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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?

#211

Post by mongol »

jnieminen wrote: post #150
lewisl9029 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 requ…

I would spent a little more and the the Business Basic plan. I think it is quite a good deal. https://www.microsoft.com/en-ww/microsoft-365/business/micro...

I will use that I think. It is a bonus to get some web Office apps in addition.

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

#212

Post by debuggerpk »

thom wrote: post #115

I 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…

four different email accounts to a single account? .. Thats neat.

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

#215

Post by mongol »

simscitizen wrote: post #201

One way of getting consumer Gmail to work with a custom domain almost exactly like the way legacy Gsuite worked is to do something like this: 1. Tell your registrar to forward e-mails from john@doe.com to john.doe@gmail.com. Many registrars offer this service for free. 2. Set up john@doe.com as an alternate sender in Gmail (Settings > Accounts and Import > Send mail as). For (2), you can use smtp.gmail.com to send ma…

Set the Reply-To header?

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

#218

Post by Daniel_sk »

Fastmail - it has a one-click migration from Gmail. The web interface is good enough, but I prefer to just use Apple Mail client on both iPhone and Macbook. It is also one of the few (if not only?) providers that support Apple push natively in Apple Mail app.

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

#219

Post by sakisv »

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…

It handles them exactly as you describe.

They didn't have them when I first joined a few years ago but, when they added them, they did it the right way.

Coupled with the fact that you can use anything you want before the @, it makes for a very powerful way of organizing your mails.

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

#220

Post by GauntletWizard »

mLuby wrote: post #180
jrnichols wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's because Google has "labels" as their own extension to IMAP. It's non-standard and they don't care. They know it's a lock-in feature. If you have a linux box around, the "imapsync" tool works well.

Is that statement being downvoted because it's incorrect? (I have no idea, just asking because that statement appears relevant.)

Labels are representable via IMAP, but there's pretty much no relation between IMAP, Labels, and the MBOX format here - They're all ways of representing e-mails, yes, but they're basically orthogonal.

MBOX is a very simple format - It's a list of e-mails, separated by newlines. That's it, all there is to it. All metadata is in the form of e-mail headers. Those e-mail headers can be added by a variety of systems - Your MTA, the Sender's MTA, and MTA's in between (such as anti-spam appliances).

Gmail stores metadata about mail messages, and one of those metadata items is the labels that are applied to it. These are used to make searching easier, and are shown in the UI so you can select them and filter by them. Gmail Exports (via Takeout) add a "X-Gmail-Labels" Header that represents this metadata[1].

Gmail's IMAP interface shows you labels. IMAP as a protocol allows you to descend into folders, and to ask about the contents of folders. Gmail doesn't have folders, but it creates folder-like-views of your e-mail by selecting and showing messages that have those labels. It's a convenient interface, but it's a shim layer on top of Gmail, not in any way representative of how your email is stored.

The parent message is uncharitable and technically incorrect. It's not wrong that the gmail export experience sucks, but it's not right enough in the details to be a valuable contribution to the discussion in my opinion. Disclaimer: I maintained the Gmail Import API at one point in my life, and care deeply about portability.

[1] Interestingly, the header is different if you're accessing over IMAP vs from a Takeout export: https://developers.google.com/gmail/imap/imap-extensions#acc...

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