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Ask HN: Alternatives to Google-Apps Custom Domain Email Hosting

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google-Apps Custom Domain Email Hosting

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another vote for fastmail--it's a fantastic service. I prefer it to Google's in many ways.

Do they still do that awesome thing where if your invoice isn't paid they delete all your mail and give you no way to recover it? This has actually happened to someone I know, where he didn't respond to the invoice fast enough. Edit: I should say that of course they need to have a recourse to stop providing services to people who don't pay. However, giving maybe 30 to 90 days to at least download your mail after your…

Thinking about this, backup directly to an S3 bucket would be a great feature for Fastmail.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google-Apps Custom Domain Email Hosting

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another vote for fastmail--it's a fantastic service. I prefer it to Google's in many ways.

Do they still do that awesome thing where if your invoice isn't paid they delete all your mail and give you no way to recover it? This has actually happened to someone I know, where he didn't respond to the invoice fast enough. Edit: I should say that of course they need to have a recourse to stop providing services to people who don't pay. However, giving maybe 30 to 90 days to at least download your mail after your…

As the "someone" in question, I should clarify that the core screw-up was that the invoice emails were going to the account's "master" mailbox, which was unmonitored because the domain it was managing was being forwarded (IIRC I couldn't figure out how to forward the master mailbox or something).

This was a while ago, so my memory may be failing me, but I'm fairly certain we had an alternate "recovery" address set up - just no one thought to send an invoice there, or call the phone number on file, or whatever... it was a "hey, you show no signs of having received the invoice, so we assume you're a PITA deadbeat and we're going to perma-delete the account for you!"

Moral of the story (from my perspective) - if a customer isn't responding to your invoice, it might just be that they don't have it... try to reach on them a side channel before cutting off service!

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google-Apps Custom Domain Email Hosting

#19
Virtualmin: http://virtualmin.com

Setup a supported Linux distribution on any cloud provider (eg. Linode, DigitalOcean) and run the Virtualmin 1-liner on it. 10 minutes later you'll have a control panel where you can create domains. Each domain can have Web sites, email accounts, git repositories, databases, DNS management, and more. Don't want to use half of those things? Turn them off. You can add as many as you want and it's open source. It works great.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Google-Apps Custom Domain Email Hosting

#20
post #7
post #5

I thought Google Apps email wasn't free anymore? Didn't they stop offering it around late 2012?

Correct. It's no longer free. I have it on an older domain, and it's still free, grandfathered in. I recently signed up with a new domain, and I'm paying for it on that domain.

If you sign into the admin panel of the grandfathered domain you can add the new domain to that Google Apps Account.

Granted any settings will effect all the domains associated with that account.

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