Ask HN: After Google Apps and Outlook, which email provider for custom domain? Recently Outlook stopped their free email service for a custom domain. Some time back Google Apps had stopped their service. I need a single email with my custom domain. Any recommendations for another provider? Any reviews on Zoho? Thank you for your time |
The Microsoft solution for your problem is not Outlook.com - it's Office 365 and/or hosted Exchange. They have a slightly different -- in my opinion better and definitely faster - web UI for the latter.
Being a Google Apps user basically means you have a Google Account associated with that user. Being a hosted Exchange user does not imply that. In other words, you can use an Android phone with a Google Apps account, but with pa hosted Exchange account you cannot log in to a Windows Phone, you need a normal Microsoft Account. In my opinion this is good, because your email is not related to mobile purchases and so on.
I personally find the hosted Exchange/Office 365 solution much better, mostly because it's only about email (+office stuff, if you buy it). It's not polluted with anything else, it does only a few things but it does them well.
Fastmail.fm is a completely different option, I am using that as well, their biggest problems are: - lack of proper push email (on mobiles) - lack of good contact management
Calendar is coming soon as far as I understood, and they're the fastest.
I'm a paying Fastmail.fm user, but I really hope they have something planned for push email, otherwise I'll be looking for another provider when my renewal is due–which is a shame, because I really like them otherwise. I understand that this is as much Apple's 'fault' as anything (for not supporting IMAP IDLE on iOS) but to me, as an end-user, it doesn't matter why it doesn't work, simply that there are other providers who have made it work regardless (e.g. Rackspace).
Plus the fact that their servers are hosted in the US.
1. Use webfaction's shared email service at http://webfaction.com and stick to IMAP. This is an old fashioned shared hosting system.
2. Use digital ocean or linode and build your own mail server.
I do #2 and have four domains and am happy with it. I don't have contact and calendar sync - that's the only problem but this doesn't really bother me. There are hundreds of open source CalDAV and CardDAV solutions available though for all platforms.
With these solutions you are free from the chains of a single vendor as they are easy to move and won't have to worry about getting shafted by Google/Microsoft etc. Three of the four domains I host are refugees from the recent live domains being shut down fiasco.
Or you could pay for Google apps and cross your fingers every day that they don't deprecate something you need.
I use Owncloud to sync my calendar and contacts b/w my Android phone and PC.
I asked them about this some time ago, and they said their mail servers are in France.
Use this in conjunction with a normal Gmail account. Incoming mail is sent to your Gmail via a simple redirect.
For seamless outgoing mail, configure Gmail to send via the SMTP server for your domain.
For bonus points run http://gmvault.org/ somewhere to keep a perfectly restorable copy of your Gmail in case of disaster (this can be restored correctly with all labels intact unlike many simple IMAP or mbox backup solutions)
There is a free signup with option for 1 custom domain.
I use it, works great.
Our site (currently only in French), http://mlstate.com shows a bit the solution we're building.
Expect much more news before this summer.
The site looks great though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFfCgIJpSf4 --- Worked good, moved fast, nice UI.
My current shared hosting provider gives out pop3/authenticated smtp or IMAP as part of the hosting deal but only has a basic web mail interface.
However, I recently did build an email server and it works a treat. The enormous complexity and the lack of a decent guide was a problem, plus there is a lot to know. Fortunately I did know a bit about PTR/SPF/DKIM and so on and so forth, but I don't think things like Postfix (even if you use them) are fathomable. For me the trick was to get it to work, as in send/receive mail, then to work on making sure the delivery works without stuff going down some black hole.
I have not bothered with a webmail frontend, e.g. Roundcube (which has been updated) as, in my experience, webmail frontends can get character sets mangled etc. I am using the normal email on my phone plus normal 'Thunderbird'.
I have not had some sea of spam or hackers wanting to do nasty things. Now it just works and my build can survive a few apt-get type upgrades, reboots and resource problems (the kernel hasn't killed the mail server things).
I built my mail server because I wanted to read email with code and that is kind of dependent on having your own email server if you are doing lots of developer things and you don't want to be mysteriously barred from some service you have no control over.
There are no limits on what I can do with my own box, if I want emails from domains x + y to go to one particular box, or accounts Alice and Bob to go through to Cheryl's account then I could do that with some extensive manual reading and a huge amount of time lost getting it to work. I would probably lose that time anyway doing it the Microsoft Way, but, at least I won't hit a wall of impossibility.
As mentioned I have changed from 'don't roll your own' because it is allegedly about as silly as reinventing the wheel, to seeing 'roll your own' as important to do and not as hard as people imagine. Clearly things might be different if I had fifty or so people wanting calendars and what not, I would go for a hosted, paid for thing under those circumstances out of cowardliness and not wanting to be blamed when it went wrong.
I must say that email is surprisingly hard once you get to the nuts and bolts of it. Email clients and webmail services do a lot of stuff to present a straightforward, easy to use interface. However, conceptually, I don't believe email needs to be hard.
I hope they don't drop their free e-mail service, but if both Google and Outlook have stopped, they might consider it :( .
They value your security and privacy highly. The data is hosted in Switzerland.
Also you can have groupware features like calendar and address book with open and standard interfaces like CalDav and CardDav.