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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?

#151

Post by dwg »

I offer https://privateemail.com as an option, "best" or not depends on you.

I'm a fan of namecheap. They do not, in my experience, engage in the same dark patterns as other registrars. I found out about their hosted mail service, privateemail, only last year. We needed something for a new business domain with very simple needs and Google Workspace would have been overkill. After using privateemail.com for the last 6 months or so, I can give it only a very basic, but positive review. It's been simple to use, reliable, and inexpensive. The plans come with Google Drive like storage, and they also appear to be developing (or integrating) online document editing which is available with their Ultimate plan (currently $68.88 per year).

We did not have any need to import mail, so I don't know if or how they support that. As far as I've seen they do not have a mobile app, but of course you can use other existing apps including the OS built-in apps. The domain is new and does not receive any spam, so cannot comment on the effectiveness of their spam filtering.

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

#152

Post by brynx97 »

karmajunkie wrote: post #147
buro9 wrote: post #39

Fastmail I've just moved, and it's great. Import is fantastic (I migrated 14GB of email) and I've used Dmarcian to monitor and confirm everything is perfect on the SPF, DKIM front. Spam initially got through, but once trained it's been flawless I've personally abandoned labels for folders as I used barely 10 labels in Gmail and seldom added more than one, but they do support labels if you want that. It's great for wi…

how good is their spam filtering? it’s been years since i had to worry about it but i really have no desire to go back to something hacked together.

I moved to Fastmail last year. Their spam detection is very good from my experience, I have not received any spam, other than marketing "spam" from services I signed up for. Even then, I would ballpark most of those end up in spam. I am also a big fan of their relatively new Masked Email feature[0].

[0]https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/4406536368911-Ma...

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

#153

Post by kingcharles »

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.

If something happens with your iCloud and you get really locked out, is there good support to get you back in?

With Gmail, there is basically no human support these days.

I just had a buddy come to me after someone tried to brute force his sbcglobal email and locked him out; AT&T have told him it might take someone up to 2 months to get to his support request.

+1 for Fastmail. I've used them for almost 20 years and their support has been great.

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

#154

Post by viraptor »

mattlondon wrote: post #50

I have used Zoho for my burner domain for a couple of years. It's functional and works ok, but is not as slick as Gmail (both web and app)

Another Zoho user. I use them with my own domain and make a heavy use of catch-all addresses + aliases when I need to respond from a specific one. (But I'm also using their docs and invoices services)

I've had two actual delivery issues over the last 5 years, so overall not bad.

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

#155

Post by kingcharles »

hughrr wrote: post #124
infinityplus1 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Just a heads up here: iCloud / OneDrive / Google Drive / DropBox are not a backup solution despite the vendors promoting it. They are there only for convenience. I have experienced file loss on OneDrive. I am now using iCloud and have had no file loss whatsoever. I regularly diff my offline backup with iCloud Drive contents mirrored to my mac. Also to note: About 50% of the stories you hear are users being morons. My…

> Also to note: About 50% of the stories you hear are users being morons. My sister lost some files. She deleted them after fat fingering something

Some of these services (e.g. Dropbox) have rollback which would have helped in this situation, and most have a "Rubbish Bin" you can undelete from. I often click on the wrong thing because the web UI is lagging and I delete something by mistake.

I agree these services right now are all for convenience. There are horror stories from all of them, except for rsync (who are active on here) - I've never heard of any horror stories from their cloud service, but obviously if your payment stops for whatever reason, then all your stuff is gone with any of these.

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

#156

Post by kingcharles »

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

I really like Fastmail's Android app too. It's probably only a wrapper around a browser, but it works so nice.

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

#157

Post by kingcharles »

karmajunkie wrote: post #147
buro9 wrote: post #39

Fastmail I've just moved, and it's great. Import is fantastic (I migrated 14GB of email) and I've used Dmarcian to monitor and confirm everything is perfect on the SPF, DKIM front. Spam initially got through, but once trained it's been flawless I've personally abandoned labels for folders as I used barely 10 labels in Gmail and seldom added more than one, but they do support labels if you want that. It's great for wi…

how good is their spam filtering? it’s been years since i had to worry about it but i really have no desire to go back to something hacked together.

It's excellent. Sometimes gives a few false positives which I have to move out of the spam folder, but it's right 99.99% of the time.

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

#158

Post by kingcharles »

mazugrin2 wrote: post #97
BoumTAC wrote: post #14

I would recommend hey.com

I'm switching away from hey.com at the end of my term. It's not a bad service, but the UI is absolutely inflexible. The absolute worst feature for me is that the sorting of your inbox (I guess I mean "Imbox") is based the time you first accessed the email. There's no straightforward way to sort by the date the email was actually sent. I asked the support group if there was ever going to be an ability to sort by anyth…

This is a shame. I was waiting for some reviews of Hey. The idea is great. And its from a company with great experience in UI. It's early days I guess.

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

#159

Post by [deleted] »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #137
discardedrefuse wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FastMail doesn't have tags. What it does have? Let me copy/paste my comment from another thread: They have subdomain addressing, which is kind of like plus addressing, but better (not all places let you sign up with plus addressing). I've got my own domain, for example: mydomain.com. So my fastmail email address is depingus@mydomain.com. But with subdomain addressing, I can sign up for services with unique email addr…

You don't even need the subdomain addressing, a one catchall domain is enough (with you own domain). Eg: I want to register on HN - I would just register with hackernews@mydomain or hn.com.accounts@mydomain or whatever on the mailbox address side - it would be delivered to my main catchall mailbox anyway.

[deleted]

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

#160

Post by larrybud »

EwanToo wrote: post #52
mdasen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-a-personalize... Q: I already own a domain that's registered with a provider other than GoDaddy. Can I set up a personalized email address in Outlook.com? A: At the moment, we only support connecting domains managed by GoDaddy with Outlook.com. Maybe that only applies to "Microsoft 365 Family or Microsoft 365 Personal" and not their business offering? They have a basic b…

If you do some googling you can find forum posts on how to do it manually, though I've not tried it myself

An earlier post shared this https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/ft15pk/use_perso...
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