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by cutting off free users they just opened themselves to getting undercut by a smaller company that can offer fewer, cheaper, targeted options. I just wanted a

by cutting off free users they just opened themselves to getting undercut by a smaller company that can offer fewer, cheaper, targeted options. I just wanted an email for my domain and that's not worth 50 bucks a year. I'll just set up my own email system at this point, call it a learning experience and never be exposed to the rest of whatever was in Google Apps.

loceng 14y ago
They can play the game though, too. Offer good discounts for onloading users; First year or two free, etc.. Hell, first 5 years free. What do they care if they get you used to their products, and then stay a client for 15 years after the 5 year trial?
alanctgardner2 14y ago
For most people, the time and effort of setting up and maintaining an email server is probably worth more than $5 per user per month. For a company of 100 people, that's about 10 person hours every month, without considering the initial cost to buy the hardware. Not to mention the risk of something going horribly wrong and blacking out your email, unless you've co-located the mail server on enterprise grade hardware (which will eat all your savings anyways).
- indiecore 14y ago
  Yes and if I was setting up a company of 100 people I'd be fine with that because I probably have the cash flow to support that. I was in the middle of setting up a service for a company of one at the moment and having one or two redirected emails isn't worth fifty dollars a year each right now.
  - alanctgardner2 14y ago
    So, a real life story: I set up a free GMail account for my site, and directed all the contacts from the site there. I added it to my phone so I'd know when I got messages. I didn't really do much promotion, so I wasn't surprised I didn't see anything for a week. When I logged in from the web, I had gotten three emails from potential customers. Unfortunately, they'd been sitting for a week, and so it didn't make a very good impression when I did reply. A company of one definitely needs the most reliable communications it can get. Even if you're drowning in leads, it makes you much more credible if you don't have to explain to a client why their email bounced back. A delightful, relevant saying I encountered the other day is 'penny wise, pound foolish'.
    - indiecore 14y ago
      >A delightful, relevant saying I encountered the other day is 'penny wise, pound foolish'. hhh, you might be right. I'm really just a bit steamed about researching all this then getting home and realizing they had just killed it.
    - Dylan16807 14y ago
      I don't understand what point you're trying to get across here. Aren't you just as likely to forget to check a google apps mail as a regular gmail? Or are you describing a bug? Isn't that still equally likely with either option? Aren't both options crushed in effectiveness by redirecting to your main account, whatever that is?
      - alanctgardner2 14y ago
        > A company of one definitely needs the most reliable communications it can get Is that clear enough for you? Self-hosting is a poor idea because screwing up once costs you real money, probably more than you'd spend on a year of hosting at a small business.
        Dylan16807 14y ago
        Sssoooo you used a story about losing business when using gmail for hosting to say that self-hosting was bad? I'm sorry, I still don't understand.
        alanctgardner2 14y ago
        My point is, I made a minor mistake in configuring GMail. That was my own fault. Multiply that amount of configuration by a million, and see if you don't make a mistake. Do ongoing maintenance, and see if you don't make a mistake. Keep everything secure, make sure you're whitelisted by every major provider, and ensure no messages ever bounce one way or another. My point is, fucking up is bad and easily costs you money. Giving yourself infinitely more ways to fuck up to save $50 a year is stupid. I don't know how I can put it more plainly than that. At this point you're pretty much just trolling.
  - g-garron 14y ago
    I have the premium account for 8 people. If we were 100, I may setup an in house exchange or similar. I may have 3 more guys maintaining the email, web and the rest of Internet related hard/soft. For 8 I prefer $50 per year. Three more guys over 8 is ridiculous.
brown 14y ago
I did that for a couple years. I highly recommend it as a learning experience, but I concluded that $50/year is absolutely 100% worth it.
- shuzchen 14y ago
  That's $50/year for each user. Easy to stomach if it's only yourself, but add even a partner (not to mention a small team with a bootstrapped product) and it starts to make less sense financially.
  - zaphoyd 14y ago
    This. I've been looking for a good email solution for personal+freelance work with decent privacy, security, and reliability. I don't need 24/7 support. I am absolutely willing to pay for it. But pricing per mailbox with Google apps adds up really quickly even with just 4-5 boxes. I'd like to be able to make separate mailboxes for my partner and to separate several different classes of email (personal, business, limited access, catch all, etc) for security purposes. These things don't need extra support or space, I can't stomach an extra $50/year for what amounts to aliases with passwords. Has anyone found a good solution for this? I could host it myself but that is a lot of hassle, free email accounts have ads and rarely let you use your own domain. The best I've found so far is email through a shared hosting provider, but it has limitations of its own (no IPv6, no 2 factor auth, self signed TLS certificates, etc). The cost is similar to a Google Apps account but without the linear price increase per mailbox.
    - chimpscanfly 14y ago
      Have you considered using aliases in GApps? Different than the catch all, but allows you to setup specific email addresses. I use them for accounts, newsletters, etc and then create filters and labels in my one apps email.
    - gregd 14y ago
      I believe that you can accomplish what you need using domain aliases (which google apps for business makes use of). You can have up to 20 domain aliases that all point to one mailbox: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182079 http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1...
skyhook_mockups 14y ago
From my own experience I can tell you that running your own mail server is a massive PITA. There's a good chance that even if you jump through all the required hoops to improve trust for your domain you will still have trouble delivering mail to certain addresses (Hotmail is notoriously hard to get white-listed for). Then there's spam... don't even get me started on spam filtering. For me personally $50/year is a bargain considering that running, maintaining, patching a mail server is time consuming and has no real upside. As a learning experience it's fine, but in practice delivering mail (reliably) sucks hard.
- mjn 14y ago
  If it's just deliverability that's an issue, you can use the regular Gmail SMTP server for outgoing mail, without Google Apps. You just have to add the address you're sending from as an alternate address in Gmail. The rest is still a bit of a hassle.
- jlmendezbonini 14y ago
  >Then there's spam... don't even get me started on spam filtering. You could sign up for Google Apps, point your domain MX to Google and forward all your SPAM free mail to your private server from the Google Apps console. No kidding, I've seen so many companies that had their mail systems in premises setup a 1 user Google Apps account ($50/year) to do what I just mentioned above. They got rid of most of their SPAM and saved tons $ on wasted bandwidth.
superuser2 14y ago
>I'll just set up my own email system at this point, call it a learning experience and never be exposed to the rest of whatever was in Google Apps. And? Free users threatening to leave are hilarious (even better when they campaign against ad targeting and AdBlock everything). Google's decision pretty clearly signals that users like you aren't worth it to the company any more than Google Apps are worth $50 to you. Don't do business. That's the point of a market. I wouldn't pay for it either - I'm grateful that my Google Apps are grandfathered, but nobody is entitled to GMail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It's a voluntary transaction between two entities and, in this case, you and Google Apps aren't a good fit.
- blhack 14y ago
  What you're missing here is that the free google apps was a way for admins to get their hands into the GA ecosystem. Google already offers the product for free, just so long as you use an @gmail.com address.
- bad_user 14y ago
  I use Google Apps because I want to use GMail, but with my own domain. That's it. I'm not an enterprise. I don't need more support than regular GMail users. I don't have special needs, like managing what services are allowed. I just don't want a @gmail.com address. I see people here defending this move, but think of how services like Google+ make mandatory an email address that's managed by Google. That email address will now have to be a @gmail.com address for regular users. Now think of how you can register with any email address on Facebook or Twitter, an email address which becomes your online ID. By using your own domain with your own email address, if the email provider interrupts the service for you, you can always change your MX records and recover all the accounts that rely on that address. That's not something you can do with a @gmail.com or a @yahoo.com or a @hotmail.com address. If Google cuts off your access for some reason (like in case they find out you're under 18 or some bullshit) or if they delete your account by accident (hey, shit happens), then at the very least your online identity is not lost. Freeloading is not the issue for me. I am already a paying Google customer in other ways (I buy stuff from Google Play, I pay for Google Drive storage, etc...) and I would happily pay them $50 per year anyway. The bigger issue is that using any Google service requires a Google email account, with Google Apps being a mild remedy for that. How can I encourage people to use Google's services now? Not mentioning that 2 businesses are now paying customers of Google Apps, because of my freeloading and my recommendations for it. Also, WTF is it with Google and raising prices? Companies are usually cutting prices down, while they are raising them. This also makes it an issue of trust - usually when I subscribe to services, I expect prices to go down, not up, otherwise I cannot trust it. My trust in Google is eroding right now. What next? Make Chrome and Android proprietary with a yearly subscription for users? Lots of pesky freeloaders out there.
jrockway 14y ago
I used to run my own one-user email system. The hosting alone cost $240 a year. And I had to spend a lot of time configuring exim4 (and spamassassin and clam-av), figuring out which email indexer to use, setting up offlineimap, running cron jobs to archive mailing lists, coercing a friend to run a secondary MX for me, etc., etc. I didn't enjoy it all. And no matter what I did to reduce spam, about 10 messages a day always made it through. (And, when I was first doing this, someone trying to hire me for a job couldn't email me, because their hosting provider was once friendly to spammers and my aggressive blacklisting rejected their TCP connections. Oops.) Running an email server is hard and very few people regret paying an expert to do it for them. (As many HN readers know, I work for Google. But I'm not telling you that you should or should not use Google's product here, only that running an email server is not trivial.)
- indiecore 14y ago
  You might be right. I'm just steamed about a nice tidy free option being swept right out from under me with no warning at all. Sleep on it I guess, see how it looks in the morning.
  - mkr-hn 14y ago
    $5 a month for world-class email on your domain seems like a minor burden.
    - blhack 14y ago
      Per account.
      - mkr-hn 14y ago
        People in need of more than a few accounts would blow through the free version quickly.
      - jfoster 14y ago
        How much do you pay your employees?
hmart 14y ago
It's 2012, nobody wants to delete an email from the server. When Google Apps Standard launched (50 accounts, 1 GB per account, for free) business were consuming email using Outlook + POP3, deleting the mail from the server. Then you could offer 'ilimited' Cpanel based emnail accounts in less than 1 GB. Business and people have different standards now and consuming email using IMAP, letting the mail in the server, using more storage (7 GB / account) without paying anything. We can't back to the 1GB 'ilimted' accounts scenario. Google has influenced our behavior, has give us the 'first dose', now they come for the money.
rhizome 14y ago
$50/yr is less than $5/mo, what is the convenience of email hosting worth to you?
- spqr 14y ago
  I pay $4 per month for Exchange Online. I paid that even when Google Apps was free because it is vastly superior. When MS finally got their act together I couldn't wait to move my MX records off of Google's inferior service. Now that it's more expensive than the superior service, good luck Google.
- jimwalsh 14y ago
  Plenty of services offer unlimited accounts for $5/month. The amount of services offered in a Google Apps account needs to stop getting minimized to just email in this thread as it skews comparisons.
wbillingsley 14y ago
Or you could cross to the dark side https://domains.live.com/Signup/SignupDomain.aspx https://domains.live.com/Signup/SignupDomain.aspx I'm lucky in that I already have Google Apps and they're not starting to charge me. But if I didn't I'd look at whether there are reasonable free/cheap alternatives out there. For customers it looks like the end of free Gmail-for-your-domain. But for competitors I imagine it looks like the end of price gouging.
squidsoup 14y ago
If Heroku can afford to support free users on it's PaaS, it surprises me that it isn't feasible for a giant like Google. I can't see this move doing anything to improve what is arguably an already unpopular service.
- throwawaay 14y ago
  Seriously? You're actually saying that a service[1] with millions of customers and still growing is "already unpopular"? Show your work, please. [1] http://www.google.com/intl/en/enterprise/apps/business/customers.html http://www.google.com/intl/en/enterprise/apps/business/custo...
- alanctgardner2 14y ago
  Just a note, you outgrow the free Heroku implementation pretty quickly. Do you need SSL on a custom domain? You're now paying. Do you need more than a small number of DB connections simultaneously? The smallest production psql tier is $50 a month, or the annual fee for one seat on Gmail.
acchow 14y ago
Will your own email system have 99.9% uptime, two-step authentication, an amazing web interface, blazing speed, and IMAP/Exchange/POP3 access?
- spullara 14y ago
  Basically GMail only has the two-step authentication. The uptime is worse than that, the web interface is not that great, it is slow and interoperates poorly with IMAP/Exchange/POP3 access.
- raverbashing 14y ago
  " and a 99.9% uptime guarantee with no scheduled downtime" That is BS and Google knows it Why? Because Google can suspend your account at a whim and not even tell you why. Google did that to a friend of mine, yes, paid account, yes called support line, they basically said "tough, it may return in 48h"
Osiris 14y ago
I'm glad I already have my Google Apps accounts setup. I rarely even use the web interface except from work. At home it's all IMAP and Android. At $50 / year for Google it's cheaper to buy a domain from GoDaddy and pay for email services (webmail + IMAP) that are automatically tied to your domain.
fusiongyro 14y ago
I do this. It's not easy, but it's not as bad as most of the comments here would lead you to believe. If you have the wherewithal to run things on a server it's definitely within reach, albeit probably not a cost-effective way to spend your time. Let me make a few recommendations. I'm not a sysadmin by trade but I know a few things you can do that will improve your lot in life running mail. - Postfix and Dovecot. They have the right combination of ease of use, power and security. Don't overconfigure; try to get it working with basic settings first and then evolve it towards what you dream of rather than setting out to configure it that way first. - SPF and DKIM. I have no trouble getting messages to Gmail and I think this is part of why. - Make sure your hosting provider is not huge and very high quality. I chose RootBSD because they're small but highly technical. If you have a lot of spare cash, iNetU are quite good and sometimes help with FreeBSD. The larger or crappier the host is, the more likely you'll wind up in blacklisted IP space. (BSD hosting companies tend to be smaller and more technical, and BSD is great software, so I'd recommend that if you're interested.) Getting off a blacklist isn't a lot of fun and it's not hard to wind up on one, but I find being on a discriminating host is a good preventative measure. - Rely on IMAP. If you want webmail, try and find one that is really just an IMAP frontend. I tried and liked Roundcube a while back; these days I have IMAP clients everywhere so I don't know what the new hot stuff is, but IMAP is fantastic. - I strongly recommend you get an account with DNSReport.com. Their software can detect most of the DNS problems you can get yourself into that wreak havoc with mail. Odds are good you'll be doing a lot more DNS than before, it's a great tool to have in the toolbox. - Stay on top of your security updates. I recommend running sshguard and whatever other security software/IDS/firewall type stuff you can stand. Make sure you're not giving out a bunch of shell accounts with root on this server. Seems obvious, but people forget or get lazy. FreeBSD will email you a security message every day; if something like that isn't coming your way, consider trying to set it up. It tells me, among other things, who tried to log into the server, how many times they failed, what their IP was, and lots of other stuff. There are a number of nice upsides to running your own mail server. - Email can be hooked up to the database various ways. - Automatic emailing for free (keep an eye on it). - Scripted email handling for free (Procmail etc). - Get system-generated messages emailed (Nagios/monit etc., login/sudo failures, etc.) - Advanced forwarding/wildcard accounts. Anyway, I hope you do give it a shot despite the nay-saying. Cost-effective? No, but it's a blast, and many of the upsides would be hard to replicate with Gmail. Of course the web mail UI will be worse. Tradeoffs.
andrewhillman 14y ago
you can still get one free account https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/google-appengine/pVZfdeky-ow/TO1SmipM2Y0J https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/google-appengine/pVZfd...
xentronium 14y ago
There are alternatives to google that are free of charge. For example, Live (Microsoft service)[1] or Yandex (Russian google vis-a-vis). [2][3] [1] https://domains.live.com/ https://domains.live.com/ [2] http://pdd.yandex.ru http://pdd.yandex.ru [3] Major caveat: the interface is in Russian only now, but after initial setup it shouldn't be a big deal;
- gmac 14y ago
  Also FastMail.fm, which I'm very happy with.
  - sciurus 14y ago
    FastMail costs $40 a year to use your own domain. https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html
msy 14y ago
Rackspace email. Equally good experience IMHO, absolutely fantastic support, $12 a year per mailbox. Best purchase of a web service I've ever made. Your email is the skeleton key and core of your online existence, that's far too important to leave to a company that considers support an exercise in statistic management.
- cbr 14y ago
  > far too important to leave to a company that > considers support an exercise in statistic management My impression is that paid Google Apps support is pretty good: http://contact.googleapps.com/ http://contact.googleapps.com/
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- munger 14y ago
  Our experience with Rackspace email at $12 per user per year has also been great. Although I suspect our pricing is grandfathered in, looks like they have doubled their price in recent times to $24 per user per year: http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email/ http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email/
reubensutton 14y ago
Personally, I would imagine that it would take more time to set up and maintain than saving $50 would be worth to me. Free is only really free if you don't value your time.
rythie 14y ago
I've got several domains, I just forward them to my gmail account and set up the reply-to addresses if I want to be consistent - no need to get an Apps account for that. We also run an email system at work, though it's a lot more work than other services - mostly due to spam / deliveriabilty - so even if you do pay $50/yr still seems a bargain. IMHO you need 100+ users to even think about justifying the time cost for running a mail server yourself. Also, I get access to all the new Google stuff without having to wait for Google to make it 'business-ready'.
VikingCoder 14y ago
> I just wanted an email for my domain and that's not worth 50 bucks a year. How much do you make per hour? How many hours do you expect to spend per year maintaining your own email system? How much would you pay to stop one hacker, one time, from reading your private email? Are you going to bother to set up two-factor authentication, or just wing it? For a lot of people, $50 a year would make total sense.
- sturadnidge 14y ago
  This times a thousand. For $50 a year I can have Google's security, spam filtering, and 2 factor auth. Totally understand someone running their own mail server due to privacy concerns, but that's a different argument to "not worth $50 a year".
  - jimwalsh 14y ago
    It's worth $50/year per domain. But their pricing is $50/account/year. That pricing is insane.
to_jon 14y ago
It's just as easy to imagine Google getting undercut by a big company. Yahoo, here's your opening. I always thought of free Google Apps as the company's brilliant play to control the fabric of the business internet. Can you name anything in the digital realm more important to businesses and organizations of all sizes than long-form communication (email) and content and information-driven collaboration? Sadly for new users and for Google itself, the company's actions reveal a failure to recognize Apps as anything more than a collection of inter-related services ready for more aggressive monetization. Management fails to see the strategic benefit and leverage afforded by controlling the online fabric of every new business that starts operating as a small team. It's the type of short-term and profit-driven thinking that afflicts so many companies as they reach the complacency of scale.
smsm42 14y ago
But that's great. Google is going for enterprise market, freeing the small business niche to whatever competitors would spring up. If I wanted to open a start-up, I'd be delighted I just had a 800-pound gorilla move out and open the space for the rest to compete and try to have a part of immense success Google has. How often you see a giant company just come out and say "please, come in, take part of my market, I don't need it anymore"?
robbiemitchell 14y ago
Paying Google to make email problems go away (and get nice features to boot) is worth it on $ alone if you plan to need even a handful of hours of outside help/year, plus equipment. Plus the peace of mind (and your saved time) of not even worrying about it. Email is a solved problem that is totally worth it to outsource or pay someone else to manage in-house. If you feel comfortable setting up your own mail server, managing spam, updating it, etc., and WANT to do it, then you're probably not Google's target audience, anyway.

loceng 14y ago

They can play the game though, too. Offer good discounts for onloading users; First year or two free, etc.. Hell, first 5 years free. What do they care if they get you used to their products, and then stay a client for 15 years after the 5 year trial?

alanctgardner2 14y ago

For most people, the time and effort of setting up and maintaining an email server is probably worth more than $5 per user per month. For a company of 100 people, that's about 10 person hours every month, without considering the initial cost to buy the hardware. Not to mention the risk of something going horribly wrong and blacking out your email, unless you've co-located the mail server on enterprise grade hardware (which will eat all your savings anyways).

indiecore 14y ago
Yes and if I was setting up a company of 100 people I'd be fine with that because I probably have the cash flow to support that. I was in the middle of setting up a service for a company of one at the moment and having one or two redirected emails isn't worth fifty dollars a year each right now.
- alanctgardner2 14y ago
  So, a real life story: I set up a free GMail account for my site, and directed all the contacts from the site there. I added it to my phone so I'd know when I got messages. I didn't really do much promotion, so I wasn't surprised I didn't see anything for a week. When I logged in from the web, I had gotten three emails from potential customers. Unfortunately, they'd been sitting for a week, and so it didn't make a very good impression when I did reply. A company of one definitely needs the most reliable communications it can get. Even if you're drowning in leads, it makes you much more credible if you don't have to explain to a client why their email bounced back. A delightful, relevant saying I encountered the other day is 'penny wise, pound foolish'.
  - indiecore 14y ago
    >A delightful, relevant saying I encountered the other day is 'penny wise, pound foolish'. hhh, you might be right. I'm really just a bit steamed about researching all this then getting home and realizing they had just killed it.
  - Dylan16807 14y ago
    I don't understand what point you're trying to get across here. Aren't you just as likely to forget to check a google apps mail as a regular gmail? Or are you describing a bug? Isn't that still equally likely with either option? Aren't both options crushed in effectiveness by redirecting to your main account, whatever that is?
    - alanctgardner2 14y ago
      > A company of one definitely needs the most reliable communications it can get Is that clear enough for you? Self-hosting is a poor idea because screwing up once costs you real money, probably more than you'd spend on a year of hosting at a small business.
      - Dylan16807 14y ago
        Sssoooo you used a story about losing business when using gmail for hosting to say that self-hosting was bad? I'm sorry, I still don't understand.
        alanctgardner2 14y ago
        My point is, I made a minor mistake in configuring GMail. That was my own fault. Multiply that amount of configuration by a million, and see if you don't make a mistake. Do ongoing maintenance, and see if you don't make a mistake. Keep everything secure, make sure you're whitelisted by every major provider, and ensure no messages ever bounce one way or another. My point is, fucking up is bad and easily costs you money. Giving yourself infinitely more ways to fuck up to save $50 a year is stupid. I don't know how I can put it more plainly than that. At this point you're pretty much just trolling.
- g-garron 14y ago
  I have the premium account for 8 people. If we were 100, I may setup an in house exchange or similar. I may have 3 more guys maintaining the email, web and the rest of Internet related hard/soft. For 8 I prefer $50 per year. Three more guys over 8 is ridiculous.

brown 14y ago

I did that for a couple years. I highly recommend it as a learning experience, but I concluded that $50/year is absolutely 100% worth it.

shuzchen 14y ago
That's $50/year for each user. Easy to stomach if it's only yourself, but add even a partner (not to mention a small team with a bootstrapped product) and it starts to make less sense financially.
- zaphoyd 14y ago
  This. I've been looking for a good email solution for personal+freelance work with decent privacy, security, and reliability. I don't need 24/7 support. I am absolutely willing to pay for it. But pricing per mailbox with Google apps adds up really quickly even with just 4-5 boxes. I'd like to be able to make separate mailboxes for my partner and to separate several different classes of email (personal, business, limited access, catch all, etc) for security purposes. These things don't need extra support or space, I can't stomach an extra $50/year for what amounts to aliases with passwords. Has anyone found a good solution for this? I could host it myself but that is a lot of hassle, free email accounts have ads and rarely let you use your own domain. The best I've found so far is email through a shared hosting provider, but it has limitations of its own (no IPv6, no 2 factor auth, self signed TLS certificates, etc). The cost is similar to a Google Apps account but without the linear price increase per mailbox.
  - chimpscanfly 14y ago
    Have you considered using aliases in GApps? Different than the catch all, but allows you to setup specific email addresses. I use them for accounts, newsletters, etc and then create filters and labels in my one apps email.
  - gregd 14y ago
    I believe that you can accomplish what you need using domain aliases (which google apps for business makes use of). You can have up to 20 domain aliases that all point to one mailbox: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182079 http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1...

skyhook_mockups 14y ago

From my own experience I can tell you that running your own mail server is a massive PITA. There's a good chance that even if you jump through all the required hoops to improve trust for your domain you will still have trouble delivering mail to certain addresses (Hotmail is notoriously hard to get white-listed for). Then there's spam... don't even get me started on spam filtering. For me personally $50/year is a bargain considering that running, maintaining, patching a mail server is time consuming and has no real upside. As a learning experience it's fine, but in practice delivering mail (reliably) sucks hard.

mjn 14y ago
If it's just deliverability that's an issue, you can use the regular Gmail SMTP server for outgoing mail, without Google Apps. You just have to add the address you're sending from as an alternate address in Gmail. The rest is still a bit of a hassle.
jlmendezbonini 14y ago
>Then there's spam... don't even get me started on spam filtering. You could sign up for Google Apps, point your domain MX to Google and forward all your SPAM free mail to your private server from the Google Apps console. No kidding, I've seen so many companies that had their mail systems in premises setup a 1 user Google Apps account ($50/year) to do what I just mentioned above. They got rid of most of their SPAM and saved tons $ on wasted bandwidth.

superuser2 14y ago

>I'll just set up my own email system at this point, call it a learning experience and never be exposed to the rest of whatever was in Google Apps. And? Free users threatening to leave are hilarious (even better when they campaign against ad targeting and AdBlock everything). Google's decision pretty clearly signals that users like you aren't worth it to the company any more than Google Apps are worth $50 to you. Don't do business. That's the point of a market. I wouldn't pay for it either - I'm grateful that my Google Apps are grandfathered, but nobody is entitled to GMail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It's a voluntary transaction between two entities and, in this case, you and Google Apps aren't a good fit.

blhack 14y ago
What you're missing here is that the free google apps was a way for admins to get their hands into the GA ecosystem. Google already offers the product for free, just so long as you use an @gmail.com address.
bad_user 14y ago
I use Google Apps because I want to use GMail, but with my own domain. That's it. I'm not an enterprise. I don't need more support than regular GMail users. I don't have special needs, like managing what services are allowed. I just don't want a @gmail.com address. I see people here defending this move, but think of how services like Google+ make mandatory an email address that's managed by Google. That email address will now have to be a @gmail.com address for regular users. Now think of how you can register with any email address on Facebook or Twitter, an email address which becomes your online ID. By using your own domain with your own email address, if the email provider interrupts the service for you, you can always change your MX records and recover all the accounts that rely on that address. That's not something you can do with a @gmail.com or a @yahoo.com or a @hotmail.com address. If Google cuts off your access for some reason (like in case they find out you're under 18 or some bullshit) or if they delete your account by accident (hey, shit happens), then at the very least your online identity is not lost. Freeloading is not the issue for me. I am already a paying Google customer in other ways (I buy stuff from Google Play, I pay for Google Drive storage, etc...) and I would happily pay them $50 per year anyway. The bigger issue is that using any Google service requires a Google email account, with Google Apps being a mild remedy for that. How can I encourage people to use Google's services now? Not mentioning that 2 businesses are now paying customers of Google Apps, because of my freeloading and my recommendations for it. Also, WTF is it with Google and raising prices? Companies are usually cutting prices down, while they are raising them. This also makes it an issue of trust - usually when I subscribe to services, I expect prices to go down, not up, otherwise I cannot trust it. My trust in Google is eroding right now. What next? Make Chrome and Android proprietary with a yearly subscription for users? Lots of pesky freeloaders out there.

jrockway 14y ago

I used to run my own one-user email system. The hosting alone cost $240 a year. And I had to spend a lot of time configuring exim4 (and spamassassin and clam-av), figuring out which email indexer to use, setting up offlineimap, running cron jobs to archive mailing lists, coercing a friend to run a secondary MX for me, etc., etc. I didn't enjoy it all. And no matter what I did to reduce spam, about 10 messages a day always made it through. (And, when I was first doing this, someone trying to hire me for a job couldn't email me, because their hosting provider was once friendly to spammers and my aggressive blacklisting rejected their TCP connections. Oops.) Running an email server is hard and very few people regret paying an expert to do it for them. (As many HN readers know, I work for Google. But I'm not telling you that you should or should not use Google's product here, only that running an email server is not trivial.)

indiecore 14y ago
You might be right. I'm just steamed about a nice tidy free option being swept right out from under me with no warning at all. Sleep on it I guess, see how it looks in the morning.
- mkr-hn 14y ago
  $5 a month for world-class email on your domain seems like a minor burden.
  - blhack 14y ago
    Per account.
    - mkr-hn 14y ago
      People in need of more than a few accounts would blow through the free version quickly.
    - jfoster 14y ago
      How much do you pay your employees?

hmart 14y ago

It's 2012, nobody wants to delete an email from the server. When Google Apps Standard launched (50 accounts, 1 GB per account, for free) business were consuming email using Outlook + POP3, deleting the mail from the server. Then you could offer 'ilimited' Cpanel based emnail accounts in less than 1 GB. Business and people have different standards now and consuming email using IMAP, letting the mail in the server, using more storage (7 GB / account) without paying anything. We can't back to the 1GB 'ilimted' accounts scenario. Google has influenced our behavior, has give us the 'first dose', now they come for the money.

rhizome 14y ago

$50/yr is less than $5/mo, what is the convenience of email hosting worth to you?

spqr 14y ago
I pay $4 per month for Exchange Online. I paid that even when Google Apps was free because it is vastly superior. When MS finally got their act together I couldn't wait to move my MX records off of Google's inferior service. Now that it's more expensive than the superior service, good luck Google.
jimwalsh 14y ago
Plenty of services offer unlimited accounts for $5/month. The amount of services offered in a Google Apps account needs to stop getting minimized to just email in this thread as it skews comparisons.

wbillingsley 14y ago

Or you could cross to the dark side https://domains.live.com/Signup/SignupDomain.aspx https://domains.live.com/Signup/SignupDomain.aspx I'm lucky in that I already have Google Apps and they're not starting to charge me. But if I didn't I'd look at whether there are reasonable free/cheap alternatives out there. For customers it looks like the end of free Gmail-for-your-domain. But for competitors I imagine it looks like the end of price gouging.

squidsoup 14y ago

If Heroku can afford to support free users on it's PaaS, it surprises me that it isn't feasible for a giant like Google. I can't see this move doing anything to improve what is arguably an already unpopular service.

throwawaay 14y ago
Seriously? You're actually saying that a service[1] with millions of customers and still growing is "already unpopular"? Show your work, please. [1] http://www.google.com/intl/en/enterprise/apps/business/customers.html http://www.google.com/intl/en/enterprise/apps/business/custo...
alanctgardner2 14y ago
Just a note, you outgrow the free Heroku implementation pretty quickly. Do you need SSL on a custom domain? You're now paying. Do you need more than a small number of DB connections simultaneously? The smallest production psql tier is $50 a month, or the annual fee for one seat on Gmail.

acchow 14y ago

Will your own email system have 99.9% uptime, two-step authentication, an amazing web interface, blazing speed, and IMAP/Exchange/POP3 access?

spullara 14y ago
Basically GMail only has the two-step authentication. The uptime is worse than that, the web interface is not that great, it is slow and interoperates poorly with IMAP/Exchange/POP3 access.
raverbashing 14y ago
" and a 99.9% uptime guarantee with no scheduled downtime" That is BS and Google knows it Why? Because Google can suspend your account at a whim and not even tell you why. Google did that to a friend of mine, yes, paid account, yes called support line, they basically said "tough, it may return in 48h"

Osiris 14y ago

I'm glad I already have my Google Apps accounts setup. I rarely even use the web interface except from work. At home it's all IMAP and Android. At $50 / year for Google it's cheaper to buy a domain from GoDaddy and pay for email services (webmail + IMAP) that are automatically tied to your domain.

fusiongyro 14y ago

I do this. It's not easy, but it's not as bad as most of the comments here would lead you to believe. If you have the wherewithal to run things on a server it's definitely within reach, albeit probably not a cost-effective way to spend your time. Let me make a few recommendations. I'm not a sysadmin by trade but I know a few things you can do that will improve your lot in life running mail. - Postfix and Dovecot. They have the right combination of ease of use, power and security. Don't overconfigure; try to get it working with basic settings first and then evolve it towards what you dream of rather than setting out to configure it that way first. - SPF and DKIM. I have no trouble getting messages to Gmail and I think this is part of why. - Make sure your hosting provider is not huge and very high quality. I chose RootBSD because they're small but highly technical. If you have a lot of spare cash, iNetU are quite good and sometimes help with FreeBSD. The larger or crappier the host is, the more likely you'll wind up in blacklisted IP space. (BSD hosting companies tend to be smaller and more technical, and BSD is great software, so I'd recommend that if you're interested.) Getting off a blacklist isn't a lot of fun and it's not hard to wind up on one, but I find being on a discriminating host is a good preventative measure. - Rely on IMAP. If you want webmail, try and find one that is really just an IMAP frontend. I tried and liked Roundcube a while back; these days I have IMAP clients everywhere so I don't know what the new hot stuff is, but IMAP is fantastic. - I strongly recommend you get an account with DNSReport.com. Their software can detect most of the DNS problems you can get yourself into that wreak havoc with mail. Odds are good you'll be doing a lot more DNS than before, it's a great tool to have in the toolbox. - Stay on top of your security updates. I recommend running sshguard and whatever other security software/IDS/firewall type stuff you can stand. Make sure you're not giving out a bunch of shell accounts with root on this server. Seems obvious, but people forget or get lazy. FreeBSD will email you a security message every day; if something like that isn't coming your way, consider trying to set it up. It tells me, among other things, who tried to log into the server, how many times they failed, what their IP was, and lots of other stuff. There are a number of nice upsides to running your own mail server. - Email can be hooked up to the database various ways. - Automatic emailing for free (keep an eye on it). - Scripted email handling for free (Procmail etc). - Get system-generated messages emailed (Nagios/monit etc., login/sudo failures, etc.) - Advanced forwarding/wildcard accounts. Anyway, I hope you do give it a shot despite the nay-saying. Cost-effective? No, but it's a blast, and many of the upsides would be hard to replicate with Gmail. Of course the web mail UI will be worse. Tradeoffs.

andrewhillman 14y ago

you can still get one free account https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/google-appengine/pVZfdeky-ow/TO1SmipM2Y0J https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/google-appengine/pVZfd...

xentronium 14y ago

There are alternatives to google that are free of charge. For example, Live (Microsoft service)[1] or Yandex (Russian google vis-a-vis). [2][3] [1] https://domains.live.com/ https://domains.live.com/ [2] http://pdd.yandex.ru http://pdd.yandex.ru [3] Major caveat: the interface is in Russian only now, but after initial setup it shouldn't be a big deal;

gmac 14y ago
Also FastMail.fm, which I'm very happy with.
- sciurus 14y ago
  FastMail costs $40 a year to use your own domain. https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html

msy 14y ago

Rackspace email. Equally good experience IMHO, absolutely fantastic support, $12 a year per mailbox. Best purchase of a web service I've ever made. Your email is the skeleton key and core of your online existence, that's far too important to leave to a company that considers support an exercise in statistic management.

cbr 14y ago
> far too important to leave to a company that > considers support an exercise in statistic management My impression is that paid Google Apps support is pretty good: http://contact.googleapps.com/ http://contact.googleapps.com/
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
munger 14y ago
Our experience with Rackspace email at $12 per user per year has also been great. Although I suspect our pricing is grandfathered in, looks like they have doubled their price in recent times to $24 per user per year: http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email/ http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email/

reubensutton 14y ago

Personally, I would imagine that it would take more time to set up and maintain than saving $50 would be worth to me. Free is only really free if you don't value your time.

rythie 14y ago

I've got several domains, I just forward them to my gmail account and set up the reply-to addresses if I want to be consistent - no need to get an Apps account for that. We also run an email system at work, though it's a lot more work than other services - mostly due to spam / deliveriabilty - so even if you do pay $50/yr still seems a bargain. IMHO you need 100+ users to even think about justifying the time cost for running a mail server yourself. Also, I get access to all the new Google stuff without having to wait for Google to make it 'business-ready'.

VikingCoder 14y ago

> I just wanted an email for my domain and that's not worth 50 bucks a year. How much do you make per hour? How many hours do you expect to spend per year maintaining your own email system? How much would you pay to stop one hacker, one time, from reading your private email? Are you going to bother to set up two-factor authentication, or just wing it? For a lot of people, $50 a year would make total sense.

sturadnidge 14y ago
This times a thousand. For $50 a year I can have Google's security, spam filtering, and 2 factor auth. Totally understand someone running their own mail server due to privacy concerns, but that's a different argument to "not worth $50 a year".
- jimwalsh 14y ago
  It's worth $50/year per domain. But their pricing is $50/account/year. That pricing is insane.

to_jon 14y ago

It's just as easy to imagine Google getting undercut by a big company. Yahoo, here's your opening. I always thought of free Google Apps as the company's brilliant play to control the fabric of the business internet. Can you name anything in the digital realm more important to businesses and organizations of all sizes than long-form communication (email) and content and information-driven collaboration? Sadly for new users and for Google itself, the company's actions reveal a failure to recognize Apps as anything more than a collection of inter-related services ready for more aggressive monetization. Management fails to see the strategic benefit and leverage afforded by controlling the online fabric of every new business that starts operating as a small team. It's the type of short-term and profit-driven thinking that afflicts so many companies as they reach the complacency of scale.

smsm42 14y ago

But that's great. Google is going for enterprise market, freeing the small business niche to whatever competitors would spring up. If I wanted to open a start-up, I'd be delighted I just had a 800-pound gorilla move out and open the space for the rest to compete and try to have a part of immense success Google has. How often you see a giant company just come out and say "please, come in, take part of my market, I don't need it anymore"?

robbiemitchell 14y ago

Paying Google to make email problems go away (and get nice features to boot) is worth it on $ alone if you plan to need even a handful of hours of outside help/year, plus equipment. Plus the peace of mind (and your saved time) of not even worrying about it. Email is a solved problem that is totally worth it to outsource or pay someone else to manage in-house. If you feel comfortable setting up your own mail server, managing spam, updating it, etc., and WANT to do it, then you're probably not Google's target audience, anyway.