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Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

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Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#81

Post by mansandersson »

buttocks wrote: post #2

HN is a hard place for people who like Microsoft but I'll tell you that a single user Office 365 Business Essentials subscription is a great deal. Along with e-mail you get a terabyte of Sharepoint (OneDrive) storage, online versions of office apps, and Teams. $5/mo. There's an IMAP migration tool. Just turn on IMAP on your Gmail account if it's not already enabled and let the O365/Exchange wizard suck all the e-mail…

I've been eyeing this as well but it looks like neither DMARC or DKIM is supported on the family plan. Anyone know a way around that issue?

Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#82

Post by RKearney »

sgloutnikov wrote: post #73
mdasen wrote: post #22

Google Takeout will export all your mail in mbox format which is easily handled by mail programs like Apple Mail and Thunderbird and should let you sync everything to a new service (if that service won't let you transfer it themselves). I'm using iCloud+ from Apple. It's cheap at $1/mo for 50GB of space and lets me have my custom domains. $3/mo will get you family sharing and 200GB of space (if you want multiple acco…

Here is a workaround for Microsoft 365 to not host your domain with GoDaddy. https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/ft15pk/use_perso...

That "workaround" instructs you to use "v=DMARC1; p=none;" for your dmarc record. I'm not sure if Microsoft actually requires this, maybe it's because it doesn't support DKIM, but setting your dmarc policy to none disables SPF checks and is an extremely bad idea.

Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#83

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

josephg wrote: post #16
wiradikusuma wrote: post #11

Google is not just email. It's the email client. It's the calendar. It's the calendar integration with email. How do you replace those?

> How do you replace those? These days? Pretty easily! Fastmail also has an email client, and a calendar. The calendar is integrated into its email service too. And the calendar integrates really well with iCal / CalDAV. I find fastmail syncs calendar entries between my apple devices more reliably than apple's own icloud. The big hole in fastmail's offering is that they have no replacement for google docs & spreadshe…

> they have no replacement for google docs & spreadsheets

I'm happy about this. Those are really complicated apps to support; they'd have to spend a ton of time and money and dedicate new teams to them (even if they "just" hosted OSS alternatives) which would raise the cost of my subscription and take away from their core competency (e-mail). And it may result in proprietary features, making it a lock-in device.

Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#84

Post by prirun »

hn_version_0023 wrote: post #33
josephg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you replace those? These days? Pretty easily! Fastmail also has an email client, and a calendar. The calendar is integrated into its email service too. And the calendar integrates really well with iCal / CalDAV. I find fastmail syncs calendar entries between my apple devices more reliably than apple's own icloud. The big hole in fastmail's offering is that they have no replacement for google docs & spreadshe…

One thing I like about Fastmail is the ability to serve static web content directly from the “Files” section of their apps/website. Since they already manage the domain for email, spinning up static sites at subdomains is really easy and really nice.

I almost did this, but they don't have rsync access to the Files space. It's really nice with a static site being able to use rsync to just update the changed files.

Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#85

Post by skydhash »

jread wrote: post #62
mdasen wrote: post #22

Google Takeout will export all your mail in mbox format which is easily handled by mail programs like Apple Mail and Thunderbird and should let you sync everything to a new service (if that service won't let you transfer it themselves). I'm using iCloud+ from Apple. It's cheap at $1/mo for 50GB of space and lets me have my custom domains. $3/mo will get you family sharing and 200GB of space (if you want multiple acco…

+1 for iCloud+. I moved 3 business/family domains and shutdown my G Suite legacy account with no issues, and no extra cost (already paying for iCloud). Can't beat $0.99/mo for 50GB shared on up to 6 accounts.

+1 for iCloud+. I got the 200 to give my cousin a way to backup her pictures (around 30 GB, and it annoyed me she wasn't backing them up) The custom domain was nice, and I moved all of them to iCloud+.

Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#86

Post by tazjin »

Yandex 360 is great and also has calendar support etc.

There are a few things that make moving your calendar away from Google pretty hard. If a Google account invites you, the invite still lands in your old calendar for example - even if that's not where your domains MX records point. Lots of third-party software also has mostly Google-specific integrations.

Moving away from them is hard, but overall probably worth it, iff you move to a provider that has real support.

Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#87

Post by harel »

guerrilla wrote: post #25
Scarbutt wrote: post #17

I've decided that I'd rather give my money to someone else Why? the less cumbersome route is to pay google.

Why would you pay a company with no support and who constantly cancels features and products? Also, why would you want an ad company reading your email to weaponize against you?

I've paid, and have already accessed support three times since with great success and good response times. I was quite surprised actually considering all the horror stories I'm reading here.

Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#88

Post by nmjenkins »

fy20 wrote: post #71
troydavis wrote: post #3

This question comes up a couple times every month. FastMail always comes up as a recommendation, so if you search comments for FastMail, you’ll find every past thread (and relatively few false positives): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru... Example from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30128198

How does FastMail handle tags? I tried Zoho but it's pretty terrible compared to how Gmail works. What I'd like is: 1) To be able to assign tags based on rules 2) To be able to view those tags in IMAP clients (Gmail exposes labels as IMAP folders) 3) To be able to Archive mail so they are no longer in the Inbox, but so the tag remains (in Gmail, 'Inbox' is just a tag that is removed when you Archive mail) Zoho fails…

If you switch to labels mode, Fastmail handles them just like Gmail.

Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#89

Post by infinityplus1 »

skydhash wrote: post #85
jread wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for iCloud+. I moved 3 business/family domains and shutdown my G Suite legacy account with no issues, and no extra cost (already paying for iCloud). Can't beat $0.99/mo for 50GB shared on up to 6 accounts.

+1 for iCloud+. I got the 200 to give my cousin a way to backup her pictures (around 30 GB, and it annoyed me she wasn't backing them up) The custom domain was nice, and I moved all of them to iCloud+.

You might want to read this reddit post about iCloud files disappearing. https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/sixyvx/warning_files...

Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

#90

Post by jws »

I’ve moved mine off to Gandi.net where I had the domains. It is either included for free with your domain, or something like 1.5 EU/mo if you store a lot of email.

Easy on the Gandi.net side and on Macs. A complete pain on the iOS side. The accounts added on the Mac don’t come over to iOS for some reason like they do other Macs, then when you go to add them manually iOS won’t look to see which ports to use or mail servers so you have to enter all that, except you can’t do the port until later and when you do the device hangs at “verifying” until you turn off all internet access and turn it back on. (That’s a half day of research for free for you.) It’s an accepted defect by Apple, its been documented for years.

Also, moving is a pain. Google lets you export, but you lose your folder information. Apple on Mac lets you easily copy from one account to another, but that is a little strange since you have two accounts for the same email address and there have been catastrophic failures in the past from that. Also some of the special folders like “Archive” apparently can’t be copied for “reasons”. The work around is to “select all” in Archive and hope it doesn’t explode from the volume.

All in all, you are in for some pain. And pain raised to some exponent if you have non-technical users in your domain to support.

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