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Ask HN: Alternate Email hosting to G Suite

105 points by mrbonner ↗ HN
I have been using at Suite with custom domain for my email since 2010. Now google is shutting down g suite and forcing a paid Workspace subscription. I only need to keep my email and domain. By accident, I deleted my g suite but still have access to admin console and the domain registration.

Is there a recommended email hosting I could simply transfer to?

150 comments

[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] thread
cpach
Try the search function. There’s been lots of discussion about this the past weeks :)
dfdz
Personally I use fastmail.com and I am happy with the service, but it costs $5/month so I am not sure that is what you are looking for.

You could self host, but setting it up is a time investment and probably not worth it unless you have fun doing it

lkxijlewlf
I use zoho. The free tier lets you use your own domain and so far that's been plenty for me.
WallyFunk
Be careful. Zoho could perform a Google style rug-pull on you. Always scout for other options in that scenario. Personally I enjoy Purelymail[0]

[0] https://purelymail.com/

lkxijlewlf
Yeah, I understand. But, so far (about 3 years), they've been really good.

I also, back up any important emails. The rest, I can lose and not cry.

Edit: Purelymail might be interesting if they had calendar syncing. Maybe when they've grown a bit more.

mchristen
Well I've had my free gsuite account for almost 15 years so you still have some time before you get to Google levels of screwed over.
jlelse
Purelymail has calendar syncing using CalDAV.
ValentineC
> Zoho could perform a Google style rug-pull on you.

Zoho has done so, with the removal of POP/IMAP for their free tier without any notice.

itake
I used zoho for a long time, but they started removing features from the free tier, like IMAP/POP access, so you're forced to use their client and can't backup your emails.

B/c I use gmail for my personal email, I found that if I didn't have a unified inbox, I would miss reading important emails.

ValentineC
> they started removing features from the free tier, like IMAP/POP access, so you're forced to use their client and can't backup your emails.

Just a heads up: I was looking through their website [1] recently, and found that they'll let you go onto the trial if you're solely looking to move away from their email service.

[1] https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html#:~:text=Can%...

pearlyn_anu
Hey, just to clarify, as someone who has been on the Zoho Mail team, of course our plans have undergone changes, the free plan including. But we always grandfather our existing users, we removed support only for new signups. If a feature was available when someone signed up for the tier, it will always be available.
extra88
No IMAP on their free tier but their Lite tier doesn't appear to be missing anything important and is only $12/year/user.

Previously (2 years ago), someone on a list I'm on reported they tried Zoho (after using Google and before switching to Fastmail) but A) found customer support to be terrible and B) their email was being treated as spam by a couple of big providers (Yahoo and AOL). I'm not too concerned about the customer support opinion but delivery is job #1, it's a major reason why I won't consider self-hosting email.

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo
I am quite pleased with zoho feature rich and modestly prized. The nice thing is that zoho.com and zoho.eu are different entities.
mdibaiee
I use Protonmail.com and I'm quite happy with their service. It does allow custom email domains, etc., but is paid.
hkhanna
I second Fastmail for email & calendar.

The key vendor lockin that has made it hard for me to get away from Google Workspace (f/k/a GSuite) is Google Docs. Lots of people in my work and personal life share and collaborate on Google Docs. That's not easy to deal with unless your email address is on the Google platform.

I tried and desperately wanted to like Microsoft's equivalent Office 365 or whatever its called now. I quickly learned that to administer Microsoft's product requires a full time job. It's horrendously buggy, complex and not catered to SMBs.

Microsoft Office itself is pretty good and Word's collaboration features are approaching parity with Google's. But administering a domain in Microsoft world is just not worth the effort. Google Workspace's domain admin panel, on the other hand, seems to strike the right balance between features and complexity and more-or-less works as expected.

I am really trying to move my life away from Google, but as long as folks in my sphere use Google Docs, that is hard to do. If Google Docs doesn't concern you, I fully endorse Fastmail and have used it in my personal life since 2017.

cproctor
This has mostly been my experience as well. I moved my email and calendaring to Fastmail, keeping my vestigal gmail address. I use this google account for Docs and nothing else. (For academics, do not keep your writing/cv/syllabi/etc in a Google account tied to your university email address!) I still get a personal email addressed to gmail every couple of months despite a years-long process of autoreplies asking family and friends to move to my new email address. It takes a long time but it's worth it.

As I've started hosting more websites (mostly academic projects like unfold.studio or learning-machines.net), I have come to appreciate more and more the ability to point multiple domains' MX records to my single fastmail account. A nice additional benefit is the ability to handle wildcard email addresses. When I log in to ebay, it's with ebay.com@<subdomain>. When I log in to the IRS, it's with irs.gov@<subdomain>. When someone sells an email address or starts spamming it, I can cut it off. And I can hope that maybe a few less rows are getting joined in the big database in the sky.

extra88
> A nice additional benefit is the ability to handle wildcard email addresses … > When someone sells an email address or starts spamming it, I can cut it off.

If you have your Fastmail account configured for wildcard, or "catch-all" addressing, does it let you cut off specific aliases? G Suite/Workspace lets you do catch-all addressing but if one address starts getting spammed, there doesn't seem a way to make it bounce, you can only filter it out.

One thing Fastmail Standard accounts have over G Suite/Workspace is allowing an order of magnitude more specific aliases. When you use the address-per-site technique you describe you can easily hit the few dozen alias limit per-account on G Suite/Workspace.

cproctor
Hmm, I'm actually not sure. It hasn't happened a ton so I usually just filter out spam after it arrives.
auslegung
https://cryptpad.fr/ Looks like an excellent private online office suite. Others may still be on Google and you’re unlikely to change that, but you can start using this for your own stuff (and they have sharing)
larrymyers
I just went through this experience due to the notification from Google that my free G Suite Legacy account was going away. Fastmail's documentation and onboarding experience made it a few hours of work to do the migration.

I'll also be going the same route and using an old vanilla gmail account for Google Docs as needed.

lrvick
When people send me google docs I make use of the guest account feature. You do not need a Google account.
hkhanna
It's still doable, yes, although the guest account feature is relatively new. But it's cumbersome to use because, at least the last time I used it, every 7 days you have to re-authenticate via a verification code sent to your email.
NGRhodes
You can still get a google account without signing up for Gmail, so you can still use Google Docs and share/collaborate fine.
devoutsalsa
I just switched to Fastmail this past week and like it quite a bit.

On a related note, I changed my credit card email address, and it triggered a security alert & they froze all 4 of my credit cards. They asked for three different forms of documentation to prove I was who I say I am, and reviewing the evidence will take 7 to 10 days. So if you change your email, be prepared for a little pain just in case.

rovr138
Switch to your own domain if you can.

That way you can change providers and never worry about this stuff.

mrbonner
Thank you for your suggestion. I have now paid for G workspace for a month so that I could migrate. I am the only user and not using any other products of G suite. Fast mail seems to be the best option for me.
627467
The thing is: if the custom domain email was setup as a new Google account (not a gsuite one) we would get most (all?) the same features as gsuite including docs and drive. I assume these account will continue to have this, no?
jrib
I'm going to switch to fastmail. Purelymail looks appealing but it seems less established. I may try it for my non-main e-mail.

One thing I am not sure about is the fact that I also relied on using oauth with my custom domain through google. Some providers will let me reset the password via e-mail; but not sure that's going to work everywhere.

twistedpair
AWS SES Inbound + a Lambda function to drop the mail where you want it (e.g. a topic, an S3 bucket, or forward it to somewhere else). Overall monthly cost is practically $0.
SwiftyBug
That sounds like the exact experience I'd get for zero dollars.
twistedpair
If you've got a lot of domains, but need the `admin@<domain>.<tld>` registration emails to work correctly, you can route them all through SES + Lambda for nothing, rather than having to add hosting to all the domains. Impl works well for some use cases.
inportb
Then route your messages into S3, mount the bucket using s3fs, and point Dovecot at it (Maildir) to enable IMAP. Or just use a MUA that could read a Maildir directly.

Going the other way, you could configure Postfix to relay via SES.

newman314
I was thinking of using icloud with custom domains as it appears to be the cheapest, $1/mth but reviews seem mixed.

Anyone that has used this config, please weigh in. Thanks.

eknkc
It works fine. Lacks a lot of configuration functionality and the web interface is sub par but it works. There is no catch all feature though.
voisin
Any suggestions on maintaining Gmail labels in the migration?
alanpearce
Works fine for me so far. From memory (like 7 years ago) gmail’s filtering rules are more powerful, but iCloud has the basics at least
0xJRS
Protonmail's been fantastic
buro9
I've just switched to fastmail for email from gsuite and Gmail. It was effortless and I feel it works better than the Gmail systems did. I also enjoy the ease with which alias and catch all emails from my various domain names work.

The calendar though, this is proving the harder lock in from Google. Google calendar app on Android is superb but has no equivalent, especially if you have Google home devices or you use Android in your car, etc. At the moment I've moved my calendars to Google calendar and have yet to find an equivalent that works as well for it. Fastmail is good, but it's the apps for calendar which aren't quite there in my opinion.

Macha
There's no need to stop using Google Calendar (Android App) because you stopped using Google Calendar (provider) if that's what you prefer, it'll let you view calendars from any provider installed on your phone. Fastmail themselves recommend DAVx to sync with your Fastmail account for this purpose (https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000279881-Se...), though it would be nice if Fastmail's own app integrated with the OS a bit more in terms of providing a calender to the OS, and having widgets for mail folders.
Reitet00
That's right. Just by coincidence I moved my calendars to Etesync recently and thanks to Android's great calendar provider architecture the frontend calendar app did not change (I'm using Etar). This nice API was designed in good old times when Google actually cared about interoperability.
SwiftyBug
After I switch to an alternate email host will my Google account still exist? Will I still be able to login to Google services using my@personaldomain.com?
kk6mrp
I use MXRoute [0] which is still offering a lifetime promo. Looks like it increased to $175 since I bought it. I haven't been disappointed and it is faster than Gmail from my experience. I host Cypht [1] instead of using their webmail which allows me to aggregate other emails and RSS feeds together in one interface.

[0] https://mxroute.com/ [1] https://cypht.org/

raghavtoshniwal
Tangential : Remember reading somewhere that 'lifetime' means the product's lifetime, not the user's
kk6mrp
Yes, it does however:

> Lifetime means the lifetime of MXroute. If every other customer cancels service, no one orders any further service, and only lifetime services remain, then it’s obvious MXroute is nearing it’s end. There’s absolutely no reason for us to plan for that scenario or to act as though it’s an inevitable future. In no way is that a reasonable situation, we’ll always be competitive and creative to keep earning your business. But even if that situation occurs 10 years down the road, won’t you have gotten a pretty sweet deal that beats our regular price offers?

[0] https://community.mxroute.com/t/isnt-a-lifetime-promotion-a-...

timothevs
+1 for MXRoute. I switched a few of my domains from Legacy GSuite in the last week, and the transition has been seamless. I am going to check out Cypht - that looks to be the answer to my last minor quibble.
kadoban
I'm always very wary of those. Once you buy it, they have no financial incentive to care at all what kind of service you get.
kk6mrp
I was also skeptical before I tried it however I have found it to be a quality reliable service.
pronoiac
I haven't signed up yet, but I like that the pricing is by storage space, not per user or domain!
somehnguy
I'm currently deciding between Office365 Family or Fastmail. I would prefer Fastmail, they seem modern & less headache inducing than configuring Office365 for my custom domain. But some family members would benefit from having access to the Office suite of products, so that benefit is quite nice.
sequence7
In case you didn't know Office365 family only works with GoDaddy domains, they used to support other registrars but have dropped that support which is why I'm looking for an alternative.
somehnguy
Hmm, I found a sort of workaround involving a temporary transfer to godaddy to get the records and then back to your preferred registrar. Any chance you know more about that?
devilkin
If you look around on reddit there are ways to use any domain registrar. Just needs some txt records.
caseyf7
What’s the best way to transfer or archive your gmail in a way that keeps it searchable?
osamagirl69
There is a button to import to fastmail, which worked very well--basically a seamless transition. The only manual part I had to do was copy over my filter rules.
horstm22
Fastmail also has a filter rule importer for Gmail!
smukherjee19
Seems like Fastmail is extremely popular here, based on the other comments. What are its advantages compared to say, Protonmail?
Swenrekcah
I use Fastmail but can’t speak for Protonmail. I wanted to use Protonmail actually, because Australia, but they have an incomprehensible 5GB allowance. Fastmail is better with 30GB which still seems low IMO.
rcMgD2BwE72F
The main reason why I switched from Fastmail to Proton is that you don't have to rely on their apps, even though they're far better designed and much more powerful. Example: Proton's Android application still does not support conversation/thread view but you can't even use IMAP/POP3 because of the encryption.

I also believe that the benefit of Proton's client-side encryption is extremely limited because most of your contacts aren't on Proton so they'll keep a plain version of your emails. So you're only protected from Proton looking at your content (while you can pay them not to) or from the police asking Proton to share your emails. But Proton was recently forced to give on of their users' account because the French police abused the anti-terrorism laws (through Europol) even though the guy was only suspected of illegally occupying a building in Paris during climate protests.

So you end up with lots of small disadvantages (running Proton's bridge for emails, or having to rely on their poor mobile apps) for little protection.

Edit: also, when I trialed Fastmail, I discovered that the Protonmail mobile app fails at manual forward to my Fastmail email address (on a custom domain). I've reported the issue 5 times (with all the info to reproduce), reinstalled the application and tested on other devices bu they don't even recognize the issue. They do reply but I still can't email myself due to a bug in their Android apps (both stable and beta versions). Quite frustrating.

smukherjee19
Thanks for the detailed reply!

Going by the narrative, did you mean you switched from Protonmail to Fastmail?

Macha
> The main reason why I switched from Fastmail to Proton

Unless I'm misreading the post, you migrated from Protonmail to Fastmail?

djaychela
The reason I chose it was because they have email snoozing which I found hugely useful in Inbox and I wanted to get away from using Google, so I switched. Never looked back since.
osamagirl69
Fastmail. Been using them for ever and they have been nothing but great. Really nice to have actual support if you do need it (I did once for a misconfig on my end of my domain records, they got it sorted in a few hours).

I used the auto-import tool from my existing google accounts and it took a while but successfully imported everything with basically zero effort.

riffic
Cloudflare's doing free mail forwarding now. It's in beta but they're onboarding people pretty fast.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-email-routing/

outgoing is going to be a bit more tricky. That's an exercise for the reader.

edit: I have also failed to seen ImprovMX mentioned here, but they have a compelling offering for bulk domain owners. Run by a community member (cx42net: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22223783)

I know there are some other niche mail services that are out and do the things you can find through other mentioned companies like fastmail, o365, migadu, mxroute, et cetera. One of these days I should put some sort of mail guide together to collect and untangle this ecosystem.

throw_away
Could people who do this talk a bit more about how the outgoing side works out? Is there a way to do this where I don't have to jump through hoops just to hit reply to a message & have it come from my custom domain?

Ideally, what I'm looking for:

* wildcard routing

* keep existing archive of mail

* easy to use (replies make sense on mobile and web interface)

* not have to replace google identity (for YouTube prefs + 3rd party sign-ins)

There was this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30104783 about how a gsuite account could be converted to a free one, which sounds like it could work with this, but I'm still unsure about how sending mail would work out.

The next best alternative I see is fastmail, but that saves me just $12/year + I have to do a lengthy export + I'm not sure how my google accounts will work out.

617a6572
In the past, I utilized a standard Gmail account (no G Suite/Workspace) and had mail forwarding set up with a domain I had in Google domains. It supports using a wildcard (any email@domain.com). In terms of sending email as the alias, this is also easily doable:

https://support.google.com/domains/answer/9437157?hl=en

extra88
Last time I looked, your actual Gmail address was still included in such outgoing emails, the From address may be the alias but the Gmail address was also present in the headers.
jhart99
I do this with ImprovMx. You set up the inbound to forward to some other address. For outbound you can either pay them or set up GMail to do outbound aliasing. It works fine for me, but there is some lag on inbound emails.
et-al
I looked into Cloudflare's email forwarding back in December and it looked like a lot of folks were still on the waitlist.

Does anyone have any more optimistic updates about this?

sequence7
It took me a week to go from requesting access to receiving access for my domain when I signed up earlier this month. I was already using cloudflare for my dns so maybe that sped things up?
mderazon
Simplelogin works great for me, and replying back also works well
funstuff007
If you have a high volume email inbox (role-based address), neither G Suit nor fastmail will suffice. Or they will, but you'll live in fear of a super high volume day when you get blocked, or start dropping messages.

This critique is for inbound mail for DAQ, not outbound mail (spam).

Does anyone know if G Suite, Fastmail or others offer a high volume option? receive 10K or more messages per day?

cjk
I can’t recommend Fastmail enough. I used to host my own email server after moving off of Google Apps back in the day, and I don’t miss it at all.

Fastmail is reliable and affordable, has great customer service, and supports the sieve language for defining filtering rules. Really tough to beat.

Pelam
Aws WorkMail is ok.
unmole
I switched to iCloud despite the fact that I have zero personal Apple devices.
criddell
I've been thinking about iCloud because it's so inexpensive. How difficult was the transfer? Did you follow any online guides?
unmole
> iCloud because it's so inexpensive.

That was part of why I went with it.

> How difficult was the transfer?

I didn't actually transfer any data. My old GSuite setup forwarded every incoming email to a Gmail account so, I already had a backup. I just updated the DNS records.