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Ask HN: Migrate from G Suite, keep email addresses?

32 points by armagon ↗ HN
I just received an e-mail from Google yesterday that they are discontinuing G Suite Legacy Free edition (which I believe was called 'Google Apps For Your Domain' back in the day). Public info is at https://www.ghacks.net/2022/01/20/google-ends-the-g-suite-legacy-free-edition-leaving-users-worried/

They intend to have a free tier, but without the most important feature, e-mail at your existing e-mail address. I've set up my kids with e-mail addresses from this domain, and have a couple accounts myself, for ten accounts in all. The cheapest paid option is going to be $6 (USD, presumably) / month / account, or $720/year for the 10 accounts, which is a non-starter, as I'm not using this for a business.

If possible, I'd like to keep the e-mail accounts working. I am able to administer my DNS settings, so changing the, uh, MX records shouldn't be too hard.

What options should I look at? I gather that running your own e-mail server is horrible unless you want to spend your life running the server. Are there inexpensive services that will host e-mail with custom domains?

42 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 94.9 ms ] thread
r6203
I discovered Fastmail a few years ago and couldn't be happier. Migrating from Gmail was easy via the import option built into Fastmail.

I'm using a custom domain and pay $5/month for my account.

https://www.fastmail.com/

hn_version_0023
I’m also a happy Fastmail customer, but I don’t think $5/mo for 10 accounts is gonna fly for this?

$500/mo < $720/mo… but not near enough cheaper for kids email IMO

pkulak
10 accounts sounds like there are actually lots of aliases, which would be free.

Regardless, I’m a happy Fastmail user as well, just to add another anecdote.

divbzero
Yes, Fastmail accounts correspond to the number of users you have. Each user can set up a virtually unlimited number of aliases.

I have also been a happy Fastmail user. Reliable and easy to configure.

DandyDev
$5/mo for 10 accounts is $50/mo in total. I don't know where you got the $500/mo from.

And that is a very reasonable price for a core service like email and not selling you data

hn_version_0023
You’re absolutely right; I feel exceptionally dumb! Don’t get the downvotes?
dolni
I will also second Fastmail as a Google alternative. Does what I need well.

I have encountered a couple minor bugs with the calendar but nothing I would classify as a show-stopper.

First, once in a while when you load the calendar page an event doesn't show up. Refeshing fixes it. Never had issues with events not showing up on mobile, though.

Second, I sync external calendars and sometimes events show up as also being on the external calendar. Weird, but easy enough to ignore.

PascLeRasc
I personally found that events showing up on the external calendar was much worse than just weird. Every job interview cycle I've gone through using Fastmail has had its own new issue.
unmole
I moved to iCloud+. It's fairly inexpensive and works fine for me. But you do need access to an Apple device to initially sign-up though.
Tutanota
Hi there, we came across this discussion and just wanted to recommend to take a look at Tutanota. You could move your custom domain accounts over, starting at €1 per user per month. Let us know if you have any questions!
aviditas
I use tutanota after switching from Google with my custom domain back in 2018. It works great. I like the desktop and mobile apps. The improvements to the calendar have been solid enough where I am slowly migrating from a stand alone paid calendar app to it. I use cloudflare for my registrar and managing my domain records and the domain renewals are my only cost there. I pay €12 a year including taxes for just my one user account. I set it all up once and with automatic payments and renewals a few years ago, I haven't had to mess with it since. I really love that I can keep my wildcard domain inbound and use that to manage newsletters and various email services.
ajb
Migadu has an interesting model of not pricing by number of users, which may be worth looking at if you have 10 accounts but not excessive usage. Ultimately I didn't go with them because I wanted an account that supports second factor.

Edited to add: migadu's pro/con list: https://www.migadu.com/procon/#the-drawbacks-list

Everyone else I know of prices per user. If you just need aliases and not separate mailboxes, protonmail is good.

kej
I'm in the same boat as OP, and Migadu is on my shortlist of replacements along with mxroute.com. They both charge for a bucket of storage instead of per user, but MX Route is in the U.S. as opposed to Migadu in Switzerland, which may be relevant to some people.

Question for everyone: Are there any other services with similar pricing where I don't have to pay more to spin up an extra address?

Ir0nMan
+1 Migadu has been a great find.
JaggedJax
There's Zoho Mail which supports custom domains for email. Their paid tiers are cheap as long as you don't need a lot of storage. I was able to switch over to their free tier since I didn't need extra users.
fy20
I switched to Zoho mail and it works fine for sending/receiving email, but compared to Gmail their clients feel like 1999. The search is terrible (you can't search Archived email) and tags only seem to exist in webmail and are not shown in the main inbox view.
JaggedJax
It's true. I only use it for extremely basic and low volume purpose. I'm not sure I'd love it as my primary email, but it can be forwarded back to a regular Gmail account too.
AdrienPoupa
I was facing the same dilemma in January, I settled on Infomaniak and I've been quite happy so far. They support DKIM/DMARC, catchall, domain aliases and are reasonably priced (18EUR yearly for 5 addresses). They have their own webmail that I find really pleasant to use. Unfortunately no mobile application for the moment, but it should be coming this year.

I listed the main providers I could find here, in case you are interested: https://adrien.poupa.net/migrating-away-from-g-suite-legacy-...

NorwegianDude
> I gather that running your own e-mail server is horrible unless you want to spend your life running the server.

Running a mail server is not hard at all. Setting it up is the annoying part as it requires you to know a bit about how email works and how all the different services are tied together. If you are a technical person then you would probably be able to research how email works and set it up in a couple of days.

Email is not exactly something new with a lot of innovation, so once it's set up you'll likely be good for quite some time(until the OS is EOL).

ab_testing
The hard part is not setting up your own email server. It is ensuring delivery. There are many instances where even if you have configured everything correctly, your email will still end up in spam. Outlook is even worse in that certain emails sent to outlook will get dropped and not even end up in spam.
ronzensci
We have 40 email accounts on our custom domain and pay $0 per month for both sending & receiving emails on our custom domain.

We have very simple tech for that. We use the free email forwarding option from our domain provider. This allows us to receive emails sent to our custom domain. To send emails we use the free sendgrid SMTP servers configured for that same custom domain email account in our forwarded email account.

Maybe not the most elegant solution, but we can run upto 100 free custom domain email accounts using this.

ValentineC
I think most of my users (and myself) would like to continue being able to use Gmail search, so I'd probably move all my domains to my single-user paid Google Workspace account (or maybe to Cloudflare email forwarding), set up forwarding/catchall rules for them, and forward them to personal Gmail addresses.

Still hoping that Google launches a family plan that has custom domains. I think around $5/month for up to 5 users would be fabulous.

danamit
Try Namecheap, I am using it for 4 years now. No issues.
floatinglotus
If you pay for Apple iCloud+ they just enabled support for custom domain names for email.
theogravity
Wow thank you for this, I would have never known.
jpking
I’ve done this recently for similar reasons. It’s easy to set up and seems to work well so far. DKIM signing of emails doesn’t work yet when sending emails from the Apple Mail apps. But it does work in Thunderbird.

Paying less than £1 a month and can share with family members too. Plus the other stuff like Private Relay on iCloud+ which are cool extras.

theogravity
I'm more concerned about sites I use OAuth with under my GSuite account - how are people migrating taking this into account? My biggest fear is I forgot to change the auth provider of a site I use away from GSuite.
easrng
I use gmail with forwardemail.net and it works great.
Crontab
My domain is registered with Gandhi, which provides basic free mail hosting for no additional cost, so that is where I am going.
p0d
I was in the same boat but made the shift a month or two ago.

My family and I created free Google accounts.

I bought a subscription to Fastmail

I have multiple domains sending mail to Fastmail

Fastmail has rules to forward to the free Gmail accounts.

The free Gmail accounts reply from the address they are sent.

All been working well. I like Gmail/Cal which is why I have stuck with them. This setup however gives me the freedom to move to a different mail client or calendar if I choose.

The only reason I wanted G Suite Legacy was for custom domains. I would have paid Google for this service. I think they dropped the ball there.

mox1
fastmail has a service called pobox.com, which is basically like an incoming e-mail router.

I do similar to the OP, using it.

You can route 1 incoming e-mail to 2 gmail boxes, which is very useful.

Ir0nMan
Check out Migadu.

You pay for a plan based on your usage and are then not limited by number of domains or number of accounts.

feistypharit
I host some domains with migadu and have been pleased. For my newer, less used domains anyway.

I also bought a lifetime account in mxroute. It’s also fine, but wonky, as they’ve repurposed other tools to admin it.

However, some of my users have a lot of old email, and the storage options on migadu suck. I don’t want to pay more per month because two accounts need more space.

Lately, I found https://purelymail.com and put a domain with them. They’re neat because it’s usage based billing for storage. The billing model is exactly as I want, however, I think it’s a one man show, so reliability and longevity could be an issue.

Ultimately, I may use cloudflare email routing and migrate people to free gmail accounts. Sadly, the multiple logins (gmail and custom domain) will be confusing.

Daegalus
you can try an MX forwarding service like https://improvmx.com I use it when i left gsuite.

it lets you forward the emails to any free or paid service. I have my domain pointing to a @gmail.com account while my mom has hers pointing to @outlook.com.

if you pay $9 (total) you get SMTP servers and more domains, etc. (though the free tier is plenty generous already.

look into it. it's a great service. let's you move your domains at the user level fairly easily.

zeagle
I switched to migadu. Works great and would recommend. Prior to this I used proton mail but found it cost prohibitive got two users with two domains. Hopefully their solution involves me keeping my play store purchases because that is the only reasonable I care about my Google account.
mymllnthaccount
I was looking at this tonight and I think Google lets you set up "alias emails" in the admin. So if you have multiple users for just yourself, you could collapse those into a 1 user with multiple aliases. That should help with your cost under Google.
chad_strategic
Okay, confused here. I have a G Suite Legacy Free edition account. So I have one domain, with 20 emails associated with that domain.

chad@example.com,wife@example.com, kid@example.com, dog@example.com,etc...

So am I going to pay for each email or just $6 a month for that one domain?

anderiv
It’s $6/user/month. So yes, you’d be paying that for each.