Currently we use gsuit, but there is too much in there we don't use and > 5€ per user is too much.
We need a stable hoster, privacy and no gimmicks.. any suggestions ?
Ask HN: What's the best mail hoster for a startup?
1–10 of 14 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best mail hoster for a startup?
#2How about Mailbox? https://mailbox.org/en/ (they support calendar sync)
or Zoho https://www.zoho.com/
Re: Ask HN: What's the best mail hoster for a startup?
#3If your own time is worth very little I suggest self hosting. It takes a few hours to setup.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best mail hoster for a startup?
#4It's hard to run a service below 3 Euro/month with good (human) support, those who do often charge annual. We use https://runbox.com/price-plans/ and are very happy. There was a discount for pre-paying two years and in our monthly cost spreadsheet with 30+ SaaS it's the service costing us the least.
There's several previous 'alternatives to gmail' discussions, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17448108
Re: Ask HN: What's the best mail hoster for a startup?
#5Even 10 euro a month per user is nothing - their salary + insurance + taxes is probably 3-4 thousand euro at least, these 10 euro are a statistical error.
We use Office365, because we need Office anyway. We initially used a hosting provider email server, but it's not trivial to get the email DNS configuration right, and you risk going in spam. Even after we got our configuration right, we still had occasional "spam" issues.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best mail hoster for a startup?
#6What's nice about GSuite is contacts and calendar syncing on Android and iPhone.
Do realize that Android only supports GSuite. In other words, by default it doesn't support CalDAV and CardDAV. There are apps for that, but I found those to be a hassle.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best mail hoster for a startup?
#7Even 10 euro a month per user is nothing - their salary + insurance + taxes is probably 3-4 thousand euro at least, these 10 euro are a statistical error. We use Office365, because we need Office anyway. We initially used a hosting provider email server, but it's not trivial to get the email DNS configuration right, and you risk going in spam. Even after we got our configuration right, we still had occasional "spam"…
Set the spf fields in DNS and you should be fine. It's not really that hard unless you do send out spammy mails.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best mail hoster for a startup?
#8Pretty happy so far with Migadu.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best mail hoster for a startup?
#9Pretty happy so far with Migadu.
Agreed! Migadu is great considering they essentially give you a single mailbox for free and the upgrades aren't per user. The different tiers just have sending limits with the top tier being basically unlimited (at their discretion - they're just worried about spam, rightfully so).
Re: Ask HN: What's the best mail hoster for a startup?
#10If your own time is worth very little I suggest self hosting. It takes a few hours to setup.
Plus a few hours every week to chase down reports of emails not being delivered, spam, etc.
As someone with many servers and a previous career managing an email service for a university, I would never run my email through anything except G Suite or Office 365. The benefits of those services being "too big to block" is immeasurable.