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Ask HN: How are you hosting email for your startup employees?

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Re: Ask HN: How are you hosting email for your startup employees?

#41

Post by cosmodisk »

solardev wrote: post #24
CharlesW wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's also much more usable cross platforms than the nightmare that is MS Office. Outlook is terrrrrrrrible. In what way? I’ve used both Google Workspace and Office 365 during my career. I don’t dislike Google Workspace, but Office 365 is notably more mature, capable, and complete. (I mostly use Macs, but the web apps work the same on any browser/OS.)

Really? Surely you're joking..? I've had the complete opposite experience, and in fact have never found a piece of productivity software as horrible as Office 365. Also on a Mac... Email: Outlook UI and hotkeys are totally different from MacOS, Windows, and Web. Rules don't really work and are impossible to debug. Search is terrible. Threading is terrible (expands the subjects of each child message, but not their bod…

A lot,if not all, of what you wrote here is true and I experienced some of it both as the end user and as an admin. However what are the alternatives for a business where most users sit on Windows? Google suite is a joke for anything but simplest tasks and config is lacking. Yes, Microsoft can be cumbersome, bloated,but it has to support 5 people shops to enterprises with tens of thousands of users and config complexities.

Re: Ask HN: How are you hosting email for your startup employees?

#43

Post by modelviewpotato »

Google Workspaces or Microsoft 365. If you don’t need the collaboration tools Fastmail is pretty good.

Don’t waste time self-hosting. You job is to make sure your company is successful, product-market fit, blah, blah, you know the drill: that is core. Everything else is context.

Re: Ask HN: How are you hosting email for your startup employees?

#44

Post by paulcole »

simfree wrote: post #38
solardev wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the OP is talking about emails for their employees, like personal inboxes. Postmark is more about transactional emails, no? And even that is offloading a lot of the deliverability concerns to a specialized vendor. > At least, by running your own email instance, it gives you the ability to easily debug what the problem is with direct logs. You really really should not need to be doing this yourself. I've had…

Microsoft has a hidden quarantine. Google has random delivery issues. Neither are truly set it and forget it, at some point your back asking why an email bounced back or disappeared into an undisclosed quarantine with no notification...

I’ve used Gmail for work for 9 years and Gmail for personal use for 18 years and have never had to ask why an email bounced back or disappeared into an undisclosed quarantine with no notification.

Re: Ask HN: How are you hosting email for your startup employees?

#45

Post by nickfromseattle »

I use O365 for email, and have Gsuite for Google Docs / Sheets / etc.

Here's why we use O365 for email:

1. Gmail tabs get lost in your sea of tabs, while Outlook being a desktop app means it's easy to alt / tab over at any time.

2. It's really easy to manage multiple mailboxes with O365 (via Outlook), while Google doesn't work super well for multiple profiles.

3. O365 has better support through their reseller partners (we use AppRiver) while dealing with things we don't know a lot about (SPF / DKIM / distribution lists / shared mailboxes / etc).

4. (I believe) O365 is much less likely to shutdown our account for unknown reasons than Google.

5. Lastly, I was exposed to O365 while working at a SaaS in the Microsoft ecosystem. For the first few weeks I hated it, and missed Gsuite, but overtime I came to love O365 and hate Gmail.

Re: Ask HN: How are you hosting email for your startup employees?

#47

Post by solardev »

cosmodisk wrote: post #41
solardev wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Surely you're joking..? I've had the complete opposite experience, and in fact have never found a piece of productivity software as horrible as Office 365. Also on a Mac... Email: Outlook UI and hotkeys are totally different from MacOS, Windows, and Web. Rules don't really work and are impossible to debug. Search is terrible. Threading is terrible (expands the subjects of each child message, but not their bod…

A lot,if not all, of what you wrote here is true and I experienced some of it both as the end user and as an admin. However what are the alternatives for a business where most users sit on Windows? Google suite is a joke for anything but simplest tasks and config is lacking. Yes, Microsoft can be cumbersome, bloated,but it has to support 5 people shops to enterprises with tens of thousands of users and config complex…

I guess I've never seen a business actually use Microsoft Office effectively. The odd PowerPoint or Word doc? The standalone apps work OK alongside Google, or people just send PDFs anyway. For actual collaboration, especially real-time, Docs and Sheets and Drive and Slides are soooooo much better to work with. Even if they are less feature packed, they do the basics much better.

But that is just my experience primarily working in web teams or small biz. Maybe there are enterprise features that I've never used or even thought about.

As for admin, I've been the gsuite admin (again just for smaller companies) and found it quite powerful, but the use cases are probably different. A lot of these companies basically use the computers as dumb terminals, where the browser is the only thing that really matters. And Chrome federated management makes that pretty easy.

Re: Ask HN: How are you hosting email for your startup employees?

#48

Post by cosmodisk »

solardev wrote: post #47
cosmodisk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot,if not all, of what you wrote here is true and I experienced some of it both as the end user and as an admin. However what are the alternatives for a business where most users sit on Windows? Google suite is a joke for anything but simplest tasks and config is lacking. Yes, Microsoft can be cumbersome, bloated,but it has to support 5 people shops to enterprises with tens of thousands of users and config complex…

I guess I've never seen a business actually use Microsoft Office effectively. The odd PowerPoint or Word doc? The standalone apps work OK alongside Google, or people just send PDFs anyway. For actual collaboration, especially real-time, Docs and Sheets and Drive and Slides are soooooo much better to work with. Even if they are less feature packed, they do the basics much better. But that is just my experience primari…

I work at non tech company. A lot of( if not most) interactions with the outside world are based on Microsoft products: meetings, file exchanges, or even collaboration. Some things work great and for some you just want to shoot yourself in the head. The average knowledge of a non tech business user is very very limited when it comes to software and some people even get panic attacks when told ' just download it and run it'. That's the default mode in many businesses. The average person on HN, who can pick up new programming language,read 50 pages of docs in the evening is so much beyond the average office user, that there aren't many hopes of that gap closing any time soon.

Re: Ask HN: How are you hosting email for your startup employees?

#49

Post by kcplate »

solardev wrote: post #24
CharlesW wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's also much more usable cross platforms than the nightmare that is MS Office. Outlook is terrrrrrrrible. In what way? I’ve used both Google Workspace and Office 365 during my career. I don’t dislike Google Workspace, but Office 365 is notably more mature, capable, and complete. (I mostly use Macs, but the web apps work the same on any browser/OS.)

Really? Surely you're joking..? I've had the complete opposite experience, and in fact have never found a piece of productivity software as horrible as Office 365. Also on a Mac... Email: Outlook UI and hotkeys are totally different from MacOS, Windows, and Web. Rules don't really work and are impossible to debug. Search is terrible. Threading is terrible (expands the subjects of each child message, but not their bod…

I don’t have any love for MS Office and Teams, but I have experienced literally none of the issues you mentioned other than the two calendars, but that is easily solved by just using one.
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