Best hosted alternative to Google Workspace for email?

Google Takeout will export all your mail in mbox format which is easily handled by mail programs like Apple Mail and Thunderbird and should let you sync everything to a new service (if that service won't let you transfer it themselves).

I'm using iCloud+ from Apple. It's cheap at $1/mo for 50GB of space and lets me have my custom domains. $3/mo will get you family sharing and 200GB of space (if you want multiple accounts - I just have one account with multiple domains/email addresses). Apple's email hosting is 22 years old (pre-dating Gmail by 4 years) and seems like it won't be going anywhere anytime soon. They've recently expanded their email offerings with things like "Sign In with Apple" and "Hide my Email."

Zoho Mail will give you free hosting without IMAP or $1 for 5GB, $1.25 for 10GB, $3 for 30GB, $4 for 50GB, $6 for 100GB (billed annually).

Microsoft 365 will cost $5.83/mo for 1 person or $8.33 for a family of 6. Each account gets 1TB of storage (6TB for the family in total) and you get all the Microsoft Office apps. One issue is that the domain needs to be with Go Daddy which ups the price a little given their premium pricing on domains which is around an extra dollar per month.

FastMail is $5/mo for 30GB, $9 for 100GB.

There's no magic email provider that no one ever complains about - including Google where we've heard horror stories of getting locked out with no one to even contact. It also seems like no one wants to be hosting your mail for free with IMAP support anymore (and almost no one wants to host your domain email for free generally).

For me, migrating to iCloud+ was cheap and easy. I'm already on a Mac and iPhone. I set up some simple rules to filter my mail on my Mac and I'm enjoying the instant response of a native app. At $1/mo, there's no lock-in to annual billing and it basically costs nothing.

Microsoft 365 seems like a good deal if you're looking for a lot of storage and Microsoft Office apps. 1TB for $5.83/mo is basically the same price per GB as Dropbox, but you're also getting mail and the Office apps.

In their Q&A they have a link to a google form where they say they will email you alternative options after April 1.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217#faq

May be worth the wait and just sign the form. Worst case, you still upgrade. But it seems like they may offer some super restricted free version for personal use.

I’ll probably just upgrade at this point. I wish protonmail supported contact syncing. That’s the main issue, that and our dakboard.

>What if I use G Suite legacy free edition for personal use and don't want to upgrade to a Google Workspace subscription?

>Upgrading to a Google Workspace subscription is a seamless transition for all customers currently on the G Suite legacy free edition. However, we understand some customers may not use their G Suite legacy free edition for business and may be interested in other options. If you have 10 or fewer users in your group and do not use your G Suite legacy free edition for business, please sign in to your administrator account to provide more information.

>Sign in to an administrator account (doesn't end in gmail.com).

>Note that even if you decide you don't want to upgrade to Google Workspace, you'll still retain access to additional Google services and paid content purchased though non-Google Workspace services made with your legacy edition account (such as movies purchased on Google Play). Learn more above.

This question comes up a couple times every month. FastMail always comes up as a recommendation, so if you search comments for FastMail, you’ll find every past thread (and relatively few false positives):

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...

Example from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30128198

Fastmail

I've just moved, and it's great. Import is fantastic (I migrated 14GB of email) and I've used Dmarcian to monitor and confirm everything is perfect on the SPF, DKIM front. Spam initially got through, but once trained it's been flawless I've personally abandoned labels for folders as I used barely 10 labels in Gmail and seldom added more than one, but they do support labels if you want that. It's great for wildcard email and aliases.

I've moved the calendar over too via Google takeout for the individual .ics files. On Android I use DAVx5 to keep using the Google calendar app (point it at your fastmail account and it will display in Google calendar).

For Drive I've moved to syncthing and am using a Synology NAS as my always online master copy, but each of my computers has a copy. I also installed libre office on my laptop.

And I'm keeping a Gmail account just for Android backup and app purchases, etc.

I’ve moved mine off to Gandi.net where I had the domains. It is either included for free with your domain, or something like 1.5 EU/mo if you store a lot of email.

Easy on the Gandi.net side and on Macs. A complete pain on the iOS side. The accounts added on the Mac don’t come over to iOS for some reason like they do other Macs, then when you go to add them manually iOS won’t look to see which ports to use or mail servers so you have to enter all that, except you can’t do the port until later and when you do the device hangs at “verifying” until you turn off all internet access and turn it back on. (That’s a half day of research for free for you.) It’s an accepted defect by Apple, its been documented for years.

Also, moving is a pain. Google lets you export, but you lose your folder information. Apple on Mac lets you easily copy from one account to another, but that is a little strange since you have two accounts for the same email address and there have been catastrophic failures in the past from that. Also some of the special folders like “Archive” apparently can’t be copied for “reasons”. The work around is to “select all” in Archive and hope it doesn’t explode from the volume.

All in all, you are in for some pain. And pain raised to some exponent if you have non-technical users in your domain to support.

HN is a hard place for people who like Microsoft but I'll tell you that a single user Office 365 Business Essentials subscription is a great deal. Along with e-mail you get a terabyte of Sharepoint (OneDrive) storage, online versions of office apps, and Teams. $5/mo. There's an IMAP migration tool. Just turn on IMAP on your Gmail account if it's not already enabled and let the O365/Exchange wizard suck all the e-mail down.

As alternative I would suggest Office365, but If you used Google workspace for so long, why not just pay Google? Why you have to change. Just pay and do nothing... They invested billions for you to use it for free so long. Its a good service.

This was asked last week with some good answers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30128198

This monster thread about the original announcement is full of them as well:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29996432

Office 365 is a great deal. For 1 user its $70 per year, up to 6 its $100 per year. You get a lot of storage and all of office.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/outlook/outloo...

I've been using Migadu ever since switching away from Google Apps, and I've been happy with their service and pricing.

You can still use the Gmail UI with a custom domain for free. All you need is a mail server. Once it's set up, configure a free Gmail account to fetch your email with IMAP and send from your domain with SMTP. Now you own your email but still get the Gmail UI as long as you want to use it, for free, with the option to use any other client you want as well.

I'm trialling Fastmail at the moment. Some observations. Excellent Google migration tool..Excellent support for domain aliases. You can also forward domain aliases to an external addresses...I raised a support query on A saturday evening and I had a resolution on Sunday morning.

Looking good so far. My main requirement is no restriction on domain aliases.

I offer https://privateemail.com as an option, "best" or not depends on you.

I'm a fan of namecheap. They do not, in my experience, engage in the same dark patterns as other registrars. I found out about their hosted mail service, privateemail, only last year. We needed something for a new business domain with very simple needs and Google Workspace would have been overkill. After using privateemail.com for the last 6 months or so, I can give it only a very basic, but positive review. It's been simple to use, reliable, and inexpensive. The plans come with Google Drive like storage, and they also appear to be developing (or integrating) online document editing which is available with their Ultimate plan (currently $68.88 per year).

We did not have any need to import mail, so I don't know if or how they support that. As far as I've seen they do not have a mobile app, but of course you can use other existing apps including the OS built-in apps. The domain is new and does not receive any spam, so cannot comment on the effectiveness of their spam filtering.

https://mxroute.com/

I have used Zoho for my burner domain for a couple of years.

It's functional and works ok, but is not as slick as Gmail (both web and app)

I will keep the free version of "google cloud identity" so I kan keep my google account and things connected to it; things like drive documents, YouTube account, app purchases, and so on. But then I intend to move my email domain to iCloud.

I'm currently going through the process of setting up a self hosted instance of mailu (packaged set of docker containers) to migrate my domain away from Gmail.

I'm doing it this way because I'm a masochist (in other words: idealist).

All I want is a mail provider that will dump wild cards into my Gmail box. What's the best tool for that? I don't mind the Google Borg... but I'm not willing to pony up $$$ for simple wildcard email delivery.

I have no idea what Google Workspace provides, but here's my review of Fastmail:

- The web interface is good, the Android app is good. Relatively fast and straightforward to use. Pretty good reliability aside from the occasional DDoS.

- The calendar is functional but kinda lame. I don't think I've ever noticed before an event happens, and trying to open new events has poor UX. Typical Calendar features work fine.

- Haven't really used Contacts but they're all there from my phone.

- There's a Notes feature which I find mostly useless since it doesn't really sync with anything (though supposedly it can work with Apple Notes' proprietary format?).

- They give you dedicated file storage and transfer quota just to serve files on the web (unrelated to mail quotas). It's accessible via normal browser and via WebDAV client. I guess it's handy, I've used it once, but pulling attachments out of emails is almost the same. If you had to send someone a large file and couldn't send it via e-mail, there you go.

- They have all the mail features that I've used in Gmail. They have some "team" features, I suppose they're helpful if you have multiple users.

- You can connect your Google, Yahoo, Outlook, iCloud, and other accounts in Fastmail so you can actually pull mail from all those places. You can even send e-mail through each of those providers too. So this is pretty cool for consolidating accounts.

- They have their own e-mail masking service, and partnered with 1Password so the masked e-mails have matching credentials in your 1Password account.

- The people running it are using really old tech and don't chase after the latest shiny thing, which I appreciate. Everything they do seems sensible. These aren't tech bros gobbling up VC money to become a Unicorn. And they don't seem to use any trackers or ads at all. The only 3rd party domains I see are from Sentry (for debugging app issues).

- My gripes: the Android app doesn't cache mail or calendar, the Calendar is clunky and notifications don't grab my attention, their new UI in beta will probably become more cramped soon.

I migrated four separate Google accounts to a single Fastmail account last year. I had put off migrating for _years_ because I thought it would be painful, but I've had no issues at all. The migration was automated with good progress updates as emails are copied across. I had to do the DNS bits manually but they were nevertheless well documented. I've had zero issues since with mail, calendars, or their simple static site hosting. I think about it so little I sometimes forget how happy I was with the whole process.

Mxroute, migadu, purelymail (in beta). Can also consider Gandi.net which gives two 3G email when you use them as domain registrar, their domain pricing however is not the cheapest you can find.

Fastmail. It just works and does everything I need, without bloat (I've got it on a custom domain). It also seems reasonably likely to last "a decade or two".

I'm very happy with Tutanota. I use it with my own domain because it's one of the cheapest options I could find and they use renewable energy.

Google is not just email. It's the email client. It's the calendar. It's the calendar integration with email. How do you replace those?

Office365, you get exchange email and Microsoft office included in the basic plan which is about $80/yr.

You can BYO your own unlimited number of email domains.

Check if your domain registrar comes with a free mailbox and mail forwarding (e.g. Gandi), and you can wire it up to a free gmail account with a custom domain. Useful for branding side projects more with custom email addresses.

By the way, is there something special about Cloudflare email routing that people keep mentioning? Don't most registrars come with mail forwarding? It's different?

One way of getting consumer Gmail to work with a custom domain almost exactly like the way legacy Gsuite worked is to do something like this:

1. Tell your registrar to forward e-mails from john@doe.com to john.doe@gmail.com. Many registrars offer this service for free.

2. Set up john@doe.com as an alternate sender in Gmail (Settings > Accounts and Import > Send mail as).

For (2), you can use smtp.gmail.com to send mail on behalf of your domain. Example setup instructions: https://support.google.com/domains/answer/9437157?hl=en. You might also want to make sure "treat as an alias" is unchecked, so `john@doe.com` shows up as the From address (as opposed to `john.doe@gmail.com on behalf of john@doe.com`). You probably also want to edit your spf record for your domain to allow Google's mail servers to send mail on behalf of your domain, e.g. "v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com -all".

So this mostly all works...but the problem is that there doesn't seem to be any way of setting up the proper DKIM and DMARC records for your domain when using smtp.gmail.com. So I'm wary of deliverability issues with this setup. I already found one other user complaining about this: https://serverfault.com/questions/1092392/spf-dkim-dmarc-for....

Does anyone have any ideas here? Are there any reputable SMTP only hosts that cater to individual users? You could use Amazon SES but it seems like it might be a bad choice for individuals, as those SES hosts are generally used for bulk e-mail and you might get stuck sending mail on an IP with a bad reputation.

Also went looking for an alternative and moved everyting to mailbox.org...

I love Zoho Mail.

I pay $12/year and can have as many emails as I want. For example, I have set up an email for my personal domain, and 3 of my projects. It is very easy to do with their docs.

You could stop there, but I redirect all those email to my GMail address (I just prefer Gmail UI). Then I set up labels for each email and now I have 5 different email in my GMail Account.

I recently had to deal with this. I created a free Outlook account. I transferred the domain from Gsuite to cloudflare and signed up for the email beta (all email is forwarded to the Outlook account).

I moved the email using Outlook on Windows (I have a separate MS365 plan for my family so I have access to Outlook). I just connected both accounts to Outlook and then dragged and dropped the emails from the Gsuite account to the Outlook account. Honestly, this was the easiest part of the whole process of leaving Gsuite.

This setup doesn't allow me to send email from the domain, but it does allow me to receive email. It's for a small HOA so I'm fine with this arrangement. If I wanted to send email, then I'd probably sign up for o Microsoft plan that allows me to do that. These are described in other comments.

How about free email plan from your web hosting? Many hosting companies provide free email plan when you host your domain/website with them. If you have a personal domain/website, why don't use the free email hosting? If you need more features, they also provide upgraded plans.

Tutanota.

It's secure, reliable and supports also family members and shared calendars, for 1€/month/user

Fastmail - it has a one-click migration from Gmail. The web interface is good enough, but I prefer to just use Apple Mail client on both iPhone and Macbook. It is also one of the few (if not only?) providers that support Apple push natively in Apple Mail app.

Migadu (https://www.migadu.com/)

Migadu prices per volume of emails not per domain. So you could have 20 domains and only send/receive 10 emails a month between them all and you’ll pay pennies versus almost everywhere else where just the act of having another domain (regardless of usage) incurs cost.

I use them and they are singularly focused on email (no bloat), have a range of power features in all plans like + domains (similar to Google), filters etc.

They are also hosted in France so you get the added benefit of being subject to EU data protection laws.

I'm very happy with Protonmail

Yandex 360 is great and also has calendar support etc.

There are a few things that make moving your calendar away from Google pretty hard. If a Google account invites you, the invite still lands in your old calendar for example - even if that's not where your domains MX records point. Lots of third-party software also has mostly Google-specific integrations.

Moving away from them is hard, but overall probably worth it, iff you move to a provider that has real support.

Infomaniak is great, starting at 1,50€/month for 5 email addresses, custom domains and unlimited space. They have a real support with humans.

Runbox.com out of Norway is rock solid.

How is self-hosted email these days? Are there web-based email clients with search, filters, and labels?

I recently moved from Gmail to Fastmail, and noted a detailed process here: https://sami.eljabali.org/how-to-replace-gmail/

Regarding migadu, which I am now looking at, what verification have you who’ve selected it done for this statement “ Your emails are your own business. We have no interest in them. We do not access1, analyse2, scan or share any user data.” from their site?

On https://etik.com, you can have an email address with 20 GB of storage and an alternative to Google Drive with 15 GB. It is hosted and developed in Switzerland by Infomaniak.

Is there any good alternative to Google Docs/Sheets and Microsoft Office 365?

I'm currently waiting for access to Cloudflare's email forwarding beta. If that didn't exist, I'd use Namecheap, which I believe is also free regardless of whether the domain is registered with them.

I'm confused by all the branding. Google change the names to things every week. Is it Google Docs, or Google One, or Google Workspace, or GSuite? They need to stop this.

Shameless plug: Qboxmail.com

We host everything in Europe and we are working hard to give all the tools necessary to work with emails. Both for resellers/companies and the end users.

Migadu.com supports unlimited domains, in case the core reason for you was having an email address with a custom domain. It is a paid service though.

After seeing Fastmail plugged here for years I finally switched and couldn’t be happier. Custom domain and everything. And… the web ui is… fast!!!

None of the answers 20 hours after post address my primary question: spam handling efficacy

Moved an account from Google Apps to Fastmail. Great experience. I moved 9GB worth of old emails.

I have switched to FastMail a few months ago and are very happy with them! Thank you.

Fast mail is awesome. And fast.

We just migrated to Fastmail.

I've decided that I'd rather give my money to someone else

Why? the less cumbersome route is to pay google.

Fastmail.

Outlook.com O365 is good

Fastmail!

Fastmail

I would recommend hey.com

Your ISP and a raspi running pine.