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.
Any cheaper than $50 per user per year and you're in the free range. Just to keep this in perspective, $50 a year is a pretty good value when you think about what you're getting in Google Apps.
I don't even see ads when reading email for my basic gmail account on my phone, so IME there's zero difference between the two except that one is tightly integrated with my domain name and the other has a terribly ugly username @gmail.com ...
How so? It's essentially the same service as gmail, only with a different domain. The incremental cost to them is zero, and they make the same revenue as they do from a gmail user.
Plenty of services will let you forward your mail to a normal GMail account. Without an SMTP server, your GMail account will still be visible to your recipients, but it's not so bad.
You can send as any email address you have access to. Some email clients show the GMail address as well when the email is sent through GMail's SMTP servers. It's suboptimal, but there are plenty of SMTP services you could use if you want to get around that.
You can also configure it so that Gmail uses the other email address SMTP servers. However, I'm not quite sure whether they still include the originating Gmail address in the email headers.
I setup my email that way years ago and abandoned it. At that time, it caused a lot of my outgoing emails to get flagged as spam because of the mismatch of various mail headers between the Gmail domains with the various to/from/reply-to domains. Don't know if it would trip fewer spam filters now.
During my time at Fermilab working on an LHC sensor team, I forwarded my Fermilab email to my personal gmail account because their mail servers were so antiquated (100MB quota, no web interface, etc). Filters, multiple Inbox labs, and all my emails I responded to looked like they came from my Fermilab email address.
This could be a good thing. If you approach your manager wanting to switch from dedicated to cloud email service, and you tell him it's for free, he's going to be suspicious. If there's a cost involved - no matter how small - it gives the product a degree liability for support.
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).
No, that method requires that the other domain have its own mail server to accept and store the mail until gmail comes and fetches it with POP. Who will host that other server?
Google Apps for domains lets you point your domain's MX record directly at Google, and Google accepts the mail for you.
The important part of Google Apps is the GMail interface, not the SMTP service. SMTP hosting is easy to come by; most hosting services include it with their web hosting packages.
Yet this doesn't appear to be any sort of mail-hosting thing, so you'd still have to sort out mail with an entirely different provider to receive e-mails on your domain. This is pretty awful.
That's not correct at all. You don't need website hosting to have a domain, and you could use free google apps on any domain you own, without paying for a host.
This is really a logical step. If you are an individual and don't really see the value in $50 a year, you can forward your own domain to your regular Gmail account and set the reply to email address to whatever you want.
If you run a business and need the Google Apps platform, then $50 a year really shouldn't be a barrier for you. If it is, time to rethink your business priorities.
We have a Google Apps account at my day gig with 79 users; I pay it monthly on a credit card, at $5/month, so right around $400/month. That is incredible value for what we get with Google Apps, as they don't just do our email, calendar, etc, but also Drive and our authentication (via OAuth/LDAP).
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.
Let's imagine your company has 100 employees in it. So at $5/user a month, you are paying $500 a month.
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?
And when the median salary of your employees is $0/month (prototyping or a family domain or something) and your options are:
a. Nothing
b. $50/(employee/family member)
What then? Of course no company paying $300,000/month is going to care about $50/user/year.
Why hasn't Google offered an option to increase from the default 25GB of email storage? Drive has an option to increase upto 16TB, but Gmail is locked at 25GB? What gives?
I would like to see a breakdown (from google) of how much storage people use. I'd guess a majority use <1 GB, and I can't imagine many people need more than 25GB.
My comment is aimed at business users, not casual users. Several friends of mine have hit the cap with their business accounts and have had to consider alternative email providers because now they can't use their email accounts.
They used to offer it. I'm still grandfathered on a 30GB plan, which is wonderful. I occasionally get poke emails from Google asking me to upgrade to one of the new plans.
It's been nearly six years of free. That's pretty gradual strong-arming.
Note that per user limits continue to apply, so people have as much incentive as they ever did to upgrade, plus for any new domains/projects people will naturally either migrate to other options (then consolidate services around these, moving themselves off Google) or start paying.
Not convinced there's any need for hostility on either side.
I'm curious what happens with the people that are in limbo - that is still in their 30 day trial period and are unable to downgrade to a free version because of that.
Me too. I just set up a client's email with Google Apps a couple of days ago intending to use the free version. Its going to be a big headache if they can't use the free offering.
Well, obviously yes I could and so could my clients. But Free is the best kind of price, especially for startups. I have no problem paying for good software and services. I also have no problem seeking out the next option that compares in value. At this point Google Apps is a paid email option that must compete with all the other countless premium email options.
If a dollar a week is too much for what you get from this service then maybe you're doing something wrong, especially for startups where you're not going to have hundreds of employees.
I'm thinking nothing if you require things like Google Apps instead of just Gmail. If you're talking about a "Gmail for your Domain" alternative, just look to other email providers:
...yet you are not prepared to pay financially in exchange for that value, and even convey disappointment when the free provision of that value is ceased.
blowing your comment out of context, but this misalignment with value and $ spend is a huge problem in our industry today.
It's just too goddamned much money for organizations that are small and are not funded startups. $50 per user per year -- if it was $5, they might have a deal, but having to cough up $500 annually for something that was originally free?
I am already using this for my security email address (the one that I use to secure other security doors). It's good.
I think I could use it more at a even at some more cost, maybe even for my other emails, iff they better their web interface.
Seems most of the people recommending alternatives are only thinking of email. I use gapps for my family, and we take a huge advantage of having a domain-specific calender and docs.
It's a lot easier to have your data be shared with the whole team. Otherwise, with a personal google account, sharing a document with a team requires adding each individual person to each document. There appears to be a feature of adding a group to a document, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to define groups, and even if it were possible it'd be a few extra steps to manage as well as to keep track of, since the document overview only shows "shared" but not the people/group it's shared with.
With a domain-specific account, it's easy to set a document to be shared with the group - added benefit is if you add a new user to the domain, she is automatically given access to those documents. Also, the document overview is much easier to manage since anything marked "shared" usually means teamwide.
I get what you're saying, everything can be accomplished with the still free personal google account, just it includes a constant daily drain on mental processing power.
by offering <50 email accounts for free, Google essentially destroyed the market for any other startups or companies to come into the market and offer non-enterprise B2B email services... thus limiting competition and innovation.
One could argue that the removal of the free tier at this point is simply because they've created an entrenched position, but one could also suggest that this creates a modicum of opportunity for another player to try to enter this space.
Certainly until today the $ size of the addressable market in the small business email space was practically $0 given Google's position.
If someone's already committed to paying, they can be convinced to pay more. It's hard to convince someone getting something for free that they should start forking over dollars.
I think he means as a vendor of mail services, $50/year/mailbox means you can't make enough profit unless you're huge, and even mid-sized, $50/year/mailbox might not let you provide very good service.
Google just removed their own ability to convert free customers to paid ones as they grew. Switching cost of email is extremely high, so a startup in this space could easily charge more than $50/yr/user once they're already in.
Granted they're lacking the integration with all of Google's other services, but given how bad google's multi-account sessions are and the fact that basically everyone is logged into their personal gmail account already, that might actually be a good thing.
Plus, $50/yr/user adds up pretty darn quickly at scale. Not as much as all of these video services that cost about $100/yr, but like I said, the cost of switching email providers is insanely high - once you have a customer, it's almost guaranteed you'll have them forever unless you screw up at massive, catastrophic scale. Though because of that, you have to have a crazy-good hosted offering to get people to sign up in the first place; demoing a mail service is hard and Gmail (personal) has been a great way to show what their paid services offer for businesses.
Fastmail.fm has been around quite a while, and while I still would consider them a success, I don't think they have done much in the form of innovation. Most of the innovation I have seen in email for the year, has been in the form of the client, not the server.
From what I have read on the fastmail.fm blog, etc, they tend to do some very good stuff on the back-end, particularly(open source) contributions to the Cyrus IMAP server. These, I understand, have improved the failover and resilience of the IMAP server a lot. These might not be "innovations" in a technical sense, but they certainly make Cyrus a much better server for Enterprise users.
The less said about fastmail.fm's "innovations" on their web interface the better.
> Certainly until today the $ size of the addressable market in the small business email space was practically $0 given Google's position.
Rackspace Mail (formerly MailTrust) has about 200k paying customers for small business e-mail hosting. I've been paying them to host mail on 8 of my domains for years -- Gmail was never appealing to me for various reasons -- so the 24/7/365 support, daily backups and 100% uptime SLA easily made MT/Rackspace the right choice.
It's $2 per mailbox per month, or less than half Google's price, but there's a minimum of $10 a month -- so it's only cheaper if you have at least a couple mailboxes/users.
As an aside, Google also gives away web analytics for free, yet there's still a billion dollars a year spent at other web analytics firms. There are always ways to compete with free.
I just helped several companies move to Google Apps from Rackspace over the weekend; their web interface is horrible and Google provides a much better experience on mobile (both iOS and Android) than Rackspace ever could.
That only matters if you care about the web interface. Lots of businesses don't, they're all on Outlook. I use Thunderbird (IMAP); I've literally never logged into Rackspace's webmail client.
One of the companies specifically migrated to avoid MS licensing costs (i.e. moving from Outlook to Chrome for the mail interface, Docs on the web/LibreOffice on the desktop).
The take away? You're always gonna pay. Somehow, somewhere, you're gonna pay. Might as well make sure you're getting a good deal rather than hunt for the free lunch.
I expect Google will find some way to encourage me to upgrade my legacy free Apps account over the next year.
Edit: And I just realized that my Google Plus account is tied to my Google Apps account. If they raise prices on me I'm screwed.
I decided fairly early on to not use my Google Apps account for my Google+ because I figured that in the future I'd want to have the ability to migrate elsewhere without losing all my Google+ stuff...
The 2$ plan does not sync with anything. The 3$ plan only sync's mobile with webmail (big woop). For "real" business email you need rackspace exchange which is 10$ a month per user, this adds up very quickly with a lot of users.
so, as it happens Bill Boebel (one of the founders of MailTrust/WebMail.us) is an investor and board member of my startup WP Engine ;)
To be fair, Google Apps for Business didn't get going until 2007 which is also the year Rackspace acquired WebMai.us. I'd say the market for B2B email contracted severely the moment Google Apps's free offering became established.
Why not? SLA generally just means they'll pro-rate a refund for the downtime, so even if they only achieve 99% over a year it won't cost them a huge amount.
That's not the point. The point is NO ONE can promise 100% uptime. One can promise a 99.999% uptime and refund for the downtime. If one promises 100% uptime, either he's lying or he's just stupid.
I don't know the details of the email SLA, but for infrastructure: power, networking etc. on our hosted Rackspace servers, we have a 100% SLA. And it's not a lame prorated thing: they pay 5% of the monthly cost back for 30 hours of downtime.
So 99% power/network uptime in a month would cost them 70% of what we pay per month.
An SLA isn't about promising what they will deliver, not really, it's about what they will deliver if they want to keep 100% of the customer's payments.
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.
Wow. Google Apps for Your Domain is a huge thing for a lot of hackers. I run my entire family's email using it. Is google just giving up on supporting custom domains? That would be a huge disruption for me =(
I posted this below but I was really counting on Google Apps to set up a custom domain email address. I'm just starting some stuff and it's still very "free time" right now and I am really not going to spend 50 dollars a year on it yet.
This might suck for the power user who had his own domain, but I am betting the free version was abused by a lot of business unwilling to pay a few bucks for the service.
What's the difference? The cost to Google is presumably the same, except that the user count might have been between two and ten-ish instead of one.
And now they can't upsell those businesses to paid accounts anymore. Established businesses already have email in place, and switching them over will be a hell of a sell.
I wonder if the cause of this is the support costs required for the free accounts? Obviously personal GMail is plug-and-play, but for someone who can't spell DNS, setting up a domain account was never quite drop-dead-simple enough. I suspect the goal here is to create a barrier to entry and prevent the inevitable support load of free users.
There was an excellent post about this a while ago, where a developer reported much better treatment from users after charging a token fee for their app.
As a final thought, maybe Google is catching on to the 'charge what something is worth, not what it costs you' way of thinking. Hosted email solutions for enterprise aren't free, and it seems like Google has realized the real value of their product. Also, ~$4/seat/month is pretty well in line with this kind of SaaS offering.
I doubt the support costs were very much. As with all things Google other than being an adsense buyer, support was basically "send us an email and we'll respond with a robo-faq that may or may not have anything to do with your question".
And Google Apps was actually quite easy to setup, partly because Google documented it pretty well but mostly because many DNS providers would basically do a one-click Google Apps setup automatically for you.
Given that there were people who would try to use the free version for their business, and then kvetch (on HN and/or other major technology blogs) when their account was hijacked and they lost business critical access and couldn't recover quickly because they didn't have the 24/7 phone support, it might actually be better that the free version is getting sunset....
Frankly, I read the blog post and I have Google Apps for Business at work (and use the free version for my domain), and I missed this. It's kind of buried in the middle paragraph, and I don't remember it being trumpeted on the upsell page when I signed up.
If it's anything like the Play Store phone support, it's basically a placebo so you feel instantly gratified, while the CSR sends an email to the real support team ( with ~48 hour turn-around).
This is likely primarily an opportunity to upsell other services - great opportunity to chat with people, make a connection, build a relationship, etc..
As a Googler and for much longer, a Google Apps user for my family, this is sad news.
I wish they had just fixed the experience for "vanity domains" so that they didn't require all the enterprise features, and didn't let administrators have complete control of users accounts. Then they could roll out new features to vanity users without needing the enterprise controls.
I understand that this is a little tricky, and involves no paying customers, but Google Apps was by far the best experience for custom domains. I'm sure it attracted the type of influencers that pull even more users. I used it for my family, bands, friends with very small businesses and more, and the other people on those domains not already using Gmail, in turn migrated their personal accounts to Gmail.
I completely agree with this. I signed up for Google Apps for the sole purpose of having an email address at my own domain, and I always wished I could just have that email address supported by my existing Gmail account, rather than having to deal with the hassle of yet another account somewhere. I would gladly have paid for that.
Google's always been pretty good about making sure you aren't locked in to their services, likely due to the efforts of their Data Liberation Front[1], but it always seemed to me that being locked in to using an @gmail.com email address was a big exception to this.
Yes, there's really two parts to a "vanity" domain: I want a nice looking email address, and I want to own my email address no matter what service I use. It's nice to be able to also use an awesome service like Gmail on top of it.
It's worth some value to me, but $50/user/year is a bit much for a family of ~5 light email users.
Right, but we're talking about the (now current) pricing model. There are many many many small family units that have not yet converted to "vanity" gmail. Now they won't ever.
Agreed, and what's annoying is that there isn't any middle ground in pricing. the XXX/customer/year model doesn't scale for people who don't make, well money.
The family / soccer club / non profit isn't going to spend $250 for five email addresses. I am sure there are other providers that offer similar services for much cheaper - and if not there is a big opportunity.
My recommendation would be to use Outlook.com. I am a LONG TIME Google Apps domain admin for SMBs and personal domains.
Since this announcement and my feeling of total abandonment from Google for the "small guys" I started investigating. MICROSOFT DOES THIS VERY WELL!!!. Now, that being said, it isn't exactly as polished as the Google Apps experience but the Microsoft re-work of its web mail is great. A quick search will give some good reviews. So...what is a guy to do?...well... you simply go to domains.live.com, go through the registration process. Once complete you will have access the the Admin Center. You then administrate your domain email as you would have in Google Apps. Again, it will be the current Microsoft way BUT it works well. I just did it for a photographer (yep...small business). It works perfectly. Once you register for the Admin Center, you can administrate MULTIPLE domains from YOUR one Admin Center. Also, Microsoft is MUCH more generous with the number of user accounts you can create for your domain...Up to 500 at last count. Naturally it also comes with Calendar, SkyDrive, etc. They give you all of the DNS records you need. Also, once you set it all up...if you go to Outlook.com directly and sign in with your personal domain email address/account, it will do so for you always (if you use the Microsoft DNS records for email---> like mail.yourdomain.com) Otherwise you will initially get the Hotmail interface. Again, a quick search will yield articles for changing to the NEW Outlook.com interface.
Happy Hosting!
I really hate it when companies try to sugar coat a decision that is all downside for their customers. It may be really hard to do, but Google should just come out and say it: there is no upside for this to anyone except Google. It is not about giving you a better experience or making things more straightforward. It is all about Google deciding to maximize their profits at the expense of their users. That's fine, it's what businesses (ultimately) do (even the ones that pretend they put their users first). Google should just say it - they no longer want to support a free version of their product because they can make more money another way.
When I see ridiculous sugar coating it breeds distrust and disbelief - congratulations Google, I now believe every single future thing you say a little less, well done.
>When I see ridiculous sugar coating it breeds distrust and disbelief - congratulations, I now believe every single future thing you say a little less, well done.
And I will especially distrust any new "free" services you decide to offer.
It seems like the current free customers are just fine ("Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version."), so how would it cause you to distrust their offers in the future?
because I was about to be a free user but they cut this process off between me checking it out at the end of work and me getting home. All I wanted was a custom email address but I'm not paying 50 dollars a year for something I can manage on my own and thus I'll never be exposed to whatever else was in Google Apps.
What he's talking about about is not Google's new pricing/business model, or even how they treat their customers. What he is talking about is that this announcement contains several statements that are complete bullshit. But, that is pretty much required for big corporate PR people. It isn't their fault that this is how they have to express themselves: " but time has shown that in practice, the experience isn't quite right for either group."
Well, that's for now. How is it going to be in 3 years? Is this just a grace period? Obviously it affects new signups first, they can't just cut off everybody and force to migrate to the paid version.
I understand you're upset, but that's probably a really naive view. Maybe it seems to you that there is no DIRECT upside for you personally, but there's always an upside, just like there's always a downside for every good thing that happens.
This looks to me just synonymous to killing a high maintenance, low returns project so that they can focus better on either the business version or other stuff. The "indirect" upside is you get other Google products of better quality.
To be clear, I'm not so upset about them killing the free version (although I do think it's sad - all the startups I've been in got our google apps accounts before we even had a bank account - because it was free! I wonder what will happen in the future). I mainly dislike the style of communication here. It really wouldn't be so terrible for Google to say:
While it was very popular we found it was quite costly and
we are not able to justify offering it as a free service on
an ongoing basis. Further we found that people who signed up
under free accounts often had false expectations about the
level of service and support we were able to give them and it
contributed to a negative overall perception of the service.
We apologize to those who are unable to use Google Apps in the
future because of this, but we feel it is an important change
to keep the service profitable and well supported into the future.
I absolutely agree with this. If they are going to dick us over I can understand that because they were offering us something free that costs money to run, but just be straight with us.
I don't think the google apps business customers are this dumb. They aren't going to trick us with this kind of obvious double talk. We are just going to think they are being deceptive and be less understanding.
Free? That's being being pretty disingenuous considering Google is an Advertising/Tracking company with the number one search engine in the world. No one uses any Google service or app for free so technically it was not a "free service". They should be upfront with people in the beginning if they don't want people bitching.
I think the only reason I felt that way was because of how they told us what they were doing. Like they were doing us some kind of favor instead of the exact opposite.
The same thing applied to the removal of the search term with the https connections. 'We're doing it for the privacy of our users'. The same users who will have the keyword information handed over, gladly, if you just pay Google.
The wording was awful, and this and that go to show how long the 'don't be evil' mantra is dead.
I'm all for Google yanking their free Apps account. It's their product, and people can't rightly bitch about something free being removed from the market.
However, it's using politician-grade spin to try and convince smart people that 1=2 which is the insulting bit.
This is a pretty pessimistic view. Customers are self-interested too: they want free content and services, but they also want absolute privacy, to ad-block everything, and generally cut off any possible revenue stream. This seems like it leads to a sort of local maxima where you produce the minimum quality required to drive users, with as little cost as possible.
By cutting off ad-supported free users, Google is attempting to pursue a global maxima: rather than making the best 'free-enterprise email/document sharing/whatever else it does because I only use it for email', they're now free to focus their efforts on paying customers. I suspect the one area where this will impact the most is customer service; Google is traditionally horrible because they're loathe to waste money on minimum wage call-centre employees to support loss-leader products. Now that Apps for Domains will be a first-class, revenue generating product, maybe they'll answer the damn phone.
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.
They can play the game though, too. Offer good discounts for onloading users; First year or two free, etc.. Hell, first 5 years free. What do they care if they get you used to their products, and then stay a client for 15 years after the 5 year trial?
For most people, the time and effort of setting up and maintaining an email server is probably worth more than $5 per user per month. For a company of 100 people, that's about 10 person hours every month, without considering the initial cost to buy the hardware. Not to mention the risk of something going horribly wrong and blacking out your email, unless you've co-located the mail server on enterprise grade hardware (which will eat all your savings anyways).
Yes and if I was setting up a company of 100 people I'd be fine with that because I probably have the cash flow to support that.
I was in the middle of setting up a service for a company of one at the moment and having one or two redirected emails isn't worth fifty dollars a year each right now.
So, a real life story: I set up a free GMail account for my site, and directed all the contacts from the site there. I added it to my phone so I'd know when I got messages. I didn't really do much promotion, so I wasn't surprised I didn't see anything for a week. When I logged in from the web, I had gotten three emails from potential customers. Unfortunately, they'd been sitting for a week, and so it didn't make a very good impression when I did reply.
A company of one definitely needs the most reliable communications it can get. Even if you're drowning in leads, it makes you much more credible if you don't have to explain to a client why their email bounced back. A delightful, relevant saying I encountered the other day is 'penny wise, pound foolish'.
I don't understand what point you're trying to get across here. Aren't you just as likely to forget to check a google apps mail as a regular gmail? Or are you describing a bug? Isn't that still equally likely with either option?
Aren't both options crushed in effectiveness by redirecting to your main account, whatever that is?
> A company of one definitely needs the most reliable communications it can get
Is that clear enough for you? Self-hosting is a poor idea because screwing up once costs you real money, probably more than you'd spend on a year of hosting at a small business.
My point is, I made a minor mistake in configuring GMail. That was my own fault. Multiply that amount of configuration by a million, and see if you don't make a mistake. Do ongoing maintenance, and see if you don't make a mistake. Keep everything secure, make sure you're whitelisted by every major provider, and ensure no messages ever bounce one way or another.
My point is, fucking up is bad and easily costs you money. Giving yourself infinitely more ways to fuck up to save $50 a year is stupid. I don't know how I can put it more plainly than that. At this point you're pretty much just trolling.
I have the premium account for 8 people. If we were 100, I may setup an in house exchange or similar. I may have 3 more guys maintaining the email, web and the rest of Internet related hard/soft.
For 8 I prefer $50 per year. Three more guys over 8 is ridiculous.
That's $50/year for each user. Easy to stomach if it's only yourself, but add even a partner (not to mention a small team with a bootstrapped product) and it starts to make less sense financially.
This. I've been looking for a good email solution for personal+freelance work with decent privacy, security, and reliability. I don't need 24/7 support. I am absolutely willing to pay for it. But pricing per mailbox with Google apps adds up really quickly even with just 4-5 boxes. I'd like to be able to make separate mailboxes for my partner and to separate several different classes of email (personal, business, limited access, catch all, etc) for security purposes. These things don't need extra support or space, I can't stomach an extra $50/year for what amounts to aliases with passwords.
Has anyone found a good solution for this? I could host it myself but that is a lot of hassle, free email accounts have ads and rarely let you use your own domain. The best I've found so far is email through a shared hosting provider, but it has limitations of its own (no IPv6, no 2 factor auth, self signed TLS certificates, etc). The cost is similar to a Google Apps account but without the linear price increase per mailbox.
Have you considered using aliases in GApps? Different than the catch all, but allows you to setup specific email addresses. I use them for accounts, newsletters, etc and then create filters and labels in my one apps email.
I believe that you can accomplish what you need using domain aliases (which google apps for business makes use of). You can have up to 20 domain aliases that all point to one mailbox: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1...
Sorry, but even for a team of 6 people if you can't muster $300/yr (breaking down to $25/mo or $4/user-mo) you aren't bootstrapping. You're being inefficient, and perhaps even reckless with your endeavor. (Unless you're building a competitor).
Sometimes it's about the pennies. But other times, especially early, it won't be these types chunks of money that kill you. I used to go on CL and do user-studies for $50 a pop and resell the gift cards for cash or amazon credit. So it's hard for me to believe that what you are building can't spare an hour of work to fund baseline communication systems that are pretty well supported.
Better pay those $300 and have your people and you 100% focus on your product, creating it, marketing it and selling it. Than dealing with spam rules or downtime servers.
That is why heroku exists right? Otherwise only linode or ec2 could make business. Now if you have free time (you shouldn't) then, it is a whole different story. I agree with you.
Most people pay more than $50 (or even $100 or $200) a year for far less useful services than a managed collaboration suite with full support.
To put it in perspective, Netflix costs ~$108 a year. People have no issues spending $4 a day on a latte, but just 13 lattes costs more than a year of Google Apps. A single latte or a big mac meal at mcdonalds costs more than an entire month of google apps for you.
I always hate these comparisons because they have no basis in reality. Food, drugs, and sex are basic human drives. You can't compare them to something as ephemeral as email.
The mobile phone is a better comparison, but you're dealing in abstract concepts now, not the simple neurochemicals your brain has spent millions of years evolving to crave. Plus, email is probably one of the least satisfying forms of communication.
$50 "feels" like a lot because it's been given away free all this time. But our industry has spoiled us. We can hop from one free product to the next free product, but really we just need to determine if that one product is valuable enough to justify paying for it.
In the case of email, it's obviously valuable. While there are other options out there, ultimately you have to determine the cost of researching, testing, setting up, and switching over you and your employees. All this time is spent away from your money making activities.
If you can't afford 0.15 % worth of overhead, using very conservative numbers, you need to rethink your business model. To break out that tired old analogy again - you're spending more than that on coffee for each of them, when you make it yourself and don't even factor in the depreciation of the coffee machine.
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 bargain considering that running, maintaining, patching a mail server is time consuming and has no real upside.
As a learning experience it's fine, but in practice delivering mail (reliably) sucks hard.
If it's just deliverability that's an issue, you can use the regular Gmail SMTP server for outgoing mail, without Google Apps. You just have to add the address you're sending from as an alternate address in Gmail.
>Then there's spam... don't even get me started on spam filtering.
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.
>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.
And?
Free users threatening to leave are hilarious (even better when they campaign against ad targeting and AdBlock everything). Google's decision pretty clearly signals that users like you aren't worth it to the company any more than Google Apps are worth $50 to you. Don't do business. That's the point of a market.
I wouldn't pay for it either - I'm grateful that my Google Apps are grandfathered, but nobody is entitled to GMail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It's a voluntary transaction between two entities and, in this case, you and Google Apps aren't a good fit.
What you're missing here is that the free google apps was a way for admins to get their hands into the GA ecosystem. Google already offers the product for free, just so long as you use an @gmail.com address.
I use Google Apps because I want to use GMail, but with my own domain. That's it.
I'm not an enterprise. I don't need more support than regular GMail users. I don't have special needs, like managing what services are allowed. I just don't want a @gmail.com address.
I see people here defending this move, but think of how services like Google+ make mandatory an email address that's managed by Google. That email address will now have to be a @gmail.com address for regular users. Now think of how you can register with any email address on Facebook or Twitter, an email address which becomes your online ID.
By using your own domain with your own email address, if the email provider interrupts the service for you, you can always change your MX records and recover all the accounts that rely on that address. That's not something you can do with a @gmail.com or a @yahoo.com or a @hotmail.com address. If Google cuts off your access for some reason (like in case they find out you're under 18 or some bullshit) or if they delete your account by accident (hey, shit happens), then at the very least your online identity is not lost.
Freeloading is not the issue for me. I am already a paying Google customer in other ways (I buy stuff from Google Play, I pay for Google Drive storage, etc...) and I would happily pay them $50 per year anyway. The bigger issue is that using any Google service requires a Google email account, with Google Apps being a mild remedy for that.
How can I encourage people to use Google's services now? Not mentioning that 2 businesses are now paying customers of Google Apps, because of my freeloading and my recommendations for it.
Also, WTF is it with Google and raising prices? Companies are usually cutting prices down, while they are raising them. This also makes it an issue of trust - usually when I subscribe to services, I expect prices to go down, not up, otherwise I cannot trust it. My trust in Google is eroding right now.
What next? Make Chrome and Android proprietary with a yearly subscription for users? Lots of pesky freeloaders out there.
If that's all you want, go to nearlyfreespeech, set up your domain there, and tell it to forward emails to your gmail account. Your gmail account then can send email under that name. I did it for quite a while.
It works, but Outlook (or at least some versions) will always show your emails as being from something like "address-you-forward-to@gmail.com (via you@your-real-domain.com)" which is annoying.
Just because you have to have a GMail account to log in to Google services doesn't mean you have to use it as your primary email address.
Plain-old GMail is no different (from a UX perspective) from being the sole user on a Google Apps account, so admins haven't really lost anything in terms of being able to evaluate Google Apps. There's nothing particularly interesting in the free version's admin panel.
I used to run my own one-user email system. The hosting alone cost $240 a year. And I had to spend a lot of time configuring exim4 (and spamassassin and clam-av), figuring out which email indexer to use, setting up offlineimap, running cron jobs to archive mailing lists, coercing a friend to run a secondary MX for me, etc., etc. I didn't enjoy it all. And no matter what I did to reduce spam, about 10 messages a day always made it through.
(And, when I was first doing this, someone trying to hire me for a job couldn't email me, because their hosting provider was once friendly to spammers and my aggressive blacklisting rejected their TCP connections. Oops.)
Running an email server is hard and very few people regret paying an expert to do it for them.
(As many HN readers know, I work for Google. But I'm not telling you that you should or should not use Google's product here, only that running an email server is not trivial.)
All you need is a forwarding service to forward the incoming mail to your gmail account, as regular personal gmail can handle sending out email with a different from address.
No exim4, no spamassassin, no clam-av, no figuring out which indexer to use, or any of that. Just a forward on the incoming mail.
I think most people would consider that cheating... You're hardly running your own email server, and still using Google.
I actually miss running my own email domain, the privacy of it, not the actual administration. I stopped when I had gotten so crazy with aliases and disposable addresses that the spam overwhelmed me. Wasn't worth the time to 'do it right,' and I gave up my privacy for the simplicity of GMail.
I would love to leave GMail and take my privacy back, but I haven't found an acceptable alternative yet.
"cheating"? people are claiming that you now need to configure your own smtp server with delivery, spam filtering etc. that's simply not true. most web hosting comes with an smtp server; you likely need web hosting anyway and pointing the smtp server at google is trivial.
i fail to see how making good use of available resources is "cheating". the idea isn't to win some geek hair-shirt contest; it is to get email delivered to your domain.
You can take the middle ground; make your own complete mailserver, and have a forwarding GMail or similar account to act as a proxy receiver for forum registration and that sort of thing- services that are much more likely to get your address into the hands of spammers.
Seconding this; Gandi works well for me as a registrar, DNS provider, and email provider.
There are many email providers you can use with your own domain. For example, rackspace is $2 a user a month. https://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email... I'm not sure why people are jumping from "Google won't do this for free for me anymore" to "I must do it myself".
It's pretty easy actually but when authorizing GMail to add a new sender address it usually mails a verification code to that address. Which, in this case would come back into the same Gmail inbox.
So if you have a X@Y.Z forwarding to A@gmail.com, then the verification code would be sent by gmail to X@Y.Z, which in turn, due to your forward settings, would redirect all mail to A@gmail.com.
The difference is that when sending mail from your Gmail.com inbox as opposed to the Google apps inbox for X@Y.Z is that when you send a mail via gmail (even if you fake the sender), the signed-by field will contain "gmail.com". On the other hand, Google apps for domains will set the signed-by field value to "Y.Z" (which would be your domain name).
As far as I know, this is the only difference. In Gmail, you can even set the default sender-address as your custom domain address so you don't need to set it everytime you reply to/compose new emails. And, unless you think/feel that signed-by: domain.name is cool, you're not really missing anything.
Using a mail address different from your default Gmail (or Google Apps for Business Mail) address unfortunately does not work for some recipients. It seems that at least some versions of Microsoft Exchange/Outlook always show your default address and not the different mail address you actually used.
For anyone considering it, some MS clients (and a few others) show something like :
myemail@gmail.com on behalf of Rob Aley [me@mydomain.co.uk]
It maybe looks a little unprofessional, but as long as your gmail account isn't something like offensivewords@gmail.com or cutesexyman32@gmail.com, its not too bad.
It is not too bad IMHO if you only use a slightly different domain for the same purpose but with completely different domains, it looks odd. And there is always the problem that some mail clients use your default Gmail address to reply and not the one you actually used.
Cannot agree more, I have had similar experiences, my friends used to call me and say, "hey I still didn't get your email".
Finally I decided to use a reliable email provider .
my choice was Google Apps .
Not to mention that you have to pay to be 'recognised' so that your emails aren't autobounced by some enterprises. I have a friend that runs his own domain email for himself and friends and it's surprising to hear just how complex it can be just to get mail accepted. I can't recall if it was a whitelist or a certificate or what, but I do remember at one stage he was happy because he found a way around having to pay a five-figure sum to some internet authority to stop some hosts bouncing his domain (the workaround only cost a couple of hundred instead).
I've never had any problems with mail delivery and I've never paid anyone a dime. I even violated one of rfc-ignorant's rules (a fake tertiary MX record) and still didn't get blacklisted :)
There are no internet authorities that control mail delivery, either, BTW. Many sites use heuristics to control mail acceptance, however, including third-party whitelists and blacklists. It can suck if you get on a blacklist, but experienced mail administrators only use whitelists and blacklists as one of many metrics regarding mail spamminess. Indicators of good mail like "most of the words in this message are non-spam words" often provide an order of magnitude more ham points than blacklists contribute spam points, so important messages will probably not be dropped even if you're on a blacklist. Of course, many sites have less clever schemes because there is a lot of spam and not a lot of sysadmin time to waste tweaking spam filtering rules.
SSL'd SMTP is a non-standard extension that nobody uses. (In fact, the port assignment for it was revoked in 1999!) TLS on port 25 is how you do secure email (mostly so you can advertise AUTH PLAIN safely.)
I think there are probably some MTAs that will STARTTLS for normal SMTP connections, but again, I've never heard of anyone using SSL/TLS as a spam-filtering criterion. (I might look through my old logs to see if anyone other than me ever issued STARTTLS on my mail server. But I'm guessing the number was near zero.)
I've been running a mailserver on my domestic DSL line for almost ten years now. Apart from my private domains it also hosted some domains for organizations, with mailing lists.
Last year I moved and my IP address changed (ISP didn't). I expected to lose the "reputation" the previous one had built up. But I did not have any problems whatsoever. I do hear rumors like yours every now and again but I have a hard time believing them.
I think that large email providers, the likes of Gmail/Hotmail, actually look at the email addresses / domains / servers that their clients send email to. Then they assign trust to those tokens.
If you're a large provider, you can do many things with the data you get from your own customer's behaviour. How about looking at accounts that have been in use for some time, seen regular web interface action, and send email to other @hotmail/gmail accounts that actually get read and not flagged spam? If those accounts send mail to my mailserver, then my mail server / domain must have something good going for it. Well that's what I would do if I were running a huge setup anyway...
As for incoming spam: I'm using various postfix tricks, greylisting, and dspam. I have no problems. I should write a howto ;-)
I used to run my own one-user email system. The hosting alone cost $240 a year.
Why? I have two VPSs with the main and backup SMTP servers and with continuous replications of emails between them and I pay less than half. Not to mention they double as web servers, IRC bouncers, etc.
And no matter what I did to reduce spam, about 10 messages a day always made it through.
I probably never get the same traffic as you do, but to me the best decision I made was enabling catch-all and using different addresses for each service out there.
In my case, spammers only send to three types of addresses:
- Random (jumble of numbers and letters@mydomain): very easy to block with a couple of programming lines.
- Fake but plausible (support@, bob@): just blacklist them once.
- Leaked (from websites and such): same as above, nuke it. Only happened to me once.
All in all, I never had to set up SpamAssassin or deal with dropped emails because of untrusted sources. Blocking by destination is much cleaner.
The smallest instance running 24/7 is $175.20 for 365 days. Add in S3 storage for 25G of data, and that adds $28.50.
This does not include incoming bandwidth, bandwidth used by your IMAP or webmail client, or DNS lookups that you'll do for every message received. (Also, spam filtering is CPU-intensive, so if you get a lot of email, a Micro instance may not be big enough.)
This doesn't include a secondary MX, either. (I like the DynDNS secondary MX service, personally, which is ~$30 a year IIRC.)
It's 2012, nobody wants to delete an email from the server. When Google Apps Standard launched (50 accounts, 1 GB per account, for free) business were consuming email using Outlook + POP3, deleting the mail from the server. Then you could offer 'ilimited' Cpanel based emnail accounts in less than 1 GB. Business and people have different standards now and consuming email using IMAP, letting the mail in the server, using more storage (7 GB / account) without paying anything. We can't back to the 1GB 'ilimted' accounts scenario. Google has influenced our behavior, has give us the 'first dose', now they come for the money.
I pay $4 per month for Exchange Online. I paid that even when Google Apps was free because it is vastly superior. When MS finally got their act together I couldn't wait to move my MX records off of Google's inferior service. Now that it's more expensive than the superior service, good luck Google.
Plenty of services offer unlimited accounts for $5/month. The amount of services offered in a Google Apps account needs to stop getting minimized to just email in this thread as it skews comparisons.
I'm lucky in that I already have Google Apps and they're not starting to charge me. But if I didn't I'd look at whether there are reasonable free/cheap alternatives out there.
For customers it looks like the end of free Gmail-for-your-domain. But for competitors I imagine it looks like the end of price gouging.
If Heroku can afford to support free users on it's PaaS, it surprises me that it isn't feasible for a giant like Google. I can't see this move doing anything to improve what is arguably an already unpopular service.
Just a note, you outgrow the free Heroku implementation pretty quickly. Do you need SSL on a custom domain? You're now paying. Do you need more than a small number of DB connections simultaneously? The smallest production psql tier is $50 a month, or the annual fee for one seat on Gmail.
Basically GMail only has the two-step authentication. The uptime is worse than that, the web interface is not that great, it is slow and interoperates poorly with IMAP/Exchange/POP3 access.
I'm glad I already have my Google Apps accounts setup. I rarely even use the web interface except from work. At home it's all IMAP and Android.
At $50 / year for Google it's cheaper to buy a domain from GoDaddy and pay for email services (webmail + IMAP) that are automatically tied to your domain.
I do this. It's not easy, but it's not as bad as most of the comments here would lead you to believe. If you have the wherewithal to run things on a server it's definitely within reach, albeit probably not a cost-effective way to spend your time.
Let me make a few recommendations. I'm not a sysadmin by trade but I know a few things you can do that will improve your lot in life running mail.
- Postfix and Dovecot. They have the right combination of ease of use, power and security. Don't overconfigure; try to get it working with basic settings first and then evolve it towards what you dream of rather than setting out to configure it that way first.
- SPF and DKIM. I have no trouble getting messages to Gmail and I think this is part of why.
- Make sure your hosting provider is not huge and very high quality. I chose RootBSD because they're small but highly technical. If you have a lot of spare cash, iNetU are quite good and sometimes help with FreeBSD. The larger or crappier the host is, the more likely you'll wind up in blacklisted IP space. (BSD hosting companies tend to be smaller and more technical, and BSD is great software, so I'd recommend that if you're interested.) Getting off a blacklist isn't a lot of fun and it's not hard to wind up on one, but I find being on a discriminating host is a good preventative measure.
- Rely on IMAP. If you want webmail, try and find one that is really just an IMAP frontend. I tried and liked Roundcube a while back; these days I have IMAP clients everywhere so I don't know what the new hot stuff is, but IMAP is fantastic.
- I strongly recommend you get an account with DNSReport.com. Their software can detect most of the DNS problems you can get yourself into that wreak havoc with mail. Odds are good you'll be doing a lot more DNS than before, it's a great tool to have in the toolbox.
- Stay on top of your security updates. I recommend running sshguard and whatever other security software/IDS/firewall type stuff you can stand. Make sure you're not giving out a bunch of shell accounts with root on this server. Seems obvious, but people forget or get lazy. FreeBSD will email you a security message every day; if something like that isn't coming your way, consider trying to set it up. It tells me, among other things, who tried to log into the server, how many times they failed, what their IP was, and lots of other stuff.
There are a number of nice upsides to running your own mail server.
- Email can be hooked up to the database various ways.
- Automatic emailing for free (keep an eye on it).
- Scripted email handling for free (Procmail etc).
- Get system-generated messages emailed (Nagios/monit etc., login/sudo failures, etc.)
- Advanced forwarding/wildcard accounts.
Anyway, I hope you do give it a shot despite the nay-saying. Cost-effective? No, but it's a blast, and many of the upsides would be hard to replicate with Gmail. Of course the web mail UI will be worse. Tradeoffs.
You'll most likely be ok. The main attack vector is a chunk of regularly used usernames and a small selection of passwords. These are quite successful against shared hosting where password quality is hard to control properly.
If you've got a "garden variety" server with a strong password, I wouldn't worry.
I've got a laptop slung on the end of my ADSL line that has had literally millions of attempts.
If you are worried, you can install fail2ban which will block repeated attacks at the firewall level.
Virtually all SSH attacks are of the nature mysql:mysql or mysql:password, so you should be safe as long as you can trust your users not to be stupid. The attackers prefer quantity over quality when looking for targets.
And if you use SSH keys you should be totally safe.
Remember to apply security fixes though since the automatic attacks also probe for ancient versions of SSH servers.
If you're worried about ssh brute force or just don't like all the noise in your logs, moving the port tends to drop off about 95% of them. In addition, running iptables tarpit rules (or your OS equivalent) tends to kill the rest fairly quickly.
I put info like this in a password manager for sanity (Keepass, I work on a PC).
One easy way to manage it is make a folder for each hostname, and add things like mysql root password, ssh port, public IP, pivate IP as different entries relating to the all aspects of managing the host.
If you only support public key or two factor authentication you won't need to worry about brute force attacks. Most SSH brute force attacks are dictionary based using common usernames.
I've run my own mail server for 15 years, since I got my first permanent connection. I host on the end of it as I have a large distrust of "the cloud".
It is cost effective for me as it has increased my merchantable skill portfolio. I've ended up designing some mail systems (50k+ users) for some large ISPs in the past thanks to my accumulated knowledge.
Debian is probably the easiest to get off the ground - it's pretty much "sudo aptitude install postfix dovecot" and follow the instructions. I was a FreeBSD user but primarily due to apathy, I tend to use Debian.
This is about to change however, when FreeBSD supports the raspberry pi as it's a much lower memory and power footprint device so some of FreeBSD's simplifications and optimisations will assist there.
For me, a Raspberry Pi with a 32 gig SD card plugged into my 12Mbit connection will suffice for the 18 users and 5 domains via IMAP that are currently being hosted on a much larger machine. Cost to me: $40-50. No brainer.
I've thought about doing this. Last time I tried to set up a mail server on a cheap VPS I didn't have enough memory, ClamAV was the biggest culprit. But I think the new 512 RPis would work quite well.
You don't need that much memory if you're setting up a simple IMAP server; you could probably do it on a super cheap instance on AWS, Rackspace or similar.
I am failing to see what the big stink is about "giving up one's privacy" when using "the cloud." Yes, there are some shady providers that might put their hands in the cookie jar at their convenience. That sucks. Google isn't one of those providers, though. What advantage would they gain from reading people's mail at a whim?
Regardless, one's privacy is already compromised the moment they sign up for Internet service; that information can be made available to the right people after one subpoena.
Google read your email and use it to throw targeted ads at you.
There is a fine line between profiling, tracking and analysing communications and utilising that data for something nefarious. The only deciding factor on how far it goes is cash.
Quick dumb question about the RASPBERRY-PI: What do y'all do with the board itself as far as a case? I mean, are most of you just letting it sit on a self or something (it's so dang small anyway)? I've seen a few plastic cases floating around and they seem like the only option really (outside of just building a simple wood box and screwing it to the wall...
32GB of storage satisfies 18 users? That surprises me. I have 5GB in one mailbox and I'm not much of an e-mail hoarder. Also, what do you do for backups? Do you have offsite backups? How do you search your email? How do you filter spam? What about calendars, shared contacts, and internal document storage? Do you have multi-factor auth and application-specific passwords? Google Apps has a ton of features and it's reliable. Not to mention, it's cheap. Unless your time is worth very little, setting-up and maintaining your own mail server is going to cost a lot more.
People use e-mail constantly. It's important. $50 per person per year isn't a blip on the radar. Do you know how much money you'll lose if your 18 users can't access their mail for an hour? Now consider how much time they'll spend setting up their own mail clients instead of using Gmail. Think of the increased time and frustration waiting for searches to finish. Think of the extra time they'll spend deleting spam. You're paying a lot more than $40-50 for that mail server, but the real cost is obscured from you.
It's a no-brainer: skimping on email hosting is simply not worthwhile.
I can appreciate that for most people this is not a decision. But for technically inclined people who want to learn this stuff, there's no reason to talk them out of it. Is it substantial work? Yeah, but so is running a web server or a database and those are also critical IT components that have a lot of niggling details.
There are lots of reasons to not use Gmail. Maybe $50/year is a lot for you. Maybe your needs are modest. Maybe you want the knowledge and experience of running mail. Maybe you want or need to interface your other components with mail. Maybe you don't like the rest of Google Apps. Maybe you hate the Gmail interface. Ultimately, most people will choose Gmail despite whichever of those reasons might apply. There's no need to turn a technical decision into a dogmatic one.
Our biggest mailbox is 200mb. Pretty much everything gets deleted or moved out of the mail system. It's not a file system. If you think it is, you're doing it wrong.
Backups: tar and gzip daily, then scp to a friend's server in another country. Also take manual backups to encrypted USB stick weekly which I carry around on me at all times.
Searching: you only have to search it if you have lots of it. I have 9 messages in my maildir. I receive perhaps 20-30 messages a day. No problems - they all fit on the screen. If it's worth keeping, it goes as a ticket/wiki entry or in the hg repo as a document.
Spam: get one or two a week per user. Just delete by hand at the moment. People who use imap use their mail client's spam filtering stuff. If it gets problematic I'll probably install a filter.
Calendars/contacts: both in mercurial in agenda format (plain text, one line per event or contact). Very easy to manage and share. Have you tried keeping a central address book/calendar accurate using any other method?
I know how much we'll lose without email which is why it is where it is :) About 2m from me most of the time.
Cost? I've spent 20 minutes on admin this year. Everything is automated..
I'm not skimping, I'm making sure we do it right so we don't need all the tooling and features. To be honest, google is too cheap to be good if you ask me and their reputation shows regulalrly with outages and problems.
I've done this and I'd recommend getting rDNS set up if you can, on top of your SPF and DKIM, though it sounds like maybe it's not entirely necessary.
I ran a linksys NSLU2 as my mail server for a few years, with a USB stick as its storage. With Debian linux with Dovecot, Postfix, spamassassin, and the Spamhaus DNSBLs set up I managed to keep the signal to noise ratio pretty damn high too.
For those in Europe, Hetzner do excellent FreeBSD dedicated servers. They are based in Germany. They have a server auction for older hardware as well where you can get decent dedicated servers for just over 20 euros per month.
I ran my own email server at home for many years, but in the end I switched to Gmail/Google Apps about two years ago since
- I kept a mostly "if it works don't break it" approach, but about once a year there'd be some alert about security issues with some specific software and I'd run a "aptitude update". Invariably it'd update the packages out of order, libc would get screwed up, and I'd have to reinstall the whole server.
- I could never get the spam filtering up to snuff. I had daily auto-training spam+ham folders etc set up, the works, but I'd always get a a few spam messages in my inbox, and a handful of false positives. Used SPF but it had to be softfail since someone I visit friends/relatives who's ISPs have blocked SMTP ports aside from their own relay.
- My fault, but I ran a forwarding address for a friend, and I got blocked by my ISP since it forwarded some spam messages that got flagged.
- I don't feel properly equipped to deal with backups. (sure you can set up an rsync to somewhere else [that you have to pay for], but you also want to keep monitoring that they're good, test restores, etc)
Easily worth $50/year for me to not have to think about it.
edit: forgot the biggest reason I switched: I got an iPhone, and iOS doesn't do push email over IMAP. Gmail supports Exchange, and there's no way I'm going to be hosting that myself...
I kept a mostly "if it works don't break it" approach, but about once a year there'd be some alert about security issues with some specific software and I'd run a "aptitude update". Invariably it'd update the packages out of order, libc would get screwed up, and I'd have to reinstall the whole server.
What distribution are you using? I've never had this happen, though for important servers I tend to use Debian stable. I would be shocked if it happened on stable.
Ran into the same issues years ago (though this was only for myself and a couple family members). Didn't think I'd get myself blacklisted so easily. You really need to be up to par on spam filtering etc. Gapps is quite elegant for my needs most of the time.
Rackspace email. Equally good experience IMHO, absolutely fantastic support, $12 a year per mailbox. Best purchase of a web service I've ever made. Your email is the skeleton key and core of your online existence, that's far too important to leave to a company that considers support an exercise in statistic management.
Our experience with Rackspace email at $12 per user per year has also been great. Although I suspect our pricing is grandfathered in, looks like they have doubled their price in recent times to $24 per user per year:
I've got several domains, I just forward them to my gmail account and set up the reply-to addresses if I want to be consistent - no need to get an Apps account for that.
We also run an email system at work, though it's a lot more work than other services - mostly due to spam / deliveriabilty - so even if you do pay $50/yr still seems a bargain. IMHO you need 100+ users to even think about justifying the time cost for running a mail server yourself.
Also, I get access to all the new Google stuff without having to wait for Google to make it 'business-ready'.
It's just as easy to imagine Google getting undercut by a big company. Yahoo, here's your opening.
I always thought of free Google Apps as the company's brilliant play to control the fabric of the business internet. Can you name anything in the digital realm more important to businesses and organizations of all sizes than long-form communication (email) and content and information-driven collaboration?
Sadly for new users and for Google itself, the company's actions reveal a failure to recognize Apps as anything more than a collection of inter-related services ready for more aggressive monetization. Management fails to see the strategic benefit and leverage afforded by controlling the online fabric of every new business that starts operating as a small team. It's the type of short-term and profit-driven thinking that afflicts so many companies as they reach the complacency of scale.
But that's great. Google is going for enterprise market, freeing the small business niche to whatever competitors would spring up. If I wanted to open a start-up, I'd be delighted I just had a 800-pound gorilla move out and open the space for the rest to compete and try to have a part of immense success Google has. How often you see a giant company just come out and say "please, come in, take part of my market, I don't need it anymore"?
Paying Google to make email problems go away (and get nice features to boot) is worth it on $ alone if you plan to need even a handful of hours of outside help/year, plus equipment. Plus the peace of mind (and your saved time) of not even worrying about it.
Email is a solved problem that is totally worth it to outsource or pay someone else to manage in-house. If you feel comfortable setting up your own mail server, managing spam, updating it, etc., and WANT to do it, then you're probably not Google's target audience, anyway.
The argument is not 'cutting off ad-supported free users' but 'sugarcoating'.
Blabling 'but time has shown that in practice, the experience isn't quite right for either group' when a statement about ~ we are sorry to remove the free ad supported option would have been the honest way.
That's a bit of an overreaction. Unless I'm reading the post incorrectly there aren't any bad news in it really: existing accounts stay free, now you have two tiers, paid and free, and with the paid you get real support for the money (and custom email etc).
You are reading it wrong. There's no longer a free Google Apps version. What they refer as free in the post is the classic Google (@gmail.com) account.
> It is all about Google deciding to maximize their profits at the expense of their users. That's fine, it's what businesses (ultimately) do (even the ones that pretend they put their users first).
Somewhat offtopic, but I always find statements like this rather silly on HN, a site ostensibly focused on and for the startup community. You mention in a comment below that you've worked for several startups. While there, did you only make decisions at the expense of your users to maximize profits?
If not, that's enough evidence to prove your statement wrong.
Most decisions like this are more complicated. While it does make the "I just reserved a domain name and want a google-hosted webmail client for it as soon as possible" case more complicated in the future (and I have one too), in most HN threads on google's poor customer service someone will inevitably bring up the fact that they'd be willing to pay money to get phone support for their Google Apps accounts, even though you've been able to do that for quite some time now. In fact, the whole second paragraph in the article seems to be about businesses that sign up for free, and don't actually understand the limits they accepted in turn.
Eliminating a product for new customers actually can be a net positive in terms of good will of your customers, even if they have to pay more. The post is a little overly cheerful, like they just came up with this brilliant new idea, but your reaction is one better saved for things like finding out a device you own has DRM you didn't know about it, or a company removing something you've paid for with a remote kill switch.
It's really see to the "profit is evil" mentality flow from places like reddit into HN, a site that's supposed to be about building companies to make profits.
> While there, did you only make decisions at the expense of your users to maximize profits?
I think you read a little more pejorative into that sentence than I intended (I understand why, it's a common phrasing in that sense). I mean it quite literally: they maximize profits by charging their users money (at their user's "expense") - not "for the overall detriment of their users" as you might (quite reasonably) interpret it.
But in this literal sense, yes, in every startup I've been involved in, we made decisions to make money and we planned for our users to pay that money. I'm not blaming Google for this - it's what businesses do (almost by definition!).
Attempting to "optimize profits" in this manner annoys me mainly because advertising makes up 96% of Google's revenue. 4% accounts for every other source of income they have. If advertising is their strength, decreasing access to business users for advertising in the name of revenue from such a basic service seems like a bad decision.
That being said, if this is this is a precursor to responding to complaints about access to Google customer service by giving all Google Apps business customers access to better support, it may make some sense.
I believe the paid business version of Google Apps has always had the option (by the domain administrator) to turn off advertising for Gmail on a site-wide basis.
Judging from this and previous threads people here are either distrusting of free services or aren't willing to pay for the goods (not everyone obviously) which is quite the paradox.
I'll chalk this one down to the startup nature of this community, seeing as some are probably involved with competing products or are developing some, but the matter of fact is that this announcement is perfectly reasonable: “vanilla” gmail accounts are free, Apps accounts are not.
Those who already have free Apps will keep them at the same price, there doesn't seem to be any swindling involved, and look! phone support, imagine that.
You're correct to point out that there's no swindling or bait-and-switch happening here. I get to keep my Google Apps account for free. Google did the right thing.
I think what we're reacting to is that the free tier of Google Apps doesn't seem any different (from a cost perspective) from regular Gmail. They're giving me the same storage, showing me the same ads, providing the same no phone support, etc. The real difference is that I get a custom domain which doesn't cost anything to Google.
$50/user/year also seems expensive if you're not going to use the value-add of the business plans (phone support, 25GB inboxes, etc). Maybe Google could have kept the old system as well (7GB storage, ads) and charged $5/user/year for the vanity domain. $50 is just a lot for what is, frankly, more vanity value add than anything else for many of us. Yes, if you want 25GB inboxes, no ads, SLAs, etc. Google Apps can provide good value add, but I don't need those things.
Google is a private business. What they announced is reasonable for a private business trying to maximize profit. However, it feels less reasonable when one thinks about the cost to provide services. The free Google Apps shouldn't cost more than the free Gmail from Google's perspective. As such, I think it's human nature to say, "then why are you charging more?" "Because they can" is a perfectly reasonable answer, but it does make us think less of Google. Google is the company pushing the Nexus 4 down to $300 to try and prove that top-grade equipment can be more mass market rather than trying to maximize profit with a $500+ Nexus 4. That's the ethos and drive that we've come to love. What Google has done is perfectly reasonable and, in fact, better than most businesses would have done: most businesses wouldn't have grandfathered us in. However, it just doesn't feel like the same Google that turned so many businesses upside-down. In short, it doesn't feel like Gmail. Gmail came along with 1GB of free storage when you got ~10MB from competitors - and Google made it into a profit center pushing the bounds in a way that made them rich and improved our lives at the same time. This just feels like a regular business trying to make money - and that just doesn't feel like Google to us.
Again, I'm not saying that Google doesn't make a ton of money or that they shouldn't or whatnot. I'm merely pointing out that Google's profits often come alongside something that genuinely makes our lives better. Our world is better because Android exists. Our world is better because Google entered search. Our world is better for YouTube. Even AdSense brought relevant ads that were less obtrusive. They're all wonderful for Google too, but they pushed us forward. This doesn't feel like that. This feels like an MBA sitting in a room looking at the number of free Google Apps accounts and thinking "I bet we could convert some of those free-sign-ups into paid ones if we discontinued the free product in the future".
I want to emphasize that Google doesn't owe me anything, but when you see two services that cost the same to provision and one getting priced upward, it just feels icky.
I think it's easily worth $50 a year even for a single user with a personal domain, but then again, I'm kind of particular with my email. Whenever I need to use an email address, I use sitename.com@mydomain.com. Since only my family and friends use my real email address, everything else is easier to filter/label, and if some site gives my address out it's easy to track down who it was.
To do this without having to manually create each address before I used it, I had to enable a catch-all address for my domain. Originally, I had my hosting provider (who are great) as the MX and they would simply forward it all on to Gmail. Well, sooner or later they determined that the massive amount of was killing their server, and politely asked if I could either disable the catch-all or find another MX (though they weren't firing me as a customer, yet). Even though my host has always been reasonable, $100ish/yr with them wasn't enough for me to use email the way that I intended.
This is where Google Apps comes in -- they are now my MX, and so my host is happy and my email arrives faster than it did before. In that light, $50/yr is a steal!
Being grandfathered in as free is a nice loyalty-builder, hopefully it stays free.
I actually started with Zoho a few years ago before switching to Google Apps. But, inability to sync contact and calendar, and use activesync with my android phone was a deal breaker for me.
I see that they offer Active Sync in free tier too. Does it actually work reliably?
>Judging from this and previous threads people here are either distrusting of free services or aren't willing to pay for the goods (not everyone obviously) which is quite the paradox.
There is no paradox. Some people are distrusting of free services, others are unwilling to pay. HN isn't one person's opinion, there are many diverse opinions represented in this community.
Sure there's an upside. There's no upside if you want google apps for free, but legions of free users make products harder to develop. It's likely that paying customers will be seeing faster development and better service.
Reality check :) Google isn't a small, open startup anymore. There are layers of corporate bureaucracy that distance public from the company. You happen to deal less with people and more with the system. The focus has long shifted away from users. As a result, we see new features, offerings, and policies gently forced upon for our own good and a better experience.
Sometimes when reading articles from HN I'll try to guess if the comments will be positive or negative. I guessed that these would be positive. I seem to of been wrong though... It seems like every other day there is an article on HN talking about "google down. no support!" and everyone is always saying the problem with Google products is that if something goes wrong you can't get help. I don't know if they offered 24/7 phone support before but to me, it sounded like this was new and they are focusing on offering a service with support and making sure it stays up and reliable for more serious businesses.
We have a paid for google apps for business account. Every time I've called for support (email from a particular domain never getting to us, emails to a particular domain never getting to them, queries about outages) I've gotten a very pleasant voice who tells me in no uncertain terms that nothing is wrong, everything is okay, and could I please just f*ck on off and be a happy cog now. So, the service is weak to nonexistent, but at least the people on the phone are apologetic and nice.
What really struck me was that they're only offering three nines of uptime. I can't see many businesses ditching Excel or Word to go with something that will cost you half a day of productivity every year, especially not for $50 a license.
I'll take "Google downtime" (a damn small amount) over any other sort of downtime (Rackspace, AWS US-EAST-1, the hardware on my desk) any day of the week.
It really depends how much they go into the Google Apps bit; for $50 you are not getting word and excel, you are getting a whole range of related IT services, including online document sharing with access controls.
That in and of itself is worth a huge amount of money.
Why do you assume that a company that uses google apps will ditch Word and Excel. I see this logic all the time and it makes no sense. I haven't seen any company that uses google apps delete Office from thier computers. The point of Google Apps is ditching Exchange.
At least with customers being made to sign up to premium accounts with 24/7 support available there will be less horror stories of customers being locked out of their Google Apps accounts.
Depends what you need to host. If you just want email & a blog, gandi.net will providing hosting for those as part of their domain registration (~$15 per year, depending on which TLD you want).
They also include minimal web hosting with registration too, but last I looked their (free) offering was so bad it didn't really count as a feature.
I imagine some other domain registrars have similar options.
I got a domain through gandi and decided to try my email there for a change, it's been pretty reliable and solid, the only time I needed support it was quick. I don't however do a lot of email so my experience might be much different to a power email user.
I'm not sure if I'm parsing this correctly, but it sounds like people who use Google Apps as an email backend for personal email on custom domains will now have to pay $50/year.
If so, that's a huge bummer. I only recently switched to running my email this way and I don't relish the thought of migrating elsewhere so soon.
I would happily pay $50/year (or perhaps more... I don't know how high I'd go) for email that's not only convenient and spam free, but also well protected from governments and the provider's employees, and not data mined.
I have absolutely no use for phone support or 99.9 uptime for my personal email. So the businessification of Google mail is not a win for me. Privacy and convenience or what I'm after.
I think you missed this sentence. "Please note this change has no impact on our existing customers, including those using the free version." Still, I'm on free google apps mostly for a personal email domain too and will likely start considering alternatives just in case.
I'd also note that the $50/year is also per user, so there's sort of an opening to offer a family, personal domain type service. For a family of a maybe 2-6 users, the $50/year-user is a bit steep if you're mostly looking for a small group email + calendaring. Maybe that would even be an interesting vector for starting a new family-based social networking service.
I actually considered an email address like firstname@lastname.com. I figured I could add my parents, or future children.
But this only works for obscure last names or unusual TLDs. There's also the issue of family relationships - people get divorced, grow up and want more independence, etc. Marrying email to a family domain could be messy.
I do exactly that, bertjw@regeer.org. I've set up accounts for everyone else in the family, but most if not all just have it set up as a forwarder to another gmail account.
On a related note could dear hn crowd suggest email provider (maybe paid, say up to 30-40$ annually) caring about my privacy a little bit more? Really delete my messages when I want to is a good start.
Google is all good but I feel I should not put all of my emails in one account..
I setup one small business on http://atmail.com/products/ cloud - which seems to work pretty well. It's $2/user/month, most beautiful webmail client I've seen, calendars, contacts, etc...
And, if you'd rather run your own server, you can of course just buy their software. But I don't have any experience running that.
I use Google Apps for my domain but forward the mail to another account which means I see no ads and get hosted mail for free. I didn't even realize until this announcement that I'm probably a net negative and probably not the only person doing this.
You can still create a free Google Apps account, limited to a single user, through App Engine [1], Google just doesn't want to advertise this fact to everyone.
I gave up on Google Apps for your Domain for email a while ago (security, bugs, and the general black box nature of the product).
Right now, my favorite solution is Kerio Connect, which you can either self-host or purchase as a cloud solution. There are hosting providers who will handle all of this for you, but having the option to bring mail fully in house is really nice.
It's essentially Exchange, but much easier to manage, and far cheaper.
They also have a Sharepoint/Box alternative, Workspace, that I now love.
I'm more than happy paying $555 for a server and then $45/user for license, $15/user/year maintenance, and hosting costs. I really don't think $50-100/mo/user (once you factor in admin/hosting costs...you could do it for $20-30/mo but $50-100 is a safer budget) is an unreasonable amount for top quality email and collaboration tools.
Ugh. The worst thing is that I've been relying on my personal domain e-mail address _also_ being a valid google address. So I have to either pony up for my family's accounts or move us all and re-create logins on a page or so of "authorized apps."
Still, the huge amount of spam that's been getting through (10-15 per day, despite always logging in to the gmail web interface and clicking Report Spam) has been encouraging me to consider a move anyway. This change is just the nudge I needed to finally make it happen...
No, I don't mind the end of free Google Apps. I use Google Apps for my business for five years, and frankly, it is mind-boggling what they have given me for free. Luckily us existing users still get the free service, but if I had to pay US$50 per year per user, I would still consider it exceptional value.
US$50 per year for a set of critical, heavily-used services is an inconsequential amount for all but the most penny-pinching operation.
I would have (read: I did) assume that, but do we really have any data on whether or not this actually was the case? Google presumably considered this and made a decision based on the data available to them. Now that this decision was announced, it seems that this assumption is false. Google must not be hooking nearly enough businesses into using this system for money or they would not have made this decision. Of course, this assumes Google Apps is run by rational people.
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[ 594 ms ] story [ 8900 ms ] threadThe fact you're using gmail will still be obvious to anyone looking at headers, but that's not really a problem.
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).
Google Apps for domains lets you point your domain's MX record directly at Google, and Google accepts the mail for you.
I can attest it takes about 5 minutes to setup if you already have web space somewhere and know how to access its email server details.
If you run a business and need the Google Apps platform, then $50 a year really shouldn't be a barrier for you. If it is, time to rethink your business priorities.
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?
What then? Of course no company paying $300,000/month is going to care about $50/user/year.
Edit: Clarification
5/3000 = 0.16%.
I give it six months before they start strong-arming free users into paid accounts.
Note that per user limits continue to apply, so people have as much incentive as they ever did to upgrade, plus for any new domains/projects people will naturally either migrate to other options (then consolidate services around these, moving themselves off Google) or start paying.
Not convinced there's any need for hostility on either side.
https://www.fastmail.fm/
http://pobox.com/
http://www.gandi.net (includes some amount of email w/ domain registration)
...yet you are not prepared to pay financially in exchange for that value, and even convey disappointment when the free provision of that value is ceased.
blowing your comment out of context, but this misalignment with value and $ spend is a huge problem in our industry today.
http://www.namecheap.com/email/email-hosting.aspx
With a domain-specific account, it's easy to set a document to be shared with the group - added benefit is if you add a new user to the domain, she is automatically given access to those documents. Also, the document overview is much easier to manage since anything marked "shared" usually means teamwide.
I get what you're saying, everything can be accomplished with the still free personal google account, just it includes a constant daily drain on mental processing power.
by offering <50 email accounts for free, Google essentially destroyed the market for any other startups or companies to come into the market and offer non-enterprise B2B email services... thus limiting competition and innovation.
One could argue that the removal of the free tier at this point is simply because they've created an entrenched position, but one could also suggest that this creates a modicum of opportunity for another player to try to enter this space.
Certainly until today the $ size of the addressable market in the small business email space was practically $0 given Google's position.
[discuss :)]
Granted they're lacking the integration with all of Google's other services, but given how bad google's multi-account sessions are and the fact that basically everyone is logged into their personal gmail account already, that might actually be a good thing.
Plus, $50/yr/user adds up pretty darn quickly at scale. Not as much as all of these video services that cost about $100/yr, but like I said, the cost of switching email providers is insanely high - once you have a customer, it's almost guaranteed you'll have them forever unless you screw up at massive, catastrophic scale. Though because of that, you have to have a crazy-good hosted offering to get people to sign up in the first place; demoing a mail service is hard and Gmail (personal) has been a great way to show what their paid services offer for businesses.
The less said about fastmail.fm's "innovations" on their web interface the better.
Rackspace Mail (formerly MailTrust) has about 200k paying customers for small business e-mail hosting. I've been paying them to host mail on 8 of my domains for years -- Gmail was never appealing to me for various reasons -- so the 24/7/365 support, daily backups and 100% uptime SLA easily made MT/Rackspace the right choice.
It's $2 per mailbox per month, or less than half Google's price, but there's a minimum of $10 a month -- so it's only cheaper if you have at least a couple mailboxes/users.
As an aside, Google also gives away web analytics for free, yet there's still a billion dollars a year spent at other web analytics firms. There are always ways to compete with free.
I expect Google will find some way to encourage me to upgrade my legacy free Apps account over the next year.
Edit: And I just realized that my Google Plus account is tied to my Google Apps account. If they raise prices on me I'm screwed.
or price. as was the main point of this thread.
To be fair, Google Apps for Business didn't get going until 2007 which is also the year Rackspace acquired WebMai.us. I'd say the market for B2B email contracted severely the moment Google Apps's free offering became established.
So 99% power/network uptime in a month would cost them 70% of what we pay per month.
http://www.rackspace.com/managed_hosting/support/serviceleve...
When Google Reader was social & free (and without ads) it wasn't perfect but it was good enough to destroy competition.
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.
DAMNIT
I was literally 10 minutes away from signing up.
For everyone with an account, I suggest looking for an alternative soon.
http://googleappsupdates.blogspot.com/2012/12/changes-to-goo...
And now they can't upsell those businesses to paid accounts anymore. Established businesses already have email in place, and switching them over will be a hell of a sell.
There was an excellent post about this a while ago, where a developer reported much better treatment from users after charging a token fee for their app.
As a final thought, maybe Google is catching on to the 'charge what something is worth, not what it costs you' way of thinking. Hosted email solutions for enterprise aren't free, and it seems like Google has realized the real value of their product. Also, ~$4/seat/month is pretty well in line with this kind of SaaS offering.
And Google Apps was actually quite easy to setup, partly because Google documented it pretty well but mostly because many DNS providers would basically do a one-click Google Apps setup automatically for you.
Not for the free version.
If it's anything like the Play Store phone support, it's basically a placebo so you feel instantly gratified, while the CSR sends an email to the real support team ( with ~48 hour turn-around).
I wish they had just fixed the experience for "vanity domains" so that they didn't require all the enterprise features, and didn't let administrators have complete control of users accounts. Then they could roll out new features to vanity users without needing the enterprise controls.
I understand that this is a little tricky, and involves no paying customers, but Google Apps was by far the best experience for custom domains. I'm sure it attracted the type of influencers that pull even more users. I used it for my family, bands, friends with very small businesses and more, and the other people on those domains not already using Gmail, in turn migrated their personal accounts to Gmail.
Google's always been pretty good about making sure you aren't locked in to their services, likely due to the efforts of their Data Liberation Front[1], but it always seemed to me that being locked in to using an @gmail.com email address was a big exception to this.
[1] http://www.dataliberation.org/
It's worth some value to me, but $50/user/year is a bit much for a family of ~5 light email users.
The family / soccer club / non profit isn't going to spend $250 for five email addresses. I am sure there are other providers that offer similar services for much cheaper - and if not there is a big opportunity.
When I see ridiculous sugar coating it breeds distrust and disbelief - congratulations Google, I now believe every single future thing you say a little less, well done.
And I will especially distrust any new "free" services you decide to offer.
This looks to me just synonymous to killing a high maintenance, low returns project so that they can focus better on either the business version or other stuff. The "indirect" upside is you get other Google products of better quality.
I don't think the google apps business customers are this dumb. They aren't going to trick us with this kind of obvious double talk. We are just going to think they are being deceptive and be less understanding.
Really? * really? * Choosing to stop offering a free service while allowing people who already have it to keep it is dicking you over?
Yes, free. As in 0$. The same way that Facebook is free and that most startup web services have a free usage tier. Knock it off with the pedantry.
I think the only reason I felt that way was because of how they told us what they were doing. Like they were doing us some kind of favor instead of the exact opposite.
The wording was awful, and this and that go to show how long the 'don't be evil' mantra is dead.
I'm all for Google yanking their free Apps account. It's their product, and people can't rightly bitch about something free being removed from the market.
However, it's using politician-grade spin to try and convince smart people that 1=2 which is the insulting bit.
By cutting off ad-supported free users, Google is attempting to pursue a global maxima: rather than making the best 'free-enterprise email/document sharing/whatever else it does because I only use it for email', they're now free to focus their efforts on paying customers. I suspect the one area where this will impact the most is customer service; Google is traditionally horrible because they're loathe to waste money on minimum wage call-centre employees to support loss-leader products. Now that Apps for Domains will be a first-class, revenue generating product, maybe they'll answer the damn phone.
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.
I was in the middle of setting up a service for a company of one at the moment and having one or two redirected emails isn't worth fifty dollars a year each right now.
A company of one definitely needs the most reliable communications it can get. Even if you're drowning in leads, it makes you much more credible if you don't have to explain to a client why their email bounced back. A delightful, relevant saying I encountered the other day is 'penny wise, pound foolish'.
hhh, you might be right. I'm really just a bit steamed about researching all this then getting home and realizing they had just killed it.
Aren't both options crushed in effectiveness by redirecting to your main account, whatever that is?
Is that clear enough for you? Self-hosting is a poor idea because screwing up once costs you real money, probably more than you'd spend on a year of hosting at a small business.
My point is, fucking up is bad and easily costs you money. Giving yourself infinitely more ways to fuck up to save $50 a year is stupid. I don't know how I can put it more plainly than that. At this point you're pretty much just trolling.
For 8 I prefer $50 per year. Three more guys over 8 is ridiculous.
Has anyone found a good solution for this? I could host it myself but that is a lot of hassle, free email accounts have ads and rarely let you use your own domain. The best I've found so far is email through a shared hosting provider, but it has limitations of its own (no IPv6, no 2 factor auth, self signed TLS certificates, etc). The cost is similar to a Google Apps account but without the linear price increase per mailbox.
Sometimes it's about the pennies. But other times, especially early, it won't be these types chunks of money that kill you. I used to go on CL and do user-studies for $50 a pop and resell the gift cards for cash or amazon credit. So it's hard for me to believe that what you are building can't spare an hour of work to fund baseline communication systems that are pretty well supported.
That is why heroku exists right? Otherwise only linode or ec2 could make business. Now if you have free time (you shouldn't) then, it is a whole different story. I agree with you.
To put it in perspective, Netflix costs ~$108 a year. People have no issues spending $4 a day on a latte, but just 13 lattes costs more than a year of Google Apps. A single latte or a big mac meal at mcdonalds costs more than an entire month of google apps for you.
And then there's coffee, which exceeds them all :)
For that matter, so is beer!
In the case of email, it's obviously valuable. While there are other options out there, ultimately you have to determine the cost of researching, testing, setting up, and switching over you and your employees. All this time is spent away from your money making activities.
Then there's spam... don't even get me started on spam filtering. For me personally $50/year is a bargain considering that running, maintaining, patching a mail server is time consuming and has no real upside.
As a learning experience it's fine, but in practice delivering mail (reliably) sucks hard.
The rest is still a bit of a hassle.
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.
And?
Free users threatening to leave are hilarious (even better when they campaign against ad targeting and AdBlock everything). Google's decision pretty clearly signals that users like you aren't worth it to the company any more than Google Apps are worth $50 to you. Don't do business. That's the point of a market.
I wouldn't pay for it either - I'm grateful that my Google Apps are grandfathered, but nobody is entitled to GMail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It's a voluntary transaction between two entities and, in this case, you and Google Apps aren't a good fit.
I'm not an enterprise. I don't need more support than regular GMail users. I don't have special needs, like managing what services are allowed. I just don't want a @gmail.com address.
I see people here defending this move, but think of how services like Google+ make mandatory an email address that's managed by Google. That email address will now have to be a @gmail.com address for regular users. Now think of how you can register with any email address on Facebook or Twitter, an email address which becomes your online ID.
By using your own domain with your own email address, if the email provider interrupts the service for you, you can always change your MX records and recover all the accounts that rely on that address. That's not something you can do with a @gmail.com or a @yahoo.com or a @hotmail.com address. If Google cuts off your access for some reason (like in case they find out you're under 18 or some bullshit) or if they delete your account by accident (hey, shit happens), then at the very least your online identity is not lost.
Freeloading is not the issue for me. I am already a paying Google customer in other ways (I buy stuff from Google Play, I pay for Google Drive storage, etc...) and I would happily pay them $50 per year anyway. The bigger issue is that using any Google service requires a Google email account, with Google Apps being a mild remedy for that.
How can I encourage people to use Google's services now? Not mentioning that 2 businesses are now paying customers of Google Apps, because of my freeloading and my recommendations for it.
Also, WTF is it with Google and raising prices? Companies are usually cutting prices down, while they are raising them. This also makes it an issue of trust - usually when I subscribe to services, I expect prices to go down, not up, otherwise I cannot trust it. My trust in Google is eroding right now.
What next? Make Chrome and Android proprietary with a yearly subscription for users? Lots of pesky freeloaders out there.
Plain-old GMail is no different (from a UX perspective) from being the sole user on a Google Apps account, so admins haven't really lost anything in terms of being able to evaluate Google Apps. There's nothing particularly interesting in the free version's admin panel.
(And, when I was first doing this, someone trying to hire me for a job couldn't email me, because their hosting provider was once friendly to spammers and my aggressive blacklisting rejected their TCP connections. Oops.)
Running an email server is hard and very few people regret paying an expert to do it for them.
(As many HN readers know, I work for Google. But I'm not telling you that you should or should not use Google's product here, only that running an email server is not trivial.)
Sleep on it I guess, see how it looks in the morning.
I use Google Apps to host 4 email addresses for my personal domain.
Personal email Online shopping email Forums/Programming email Facebook-only email (so people can't search for me)
I use it for me. I wouldn't pay $20/month for such a service, and Google is smart for not taking free away from existing customers.
No exim4, no spamassassin, no clam-av, no figuring out which indexer to use, or any of that. Just a forward on the incoming mail.
I actually miss running my own email domain, the privacy of it, not the actual administration. I stopped when I had gotten so crazy with aliases and disposable addresses that the spam overwhelmed me. Wasn't worth the time to 'do it right,' and I gave up my privacy for the simplicity of GMail.
I would love to leave GMail and take my privacy back, but I haven't found an acceptable alternative yet.
i fail to see how making good use of available resources is "cheating". the idea isn't to win some geek hair-shirt contest; it is to get email delivered to your domain.
There are many email providers you can use with your own domain. For example, rackspace is $2 a user a month. https://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email... I'm not sure why people are jumping from "Google won't do this for free for me anymore" to "I must do it myself".
It's pretty easy actually but when authorizing GMail to add a new sender address it usually mails a verification code to that address. Which, in this case would come back into the same Gmail inbox.
So if you have a X@Y.Z forwarding to A@gmail.com, then the verification code would be sent by gmail to X@Y.Z, which in turn, due to your forward settings, would redirect all mail to A@gmail.com.
The difference is that when sending mail from your Gmail.com inbox as opposed to the Google apps inbox for X@Y.Z is that when you send a mail via gmail (even if you fake the sender), the signed-by field will contain "gmail.com". On the other hand, Google apps for domains will set the signed-by field value to "Y.Z" (which would be your domain name).
As far as I know, this is the only difference. In Gmail, you can even set the default sender-address as your custom domain address so you don't need to set it everytime you reply to/compose new emails. And, unless you think/feel that signed-by: domain.name is cool, you're not really missing anything.
for now
myemail@gmail.com on behalf of Rob Aley [me@mydomain.co.uk]
It maybe looks a little unprofessional, but as long as your gmail account isn't something like offensivewords@gmail.com or cutesexyman32@gmail.com, its not too bad.
There are no internet authorities that control mail delivery, either, BTW. Many sites use heuristics to control mail acceptance, however, including third-party whitelists and blacklists. It can suck if you get on a blacklist, but experienced mail administrators only use whitelists and blacklists as one of many metrics regarding mail spamminess. Indicators of good mail like "most of the words in this message are non-spam words" often provide an order of magnitude more ham points than blacklists contribute spam points, so important messages will probably not be dropped even if you're on a blacklist. Of course, many sites have less clever schemes because there is a lot of spam and not a lot of sysadmin time to waste tweaking spam filtering rules.
Mail is hard.
In any case, from a decade of listening to the random things he's had to deal with, I certainly have to agree with your final comment.
I think there are probably some MTAs that will STARTTLS for normal SMTP connections, but again, I've never heard of anyone using SSL/TLS as a spam-filtering criterion. (I might look through my old logs to see if anyone other than me ever issued STARTTLS on my mail server. But I'm guessing the number was near zero.)
Last year I moved and my IP address changed (ISP didn't). I expected to lose the "reputation" the previous one had built up. But I did not have any problems whatsoever. I do hear rumors like yours every now and again but I have a hard time believing them.
I think that large email providers, the likes of Gmail/Hotmail, actually look at the email addresses / domains / servers that their clients send email to. Then they assign trust to those tokens. If you're a large provider, you can do many things with the data you get from your own customer's behaviour. How about looking at accounts that have been in use for some time, seen regular web interface action, and send email to other @hotmail/gmail accounts that actually get read and not flagged spam? If those accounts send mail to my mailserver, then my mail server / domain must have something good going for it. Well that's what I would do if I were running a huge setup anyway...
As for incoming spam: I'm using various postfix tricks, greylisting, and dspam. I have no problems. I should write a howto ;-)
Why? I have two VPSs with the main and backup SMTP servers and with continuous replications of emails between them and I pay less than half. Not to mention they double as web servers, IRC bouncers, etc.
And no matter what I did to reduce spam, about 10 messages a day always made it through.
I probably never get the same traffic as you do, but to me the best decision I made was enabling catch-all and using different addresses for each service out there.
In my case, spammers only send to three types of addresses:
- Random (jumble of numbers and letters@mydomain): very easy to block with a couple of programming lines.
- Fake but plausible (support@, bob@): just blacklist them once.
- Leaked (from websites and such): same as above, nuke it. Only happened to me once.
All in all, I never had to set up SpamAssassin or deal with dropped emails because of untrusted sources. Blocking by destination is much cleaner.
This does not include incoming bandwidth, bandwidth used by your IMAP or webmail client, or DNS lookups that you'll do for every message received. (Also, spam filtering is CPU-intensive, so if you get a lot of email, a Micro instance may not be big enough.)
This doesn't include a secondary MX, either. (I like the DynDNS secondary MX service, personally, which is ~$30 a year IIRC.)
Just tell me where to sign up (next year when AWS free tier expires).
I'm lucky in that I already have Google Apps and they're not starting to charge me. But if I didn't I'd look at whether there are reasonable free/cheap alternatives out there.
For customers it looks like the end of free Gmail-for-your-domain. But for competitors I imagine it looks like the end of price gouging.
Show your work, please.
[1] http://www.google.com/intl/en/enterprise/apps/business/custo...
That is BS and Google knows it
Why? Because Google can suspend your account at a whim and not even tell you why.
Google did that to a friend of mine, yes, paid account, yes called support line, they basically said "tough, it may return in 48h"
At $50 / year for Google it's cheaper to buy a domain from GoDaddy and pay for email services (webmail + IMAP) that are automatically tied to your domain.
Let me make a few recommendations. I'm not a sysadmin by trade but I know a few things you can do that will improve your lot in life running mail.
- Postfix and Dovecot. They have the right combination of ease of use, power and security. Don't overconfigure; try to get it working with basic settings first and then evolve it towards what you dream of rather than setting out to configure it that way first.
- SPF and DKIM. I have no trouble getting messages to Gmail and I think this is part of why.
- Make sure your hosting provider is not huge and very high quality. I chose RootBSD because they're small but highly technical. If you have a lot of spare cash, iNetU are quite good and sometimes help with FreeBSD. The larger or crappier the host is, the more likely you'll wind up in blacklisted IP space. (BSD hosting companies tend to be smaller and more technical, and BSD is great software, so I'd recommend that if you're interested.) Getting off a blacklist isn't a lot of fun and it's not hard to wind up on one, but I find being on a discriminating host is a good preventative measure.
- Rely on IMAP. If you want webmail, try and find one that is really just an IMAP frontend. I tried and liked Roundcube a while back; these days I have IMAP clients everywhere so I don't know what the new hot stuff is, but IMAP is fantastic.
- I strongly recommend you get an account with DNSReport.com. Their software can detect most of the DNS problems you can get yourself into that wreak havoc with mail. Odds are good you'll be doing a lot more DNS than before, it's a great tool to have in the toolbox.
- Stay on top of your security updates. I recommend running sshguard and whatever other security software/IDS/firewall type stuff you can stand. Make sure you're not giving out a bunch of shell accounts with root on this server. Seems obvious, but people forget or get lazy. FreeBSD will email you a security message every day; if something like that isn't coming your way, consider trying to set it up. It tells me, among other things, who tried to log into the server, how many times they failed, what their IP was, and lots of other stuff.
There are a number of nice upsides to running your own mail server.
- Email can be hooked up to the database various ways.
- Automatic emailing for free (keep an eye on it).
- Scripted email handling for free (Procmail etc).
- Get system-generated messages emailed (Nagios/monit etc., login/sudo failures, etc.)
- Advanced forwarding/wildcard accounts.
Anyway, I hope you do give it a shot despite the nay-saying. Cost-effective? No, but it's a blast, and many of the upsides would be hard to replicate with Gmail. Of course the web mail UI will be worse. Tradeoffs.
(I ask because I'm still trying to get an idea of just how vulnerable your garden-variety server is, user stupidity aside)
If you've got a "garden variety" server with a strong password, I wouldn't worry.
I've got a laptop slung on the end of my ADSL line that has had literally millions of attempts.
If you are worried, you can install fail2ban which will block repeated attacks at the firewall level.
And if you use SSH keys you should be totally safe.
Remember to apply security fixes though since the automatic attacks also probe for ancient versions of SSH servers.
One easy way to manage it is make a folder for each hostname, and add things like mysql root password, ssh port, public IP, pivate IP as different entries relating to the all aspects of managing the host.
I've run my own mail server for 15 years, since I got my first permanent connection. I host on the end of it as I have a large distrust of "the cloud".
It is cost effective for me as it has increased my merchantable skill portfolio. I've ended up designing some mail systems (50k+ users) for some large ISPs in the past thanks to my accumulated knowledge.
Debian is probably the easiest to get off the ground - it's pretty much "sudo aptitude install postfix dovecot" and follow the instructions. I was a FreeBSD user but primarily due to apathy, I tend to use Debian.
This is about to change however, when FreeBSD supports the raspberry pi as it's a much lower memory and power footprint device so some of FreeBSD's simplifications and optimisations will assist there.
For me, a Raspberry Pi with a 32 gig SD card plugged into my 12Mbit connection will suffice for the 18 users and 5 domains via IMAP that are currently being hosted on a much larger machine. Cost to me: $40-50. No brainer.
Regardless, one's privacy is already compromised the moment they sign up for Internet service; that information can be made available to the right people after one subpoena.
http://searchengineland.com/google-fired-two-employees-for-b...
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/operation-aurora/
http://readwrite.com/2010/09/27/googles_second_transparency_...
Google read your email and use it to throw targeted ads at you.
There is a fine line between profiling, tracking and analysing communications and utilising that data for something nefarious. The only deciding factor on how far it goes is cash.
People use e-mail constantly. It's important. $50 per person per year isn't a blip on the radar. Do you know how much money you'll lose if your 18 users can't access their mail for an hour? Now consider how much time they'll spend setting up their own mail clients instead of using Gmail. Think of the increased time and frustration waiting for searches to finish. Think of the extra time they'll spend deleting spam. You're paying a lot more than $40-50 for that mail server, but the real cost is obscured from you.
It's a no-brainer: skimping on email hosting is simply not worthwhile.
There are lots of reasons to not use Gmail. Maybe $50/year is a lot for you. Maybe your needs are modest. Maybe you want the knowledge and experience of running mail. Maybe you want or need to interface your other components with mail. Maybe you don't like the rest of Google Apps. Maybe you hate the Gmail interface. Ultimately, most people will choose Gmail despite whichever of those reasons might apply. There's no need to turn a technical decision into a dogmatic one.
Backups: tar and gzip daily, then scp to a friend's server in another country. Also take manual backups to encrypted USB stick weekly which I carry around on me at all times.
Searching: you only have to search it if you have lots of it. I have 9 messages in my maildir. I receive perhaps 20-30 messages a day. No problems - they all fit on the screen. If it's worth keeping, it goes as a ticket/wiki entry or in the hg repo as a document.
Spam: get one or two a week per user. Just delete by hand at the moment. People who use imap use their mail client's spam filtering stuff. If it gets problematic I'll probably install a filter.
Calendars/contacts: both in mercurial in agenda format (plain text, one line per event or contact). Very easy to manage and share. Have you tried keeping a central address book/calendar accurate using any other method?
I know how much we'll lose without email which is why it is where it is :) About 2m from me most of the time.
Cost? I've spent 20 minutes on admin this year. Everything is automated..
I'm not skimping, I'm making sure we do it right so we don't need all the tooling and features. To be honest, google is too cheap to be good if you ask me and their reputation shows regulalrly with outages and problems.
I ran a linksys NSLU2 as my mail server for a few years, with a USB stick as its storage. With Debian linux with Dovecot, Postfix, spamassassin, and the Spamhaus DNSBLs set up I managed to keep the signal to noise ratio pretty damn high too.
It was fun, and remarkably not hard.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/04/so-youd-like-to-sen...
- I kept a mostly "if it works don't break it" approach, but about once a year there'd be some alert about security issues with some specific software and I'd run a "aptitude update". Invariably it'd update the packages out of order, libc would get screwed up, and I'd have to reinstall the whole server.
- I could never get the spam filtering up to snuff. I had daily auto-training spam+ham folders etc set up, the works, but I'd always get a a few spam messages in my inbox, and a handful of false positives. Used SPF but it had to be softfail since someone I visit friends/relatives who's ISPs have blocked SMTP ports aside from their own relay.
- My fault, but I ran a forwarding address for a friend, and I got blocked by my ISP since it forwarded some spam messages that got flagged.
- I don't feel properly equipped to deal with backups. (sure you can set up an rsync to somewhere else [that you have to pay for], but you also want to keep monitoring that they're good, test restores, etc)
Easily worth $50/year for me to not have to think about it.
edit: forgot the biggest reason I switched: I got an iPhone, and iOS doesn't do push email over IMAP. Gmail supports Exchange, and there's no way I'm going to be hosting that myself...
What distribution are you using? I've never had this happen, though for important servers I tend to use Debian stable. I would be shocked if it happened on stable.
I earn more than $25 per day, therefore $50 per year for mail hosting is worth it!
For example, Live (Microsoft service)[1] or Yandex (Russian google vis-a-vis). [2][3]
[1] https://domains.live.com/
[2] http://pdd.yandex.ru
[3] Major caveat: the interface is in Russian only now, but after initial setup it shouldn't be a big deal;
https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html
My impression is that paid Google Apps support is pretty good: http://contact.googleapps.com/
http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email/
Free is only really free if you don't value your time.
We also run an email system at work, though it's a lot more work than other services - mostly due to spam / deliveriabilty - so even if you do pay $50/yr still seems a bargain. IMHO you need 100+ users to even think about justifying the time cost for running a mail server yourself.
Also, I get access to all the new Google stuff without having to wait for Google to make it 'business-ready'.
How much do you make per hour? How many hours do you expect to spend per year maintaining your own email system?
How much would you pay to stop one hacker, one time, from reading your private email?
Are you going to bother to set up two-factor authentication, or just wing it?
For a lot of people, $50 a year would make total sense.
Totally understand someone running their own mail server due to privacy concerns, but that's a different argument to "not worth $50 a year".
I always thought of free Google Apps as the company's brilliant play to control the fabric of the business internet. Can you name anything in the digital realm more important to businesses and organizations of all sizes than long-form communication (email) and content and information-driven collaboration?
Sadly for new users and for Google itself, the company's actions reveal a failure to recognize Apps as anything more than a collection of inter-related services ready for more aggressive monetization. Management fails to see the strategic benefit and leverage afforded by controlling the online fabric of every new business that starts operating as a small team. It's the type of short-term and profit-driven thinking that afflicts so many companies as they reach the complacency of scale.
Email is a solved problem that is totally worth it to outsource or pay someone else to manage in-house. If you feel comfortable setting up your own mail server, managing spam, updating it, etc., and WANT to do it, then you're probably not Google's target audience, anyway.
Blabling 'but time has shown that in practice, the experience isn't quite right for either group' when a statement about ~ we are sorry to remove the free ad supported option would have been the honest way.
EDIT: phrasing
Somewhat offtopic, but I always find statements like this rather silly on HN, a site ostensibly focused on and for the startup community. You mention in a comment below that you've worked for several startups. While there, did you only make decisions at the expense of your users to maximize profits?
If not, that's enough evidence to prove your statement wrong.
Most decisions like this are more complicated. While it does make the "I just reserved a domain name and want a google-hosted webmail client for it as soon as possible" case more complicated in the future (and I have one too), in most HN threads on google's poor customer service someone will inevitably bring up the fact that they'd be willing to pay money to get phone support for their Google Apps accounts, even though you've been able to do that for quite some time now. In fact, the whole second paragraph in the article seems to be about businesses that sign up for free, and don't actually understand the limits they accepted in turn.
Eliminating a product for new customers actually can be a net positive in terms of good will of your customers, even if they have to pay more. The post is a little overly cheerful, like they just came up with this brilliant new idea, but your reaction is one better saved for things like finding out a device you own has DRM you didn't know about it, or a company removing something you've paid for with a remote kill switch.
I think you read a little more pejorative into that sentence than I intended (I understand why, it's a common phrasing in that sense). I mean it quite literally: they maximize profits by charging their users money (at their user's "expense") - not "for the overall detriment of their users" as you might (quite reasonably) interpret it.
But in this literal sense, yes, in every startup I've been involved in, we made decisions to make money and we planned for our users to pay that money. I'm not blaming Google for this - it's what businesses do (almost by definition!).
That being said, if this is this is a precursor to responding to complaints about access to Google customer service by giving all Google Apps business customers access to better support, it may make some sense.
I'll chalk this one down to the startup nature of this community, seeing as some are probably involved with competing products or are developing some, but the matter of fact is that this announcement is perfectly reasonable: “vanilla” gmail accounts are free, Apps accounts are not.
Those who already have free Apps will keep them at the same price, there doesn't seem to be any swindling involved, and look! phone support, imagine that.
I think what we're reacting to is that the free tier of Google Apps doesn't seem any different (from a cost perspective) from regular Gmail. They're giving me the same storage, showing me the same ads, providing the same no phone support, etc. The real difference is that I get a custom domain which doesn't cost anything to Google.
$50/user/year also seems expensive if you're not going to use the value-add of the business plans (phone support, 25GB inboxes, etc). Maybe Google could have kept the old system as well (7GB storage, ads) and charged $5/user/year for the vanity domain. $50 is just a lot for what is, frankly, more vanity value add than anything else for many of us. Yes, if you want 25GB inboxes, no ads, SLAs, etc. Google Apps can provide good value add, but I don't need those things.
Google is a private business. What they announced is reasonable for a private business trying to maximize profit. However, it feels less reasonable when one thinks about the cost to provide services. The free Google Apps shouldn't cost more than the free Gmail from Google's perspective. As such, I think it's human nature to say, "then why are you charging more?" "Because they can" is a perfectly reasonable answer, but it does make us think less of Google. Google is the company pushing the Nexus 4 down to $300 to try and prove that top-grade equipment can be more mass market rather than trying to maximize profit with a $500+ Nexus 4. That's the ethos and drive that we've come to love. What Google has done is perfectly reasonable and, in fact, better than most businesses would have done: most businesses wouldn't have grandfathered us in. However, it just doesn't feel like the same Google that turned so many businesses upside-down. In short, it doesn't feel like Gmail. Gmail came along with 1GB of free storage when you got ~10MB from competitors - and Google made it into a profit center pushing the bounds in a way that made them rich and improved our lives at the same time. This just feels like a regular business trying to make money - and that just doesn't feel like Google to us.
Again, I'm not saying that Google doesn't make a ton of money or that they shouldn't or whatnot. I'm merely pointing out that Google's profits often come alongside something that genuinely makes our lives better. Our world is better because Android exists. Our world is better because Google entered search. Our world is better for YouTube. Even AdSense brought relevant ads that were less obtrusive. They're all wonderful for Google too, but they pushed us forward. This doesn't feel like that. This feels like an MBA sitting in a room looking at the number of free Google Apps accounts and thinking "I bet we could convert some of those free-sign-ups into paid ones if we discontinued the free product in the future".
I want to emphasize that Google doesn't owe me anything, but when you see two services that cost the same to provision and one getting priced upward, it just feels icky.
For anyone who might be looking for an option for the future, Zoho offers a free tier for up to 3 inboxes: https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html.
To do this without having to manually create each address before I used it, I had to enable a catch-all address for my domain. Originally, I had my hosting provider (who are great) as the MX and they would simply forward it all on to Gmail. Well, sooner or later they determined that the massive amount of was killing their server, and politely asked if I could either disable the catch-all or find another MX (though they weren't firing me as a customer, yet). Even though my host has always been reasonable, $100ish/yr with them wasn't enough for me to use email the way that I intended.
This is where Google Apps comes in -- they are now my MX, and so my host is happy and my email arrives faster than it did before. In that light, $50/yr is a steal!
Being grandfathered in as free is a nice loyalty-builder, hopefully it stays free.
I actually started with Zoho a few years ago before switching to Google Apps. But, inability to sync contact and calendar, and use activesync with my android phone was a deal breaker for me.
I see that they offer Active Sync in free tier too. Does it actually work reliably?
There is no paradox. Some people are distrusting of free services, others are unwilling to pay. HN isn't one person's opinion, there are many diverse opinions represented in this community.
What are you talking about? There is no sugar coating in this announcement, they just explain loud and clear what they are doing:
> With this in mind, we’ve decided to make things very straightforward. Starting today for all new customers:
Doesn't get more sugar free than this.
Maybe you were referring to Apple a few months ago when they announced their new maps?
With Google Apps, you just keep going on your other laptop/tablet/smartphone/friend's computer/etc.
That in and of itself is worth a huge amount of money.
(Google may charge you to use this feature.)
Also, when you attempt to sign up, the link redirects to a google apps free trial page.
Don't see much of a problem here - I'm surprised they didn't do this sooner - I'm happy to pay for this service at that price - no problem.
They also include minimal web hosting with registration too, but last I looked their (free) offering was so bad it didn't really count as a feature.
I imagine some other domain registrars have similar options.
If so, that's a huge bummer. I only recently switched to running my email this way and I don't relish the thought of migrating elsewhere so soon.
I would happily pay $50/year (or perhaps more... I don't know how high I'd go) for email that's not only convenient and spam free, but also well protected from governments and the provider's employees, and not data mined.
I have absolutely no use for phone support or 99.9 uptime for my personal email. So the businessification of Google mail is not a win for me. Privacy and convenience or what I'm after.
Anyone working on something like this?
I'd also note that the $50/year is also per user, so there's sort of an opening to offer a family, personal domain type service. For a family of a maybe 2-6 users, the $50/year-user is a bit steep if you're mostly looking for a small group email + calendaring. Maybe that would even be an interesting vector for starting a new family-based social networking service.
I actually considered an email address like firstname@lastname.com. I figured I could add my parents, or future children.
But this only works for obscure last names or unusual TLDs. There's also the issue of family relationships - people get divorced, grow up and want more independence, etc. Marrying email to a family domain could be messy.
Google is all good but I feel I should not put all of my emails in one account..
And, if you'd rather run your own server, you can of course just buy their software. But I don't have any experience running that.
It's sad that now attaching a custom domain will cost a lot more than the domain itself.
[1] - https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/pVZfdeky-ow...
Now to figure out which email should be 'real' for Google App Engine - maybe the 1 user will be 'noreply'!
Right now, my favorite solution is Kerio Connect, which you can either self-host or purchase as a cloud solution. There are hosting providers who will handle all of this for you, but having the option to bring mail fully in house is really nice.
It's essentially Exchange, but much easier to manage, and far cheaper.
They also have a Sharepoint/Box alternative, Workspace, that I now love.
I'm more than happy paying $555 for a server and then $45/user for license, $15/user/year maintenance, and hosting costs. I really don't think $50-100/mo/user (once you factor in admin/hosting costs...you could do it for $20-30/mo but $50-100 is a safer budget) is an unreasonable amount for top quality email and collaboration tools.
Still, the huge amount of spam that's been getting through (10-15 per day, despite always logging in to the gmail web interface and clicking Report Spam) has been encouraging me to consider a move anyway. This change is just the nudge I needed to finally make it happen...
No, I don't mind the end of free Google Apps. I use Google Apps for my business for five years, and frankly, it is mind-boggling what they have given me for free. Luckily us existing users still get the free service, but if I had to pay US$50 per year per user, I would still consider it exceptional value.
US$50 per year for a set of critical, heavily-used services is an inconsequential amount for all but the most penny-pinching operation.