. Is this the case? So you'll need to pay for unwanted inbound email as well as your outbound usage?
- alias_neo 5y agoIt appears they charge for mailbox capacity. e.g. 5GB for the $19/yr. Is that total, for all users/mailboxes? Even 30GB doesnt seem enough, I have 10-12 family members on GSuite but I certainly won't pay £600/yr for them. We send emails with photos/videos to the kids addresses so capacity needs to be a little more than 5GB shared for us, even if I kick all of the extended family off.
- swansonator 5y agoFastmail is excellent. A bit cheaper than the new Google Workspace and less invasive. It supports multiple domains easily. Interface is great and the iOS app is just as great. I'm sure the Android version is good too.
- rastographics 5y agoAnother happy fastmail customer here. Switched from Google with custom domain. Calendar and contacts are better than Google's too
- aprdm 5y agoI only wish their iOS app worked offline
- 1_player 5y agoThe iOS app is meh, the webmail is much better but otherwise I'm a happy Fastmail customer and they're 100% worth the money.
- nopenopenopeno 5y agoThe iOS app is almost identical to the webmail.
- newsbinator 5y agoI'm a happy Fastmail customer, except there's one major annoyance in the web interface: large images, like screenshots, completely break the viewport. You have to scroll the browser horizontally for 2000 pixels sometimes, looking at fractions of the image at a time (or download each embedded image and open it in a local viewer to contain it to your screen size). Fastmail support replied essentially "won't fix".
- tut-urut-utut 5y agoAren't they an Australian company, which is from the data protection standpoint still worse than Google?
- trinsic2 5y ago
- sephamorr 5y agoI use a personal Gmail account and my custom domain hosted on zoho (for free) . Each user on the custom/zoho redirects all the mail to Gmail. Gmail is configured to default use the zoho smtp server as the outbound. This has worked great for me for years. When my parents' custom domain needs to be migrated shortly, I expect to set them up with the same thing.
- doctoboggan 5y agoIt looks like I wouldn't be able to use their free plan with more than 5 users, but $1/user/month isn't too bad. You've never had deliverability issues using zoho's servers?
- sephamorr 5y agoI haven't, personally, though there is always a chance that I have had low rates of failures that I haven't noticed. Said personal domain is a .hk domain though, and I have had an issue where US defense-contractor type domains silently block all email from China or China adjacent domains or IP blocks.
- akoster 5y agoYandex Connect? https://yandex.com/support/connect/add-domain.html https://yandex.com/support/connect/add-domain.html Up to 1000 mailboxes per domain https://www.yandex.com/support/connect/create-mailbox.html https://www.yandex.com/support/connect/create-mailbox.html For free, for now (though they now have a paid-tier https://360.yandex.com/business/ https://360.yandex.com/business/ which they have integrated somewhat into the legacy and still free Yandex connect)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- awin 5y agoZoho email has a forever free plan with 5GB storage for upto 5 users. Pretty decent. Have been using it for the past 3 years
- rootsudo 5y agoO365
- slantyyz 5y agoI looked into this as an option, and it's worth mentioning - if you need email aliases, you'll need a Business 365 account, not a Personal 365 account. The Basic (lowest tier) Business account is roughly same price as the personal 365 account, but I believe they are completely different services. If you have an existing personal 365 account, I don't believe there is a seamless switchover to a business account. You will need to create a business account separately.
- Osiris 5y agoI have a Microsoft 365 Family account and in outlook there is an option to configure a personalized domain. I haven't actually switched it yet so I can't confirm that it works, but the option is there.
- slantyyz 5y agoFrom what I understand you can use a custom domain on the personal/family plans, but if you're aliasing emails (e.g. info@yourdomain, notify@yourdomain) to a single address, you need the business plans.
- syshum 5y agoOffically you can only use the Family account on a custom domain register with GoDaddy, there are a few hacks out there to get around this but they could be broken at any time
- myobripicusni 5y agoI'm looking into this too, and found the Exchange Online Plan 1 which is a dollar cheaper at 4/user/month. I'm just trying to figure out if you can add multiple domains and aliases (that can be used for sending) with a single user license.
- minerva23 5y agoWow. No one here mentioned the obvious. Transfer your domains to Google Domains. Use the free email alias feature to rewrite your custom domain users into Gmail users (or wherever else). Configure Gmail to send from your custom domain. I do this. It works spectacularly.
- anon1094 5y agoDoes this prevent the whole custom@domain.com via name@gmail.com thing?
- charcircuit 5y agoI'm not sure what you are talking about so I don't think it's a problem as my emails look normal in gmail and it doesn't show anything weird.
- krono 5y agoYou might want to go over some of your email/message/security headers and look for anything unexpected (e.g. actual email address, device names, locations, etc.). The web-interface won't display most of what you'll find in there, with good reason. Finding a way to access those headers from gmail will be a challenge though. Don't think I've ever found that button in the same place twice!
- krehl 5y agoI don't think that this will enable you to send emails that conform to the DMARC standard (using DKIM and SPF). Might be ok for a side project, but in my opinion not enough for a small business.
- minerva23 5y agoYes
- feupan 5y agoThat didn't work for me. My domain is still set up with G Suite with SPF and all so Google is technically fully capable of sending emails on my domain’s behalf, but if I got the "me@example.com via example@gmail.com" text regardless. My setup: 1. log into example@gmail.com 2. set up "Send as me@example.com" with alias 3. enter example@gmail.com as the SMTP username Headers: ARC-Authentication-Results: i=1; mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of example@gmail.com designates 209.85.220.41 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=example@gmail.com Return-Path: <example@gmail.com> From: Me <me@example.com>
- jstx1 5y agoCan anyone clarify what G Suite covers and what's being taken away? If you sign up for a free Google account, you can use free gmail/docs/sheets/drive etc - that's not going away, is it?
- jtdressel 5y agoI believe you lose gmail/docs/sheets. Based on the below comment, I think you can keep some services like youtube and photos. That said, I strongly recommend every do regular google takeouts https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout?pli=1 https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout?pli=1 https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/s7v4my/google_requiring_all_g_suite_legacy_free_edition/hteoaot/?context=1 https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/s7v4my/google_...
- jstx1 5y ago> I believe you lose gmail/docs/sheets. Do you have any source on this? It doesn't sound right to me. I'm talking about the base free services that Google offers to everyone, not about G Suite. Over a billion people are using free Gmail, I think it would have been bigger news if Google had pulled the plug.
- slantyyz 5y agoAlso, if you are using your GSuite account with Google Play, any purchases you made could be lost.
- prirun 5y agoI have a free Google Gmail account and can use all those free features. I never signed up for G Suite or Workspace. I think the problem is when a personal domain name is used. I'm glad I moved from Gmail to Fastmail a month ago. After they screwed me over with Google Sites V2, I just don't trust them with my email address. It's tied to too many things, and if something ever went wrong, I'd be completely screwed and could not get any help from Google. I clicked their "Report a problem" button when trying to migrate to Sites V2, to report several big issues. I'll let you guess how many responses I got.
- 5y ago
- andreinwald 5y agoFree mail service for custom domains - G Suite alternative https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30006596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30006596
- jimmies 5y agoI am planning to move email to iCloud+. - Provides custom domain support. - Is cheap ($1 for 3 email addresses). - Has email web interface and imap access. - Seems to support contacts and calendar sync via carddav, caldav - standard stuff I can sync my other devices with. - Apple is reputable enough with security. Drawbacks: - No standard two-factor authentication like Google, needs an iPhone/mac for two-factor. - Migrating Google Photos/shared will be a pain in the ass.
- doctoboggan 5y agoI initially liked this solution but I don’t think it’ll work for me. There seems to be a hard limit on the number of emails. It also seems like you can only share the domain with your apple family (my extended family isn’t part of my apple family sharing plan.)
- aranelsurion 5y agoI assume by "hard limit on the number of emails" you mean daily sending limits, which is quite high for a personal user (500 per day)? If that's the case, Gmail also seems to have a similar limit. Or do you mean there's a hard limit on total number of emails you can store?
- doctoboggan 5y agoSorry for the confusing wording, I meant email accounts. It looks like you can only share the domain in your apple family sharing plan which means only 6 different accounts.
- unmole 5y agoDoes it allow having a catch-all email address?
- oskarc 5y agoSadly, no. It also pushed me back from using their mail services (and far more complex issue where my @iCloud alias stopped working at all, but they fixed it after a few weeks).
- achairapart 5y agoIf I ever migrate, what will happen to all the services I signed up with Google oAuth system ("Sign in with Google")?
- tut-urut-utut 5y ago"reset password" and then set your password instead using google single sign on. And then remember not to use any single sign on service but generate separate passwords for every service and keep them in password manager you own. Btw, the above works if you own the domain for your email, assumed yes since that was the whole point of Google for business. If not, buy own domain ASAP and switch to mail provider that allows custom domains.
- syshum 5y agoI have not done this myself yet but seems the process is https://old.reddit.com/r/gsuite/comments/s7t45q/g_suite_legacy_free_edition_accounts_being/htf7hot/?context=3 https://old.reddit.com/r/gsuite/comments/s7t45q/g_suite_lega... - Migrate everything (that google will let you) off your Workspaces to somewhere else. (critical you move email first as gmail mail box will be deleted when you remove the license below) - Upgrade to paid GSuite (its cool, you’ll cancel in a sec) - Add Cloud Identity Free (https://support.google.com/cloudidentity/answer/7319251?hl=en https://support.google.com/cloudidentity/answer/7319251?hl=e...) - Move your users to Cloud Identity Free (? nfi how this part works, I’ve not done it yet) - Remove Workspace subscriptions - No more paid services, but you can continue to maintain identity services
- dreamyfigment 5y agohttps://purelymail.com/ https://purelymail.com/ is a simple alternative I've been using since I saw it posted here. $10 a year or https://purelymail.com/advancedpricing https://purelymail.com/advancedpricing, mostly your choice depending on your usage.
- danlugo92 5y agoZoho has a 1 dolar per month plan, up to 5 or 6 users I think.
- vanous 5y agoSome European hosting providers have quite reasonable tiers for hosting with email, contacts, calendar, for example: https://www.active24.cz/en/email-solutions https://www.active24.cz/en/email-solutions https://www.hetzner.com/webhosting https://www.hetzner.com/webhosting Not affiliated in any way, but a long time customer of some of their services.
- da_rob 5y agoI started looking for options yesterday[1], currently these are the contestants: * Google Workspace * Fastmail * ProtonMail * Zoho Mail * Tutanota * (Mailbox.org) [1] https://roblillack.net/google-workspace-alternatives-for-families/ https://roblillack.net/google-workspace-alternatives-for-fam...
- chachan 5y agois Zimbra still a good idea?