If 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
1) You can stop feeding personal data into the Google (advertisement) ecosystem
2) Google is notorious for killing off services or changing their agreements at a moments notice like here so there is a chance they'll drop their offering or increase prices.
3) Google support is either terrible or nonexistent (unless you're lucky enough to get your complaint to the HN frontpage).
I'm an affected user and I plan to put in the effort to migrate -- I only use it for email on a custom domain and have been doing regular backups (using gmvault) in case Google changed their mind so moving to a new service should be a breeze.
For 20 years people have complained of 1,2,3 for free accounts, and said that they'd prefer to pay to avoid these issues. Now that there's an option....
Our philosophy
Google Workspace customers own their customer data, not Google. Customer data that Google Workspace organizations put into our systems is theirs, and we do not scan it for advertisements. We offer our customers a detailed Data Processing Amendment that describes our commitment to protecting customer data. Furthermore, if customers delete their data, we commit to deleting it from our systems within 180 days.
No advertising in Google Workspace
There is no advertising in the Google Workspace Core Services, and we have no plans to change this in the future. Google does not collect, scan or use data in Google Workspace Core Services for advertising purposes. Customer administrators can restrict access to Non-Core Services from the Google Workspace Admin console. Google indexes customer data to provide beneficial services, such as spam filtering, virus detection, spellcheck and the ability to search for emails and files within an individual account.
Limited data use
Google does not use any of your data for any purpose except to provide you with the relevant Google Workspace service. For example, when customers use the Cloud Translation API, Google will not make the content of the text that you send available to the public, or share it with anyone else, except as necessary to provide the Cloud Translation API service.
1) valid point, but how can I be sure another email provider won't do just the same, or even worse? At least Google is sitting on it's data using it to profit for itself. Smaller actors are just wholesaling everything they can reach.
2) I don't agree with "moments notice" sentiment. 3 months are quite enough for most users (and they can buy more time for a relatively small price). The free lunch was off the menu for more than nine years, I am actually surprised they gave us so much time.
3) There are replies around this post that for paying users Google support is significantly better. Good opportunity to check if it is really so.
Because the other service only does email as a service, so if they do the same their business folds, and the other service is likely to have far better support (which tends to 0 at google)
It is far more likely Google will decide to change the terms unilaterally on their customers or discontinue a service altogether - their business is advertising, not email.
Yeah I'm happy with fastmail and it just makes it less confusing when I'm doing stuff online. Instead of having 2 google accounts, one legacy and one custom domain. My custom domain is a completely different site unattached to the entire google ecosystem.
I already deal with this enough at work. I don't like having to switch between g accounts all the time.
Fastmail discounts for longer terms. I'm on the 30GB plan because of a custom domain and it was $90 for 2 years in Nov 2021, or $3.75/mo. Now I see it's $95 for 2 years so they've had a recent price increase apparently.
Fastmail does give you access to your 30GB via FTP or WebDAV. It also has a web-based file uploading tool. Then you can create links to share files or folders with others, like a picture album. I did this a little just to try it out, and it was very straightforward. Whereas I could never figure out how to do it with iCloud and gave up.
I 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.
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.
This looks a lot like a direct clone of 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.
I 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/). 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 ... ;)
Sure, 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.
IIRC 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.
>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?
Amazon 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.
Highly 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.
Seconding 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.
I 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.
I 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.
We'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.
The 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.
Aruba. 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
Why 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.
gmail 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.
I'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?
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.
Also 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.
G 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.
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.
From 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.
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!