151–160 of 475 posts
Not sure how to feel about this. The core feature of the free Google Apps was that you could use GMail with your own domain without having to run a dedicated mail server yourself.
This method is actually far more convenient than setting up Google Apps. You can both send and receive mail at the other domain, and you get a unified inbox (which Google Apps never provided).
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$50 / user / year - still not insane but I know it's put people off in the past.
Certainly puts me off. $5/10 per user per year, wouldn't think twice about it (even though the money would be paid grudgingly). With the number of users we have that would end up being around $50/year; but $500/year to host some email and store spreadsheets? No thanks.
Now, the median salary for thos 100 employees is most likely at least $3000, so you are paying them collectively $300,000 a month. That represents 0.016% of their salary. Do you get where I'm going with this?
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by cutting off free users they just opened themselves to getting undercut by a smaller company that can offer fewer, cheaper, targeted options. I just wanted an email for my domain and that's not worth 50 bucks a year. I'll just set up my own email system at this point, call it a learning experience and never be exposed to the rest of whatever was in Google Apps.
From my own experience I can tell you that running your own mail server is a massive PITA. There's a good chance that even if you jump through all the required hoops to improve trust for your domain you will still have trouble delivering mail to certain addresses (Hotmail is notoriously hard to get white-listed for). Then there's spam... don't even get me started on spam filtering. For me personally $50/year is a bar…
You could sign up for Google Apps, point your domain MX to Google and forward all your SPAM free mail to your private server from the Google Apps console.
No kidding, I've seen so many companies that had their mail systems in premises setup a 1 user Google Apps account ($50/year) to do what I just mentioned above. They got rid of most of their SPAM and saved tons $ on wasted bandwidth.
Google made a mistake initially by 1) Giving too much away for free and 2) Charging too low. It is probably trying to correct these mistakes. 1) On giving too much away… Remember, Google Apps started with 200 free users, later reduced it to 100, then to 50, then to 10 and now to zero. http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/23/google-puts-the-squeeze-on-... At 200 free users, there was no room for a new entrant in the market.…
And when Google Apps first started, you could request to increase the number of free users. I have an old account with a quota of 500 free users.
Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version. I give it six months before they start strong-arming free users into paid accounts.
Any other decent, free IMAP hosts out there? Ever since the Gmail UI shit the bed and mail clients grew an archive button I don't really need Google Apps itself anymore anyway.
If you have the time for it, you could try a VPS and your own IMAP/SMTP-server and web-interface. I migrated off Google a year ago to my own server, took a day to sit down and understand/configure it and have since then run smoothly w/o me touching it. And since I host some other people's domains and mail for a small fee, I actually earn a few $ / year.