Outlook.com O365 is good
Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
221–230 of 266 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to try Apple’s: I have tried the iCloud+. It’s unstable, incomplete. Barely not shitty. Deliberately sparsely and vaguely documented. Their support employees don’t know the features around custom domain, HideMyEmail etc and refuse to accept anything about it on email and then being typical Apple they simply say no to saying anything on email - hell, there is no email you can contact them. They tell you “y…
So I made the switch from G Suite Legacy to iCloud+ (99 cents seemed like a bargain to try out) and it has a few kinks to work out. Their documentation put double-quotes around the SPF records, and when I added them they didn't work -- had to remove the quotes completely. And yeah, 3 email address limit and a weak icloud.com interface (compared to gmail) is also annoying. But honestly I'll probably use it for a while…
I'm using iCloud a as well right now as a stopgap until I find something more adequate.
Their IMAP is very slow (in true iCloud spirit). People will find it difficult to migrate larger mailboxes. I don't get why they can't just fetch my mail directly from Google.
3 email addresses without at least a catch-all option is not enough.
Their spam filter is rubbish. Even emails sent between members of the same family sharing group go to spam in spite of never leaving Apple's own infrastructure.
Many of my messages show up with an incorrect date, because they were moved between other email providers at some point, adding a more recent "Received" header. I don't blame Apple for this but it's definitely inconvenient having to preprocess the mbox file before uploading.
Apple Mail is highly unreliable and buggy. It deleted all my emails before. There doesn't appear to be any way to cancel a copy/move operation, which is particularly annoying when migrating a lot of email. But fine, there are other email clients (none that I like though).
Unfortunately, the rest of iCloud is really second rate as well. iCloud Drive has no versioning or ransomware protection whatsoever. You can't upload or download a folder from iCloud drive via the web interface. Sharing is crippled, insecure or impossible unless everyone involved uses Apple devices for absolutely everything.
So this is just not an adequate solution for any sort of professional use.
I'm trying Microsoft 365 right now. My experience started with an outage of the main admin site lasting for hours. But it can do a lot of things and it's fast. The downside is that you have to use their unbelievably sprawling, inconsistent, redundant set of admin interfaces that only make sense if you have been a Windows sysadmin since the (previous) .com bubble.
Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 - You…
I would argue the OP is correct gmail's implementation of labels is a proprietary extension of the IMAP standard. Now you are correct that it's not so relevant when exporting to mbox.
It should also be noted that placing labels into the message headers is a solution that can lead to information leaks, and one should be careful with it
The headers are kept (at least in some email apps) when you reply to those emails so the receiver will know your label for that message. So if you label email from your boss as "from idiot" he will know (and there are obviously more serious examples).
Regarding the Gmail labels in IMAP, I'm not sure why you talk about headers. The page you linked to is about the IMAP extension commands, AFAIK the labels do not end up in the headers in that case.
Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
#224Tutanota.
It's secure, reliable and supports also family members and shared calendars, for 1€/month/user
Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 rig…
I got a 15 GB account with Mega. I activated a bonus and got about 5 more. It's full now, but I forgot about that fact until I got an email about that I need to upgrade—bonus has expired —, or they're going to delete the data. But until I do, I can't delete the data, I can't do anything except pay, or everything's gone. So, I guess everything's gone. There is no way I'm putting my card on a service that kidnaps data.
AFAIK 20GB is now free forever for active accounts, so that email might just be a reminder to log in to refresh it.
If not, you can also subscribe via Google Play or the App Store and keep your payment info safe that way. (I didn't sign in to check if they support PayPal or the like)
Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
#226Check if your domain registrar comes with a free mailbox and mail forwarding (e.g. Gandi), and you can wire it up to a free gmail account with a custom domain. Useful for branding side projects more with custom email addresses. By the way, is there something special about Cloudflare email routing that people keep mentioning? Don't most registrars come with mail forwarding? It's different?
It's just a new service in beta from Cloudflare, fully free email forwarding (doesn't appear to be "free for now"). Useful for people who already use Cloudflare, except it doesn't have SMTP so you can't fully "pretend" (i.e.: "send as" from your main mailbox) to be your alias, just forward.
Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
#227I'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.
I got access and it wasn't a good replacement for me, as they don't have SMTP servers to send mail via your domain, just (incoming) email forwarding.
Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
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:/…
That’s a huge security issue! Geez. If anybody realizes you’re using that service they can immediately impersonate you.
The email standards explicitly allow everyone to impersonate anyone. That’s why you should use S/MIME and PGP.
Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did not know this, I moved to mailbox.org in December. Surely they'll only allow that if they pass the auth and the domain belongs to your account?
No, they don't do that check, that is the problem.
I don’t think they can implement such a check without breaking changes.
Re: Ask HN: Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s a huge security issue! Geez. If anybody realizes you’re using that service they can immediately impersonate you.
The email standards explicitly allow everyone to impersonate anyone. That’s why you should use S/MIME and PGP.
If you’re using DKIM to sign the outgoing message it’s a huge flaw if your service provider is signing other peoples emails with your key just because they included the domain. You authenticate to the server for a reason.