I'm currently waiting for access to Cloudflare's email forwarding beta. If that didn't exist, I'd use Namecheap, which I believe is also free regardless of whether the domain is registered with them.
Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
111–120 of 266 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
#112I'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?
They have some support, I recently read a G Suite legacy free "customer's" chat with a Google Workspace Support person.
There is no danger of Google canceling the core services of Google Workspace (email, calendar, Drive).
Google has never scanned G Suite/Workspace email for ad targeting and stopped doing it for email entirely in 2017; the ads in Gmail are targeted based on other information Google has (e.g. search history).
There are good reasons to not pay for Google's service, the above are not any of them.
Since Google has stated they're going to create an option for small, non-business G Suite legacy free customers, there's no rush for those people, who have been using it 10+ years, to get off it before they see what that option is.
Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
#113Google 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…
Does iCloud+ support catch all on custom domains now? I really like this about Google but would also be glad to go elsewhere
No they don’t and it’s a maximum of three email addresses per user.
Looking at it they don’t allow for “groups” or aliases either.
It feels years behind.
Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
#114Google 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…
An alternative to Microsoft 365 if you don't need anything other than email hosting is their Exchange Online plan, which is $4/month: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/exchange/excha...
This is what I ended up switching to and it's been working fine so far. I learned from this debacle that tight-coupling email to any other service is a liability, so email-only is actually a feature for me. No GoDaddy requirement either.
Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
#115I migrated four separate Google accounts to a single Fastmail account last year. I had put off migrating for _years_ because I thought it would be painful, but I've had no issues at all. The migration was automated with good progress updates as emails are copied across. I had to do the DNS bits manually but they were nevertheless well documented. I've had zero issues since with mail, calendars, or their simple static site hosting. I think about it so little I sometimes forget how happy I was with the whole process.
Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
#116I will keep the free version of "google cloud identity" so I kan keep my google account and things connected to it; things like drive documents, YouTube account, app purchases, and so on. But then I intend to move my email domain to iCloud.
How do you do this? I’m planning to keep my Gmail account and pay for it, but my son does not need the mail address but wants to keep his YouTube account.
Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
#117How about free email plan from your web hosting? Many hosting companies provide free email plan when you host your domain/website with them. If you have a personal domain/website, why don't use the free email hosting? If you need more features, they also provide upgraded plans.
Exactly. Maybe not free but for a very small fee, compared to the HN popular options. And you might even get caldav and carddav (calendar and contact) sync included.
Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
#118Also went looking for an alternative and moved everyting to mailbox.org...
Be aware that Mailbox.org allows any user to send emails as ("from") any other user via SMTP and these emails will look legit since they pass SPF and DKIM checks. Many consider this a security issue. There was a quite lengthy discussion about this in their forum but they deleted it since. They refused to fix it. Archive.org still has it. Content is in German (sorry): https://web.archive.org/web/20210123192856/https:/…
Anyone willing to spin up a mail server can do this. DKIM and SPF are only intended to establish the identity of the server. I don't know that there is any obligation on the part of someone running a mail server to police the "From:" address on an email in some specific way. Traditionally the "From:" address was considered informational. It generally represents the address that the sender considers "their" email address. A actual user identity is established by signing the email and is separate from the "From:" address.
Does mailbox.org even include the "From:" address in the DKIM signature?
Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
#119I'm trialling Fastmail at the moment. Some observations. Excellent Google migration tool..Excellent support for domain aliases. You can also forward domain aliases to an external addresses...I raised a support query on A saturday evening and I had a resolution on Sunday morning.
Looking good so far. My main requirement is no restriction on domain aliases.
Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
#120Office365, you get exchange email and Microsoft office included in the basic plan which is about $80/yr.
You can BYO your own unlimited number of email domains.