Ask HN: Alternate Email hosting to G Suite | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Alternate Email hosting to G Suite

105 pointsmrbonner149 comments

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

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

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I second Fastmail for email & calendar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hmm, I'm actually not sure. It hasn't happened a ton so I usually just filter out spam after it arrives.

https://cryptpad.fr/ Looks like an excellent private online office suite. Others may still be on Google and you’re unlikely to change that, but you can start using this for your own stuff (and they have sharing)

I just went through this experience due to the notification from Google that my free G Suite Legacy account was going away. Fastmail's documentation and onboarding experience made it a few hours of work to do the migration.

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

When people send me google docs I make use of the guest account feature. You do not need a Google account.

It's still doable, yes, although the guest account feature is relatively new. But it's cumbersome to use because, at least the last time I used it, every 7 days you have to re-authenticate via a verification code sent to your email.

You can still get a google account without signing up for Gmail, so you can still use Google Docs and share/collaborate fine.

I just switched to Fastmail this past week and like it quite a bit.

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

Switch to your own domain if you can.

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

Thank you for your suggestion. I have now paid for G workspace for a month so that I could migrate. I am the only user and not using any other products of G suite. Fast mail seems to be the best option for me.

The thing is: if the custom domain email was setup as a new Google account (not a gsuite one) we would get most (all?) the same features as gsuite including docs and drive. I assume these account will continue to have this, no?

From all the places I'm surprised Fastmail gets so much praise in HN. I'm sure it's a nice paid service but it's based in Australia which is notorious for being a disaster for those who care for privacy. There are countless posts in Hacker News about this (just search Australia + privacy) and here's one [1] that's specifically addressing Fastmail and its situation over there.

I'm not against Fastmail specifically but I'd definitely consider services based in countries which do better privacy-wise.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28410178

Hierarchy of needs. For email I need:

1. To have control over my account, so I can use my custom domain and move to another provider without the years it takes for my family etc. to update everywhere they have my old address stored. So protonmail, posteo, etc., are out.

2. Able to use open tools to access my account. No IMAPS or SMTPS? Out.

3. To be safe against hackers etc. So Joe's Email Service, run out of his basement, that promises not to give the data to his government in Slovakia is out.

4. Privacy against governments is definitely a nice to have feature, _but_ anyone sending me email is probably using Gmail anyway, so it's not like the US government couldn't get it at the other end anyway. If we ignore for the fact that they share so much data, Australia is arguably preferable to the US having data, since I go to the US frequently and have business there and so if something happens like with the curl author where they decide they don't like someone I've done business with, the US is more of a problem.

Fastmail has obvious failings on point 4, but providers need to cover points 1, 2, and 3 before I'm comparing them on point 4.

I second that. No difference between gmail & fastmail - mail scanning, automated address collection and no at rest encryption.

Tutanota is the best of the lot with encryption at rest, ability to send both plain and encrypted email, custom domain support, and a responsive customer support with crypto payment support.

Much better than Proton too minus the shenanigans.

Please elaborate on the mail scanning @ fastmail? As far as I'm aware they do not do this, beyond ofcourse virus/spam.

I also don't know what they could be thinking of as mail scanning at Fastmail.

Gmail in G Suite basically never scanned email contents for targeted ads, that was another part of the free G Suite's appeal. Consumer Gmail stopped doing such scanning in 2017.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/23/15862492/google-gmail-adv...

1. https://www.fastmail.com/ 2. https://protonmail.com/ 3. https://posteo.de/en 4. https://mailbox.org/de/ 5. https://purelymail.com/ 6. https://www.migadu.com/

I use and love Posteo but OP wants to keep using their domain. And Posteo doesn't do custom domains.

I've been using Office 365 for about a year now after moving from G Suite - didn't like how on G Suite I couldn't use certain products like Stadia and my Google account was essentially hostage to the monthly bill.

I did have to go through the process of transferring my data (Photos) manually to a standard consumer Google account and losing some stuff like my Google Maps Local Guides status, Android purchases (I use an iPhone now anyway but not nice to lose the purchases in-case I switch in the future) and my YouTube account (wasn't much stuff on it anyway) and resubscribing to all my favourite YouTubers. Wasn't too painful - disgraceful how Google allow you to transfer your standard Google Account to a Gsuite one but not the reverse.

Been a rather pleasant experience on the Microsoft side. Integration into the Outlook smartphone apps and Windows 10/11 mail client is second to none and the webapp is solid too. The spam filtering is excellent too.

Quite nice how if you login to Microsoft services and have the same email address for your standard Microsoft account and O365 you can get the option to select which one when logging in.

You can find resellers selling keys for a year of it, I bought mine from Amazon. Will definitely be renewing this year.

Tried it out, but the problem is no catch-all / aliases, and with the family subscription you're limited to 6 accounts.

Also, you won't be able to sign in into Windows / Office with me@domain.com, you'd still need to use the outlook.com / live.com / hotmail.com address, which feels unnecessarily complicated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ideally, what I'm looking for:

* wildcard routing

* keep existing archive of mail

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last time I looked, your actual Gmail address was still included in such outgoing emails, the From address may be the alias but the Gmail address was also present in the headers.

I do this with ImprovMx. You set up the inbound to forward to some other address. For outbound you can either pay them or set up GMail to do outbound aliasing. It works fine for me, but there is some lag on inbound emails.

I looked into Cloudflare's email forwarding back in December and it looked like a lot of folks were still on the waitlist.

Does anyone have any more optimistic updates about this?

It took me a week to go from requesting access to receiving access for my domain when I signed up earlier this month. I was already using cloudflare for my dns so maybe that sped things up?

Simplelogin works great for me, and replying back also works well

Personally I use fastmail.com and I am happy with the service, but it costs $5/month so I am not sure that is what you are looking for.

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

Curious as to why no one is recommending just paying for Google Workspace? $6/month for Google vs $5/month for Fastmail seems similar enough to avoid the hassle of transferring email servers.

For me the annoyance was that I had 4 legacy organizations that I had to spend hours figuring out how to merge (incredibly non trivial to get drive contents from one organization to another, shared drives work but only with files and not folders, so I had to move stuff over a folder at a time). If they’re going to do this crap, I wish they had proper migration tools. They left a lot of us high and dry. A lot of people aren’t against spending money, but if we already have to spend the time to move crap around, we might as well pay an organization we trust.

One reason I am looking to move away is that Google simply has too large of a market stake in the email business. If I'm going to pay, I'd rather pay a smaller company in order to stimulate diversity in the field; it's just better for open standards.

I'm paying for Workspace and use it as my primary Google Account and really wouldn't recommend it unless you also have another regular Google account and use Workspace only for work, because the "Google experience" on a Google workspace account is really sub-par. Google assistant functionality is limited, you can't get invited to someone's home, you can't set up a family, actually you can't use Google One at all. The list of inconveniences is huge. I've been planning to move out of Google Workspace for years but it's a hassle to migrate primary inbox.

+1 to this.

Adding on: I also can't use Google Pay on my G Suite Legacy account, we can't be invited to families for Google One/YouTube Premium either, and apparently my free Google Voice number might stop working if I fail to transfer it to a free @gmail.com account before they force me to downgrade.

I’ve been doing the same, primarily for the unlimited storage, which I have long used as an offsite backup. But just this month they have taken that away. It’s just another thing in a very long list that they kill with little warning. So add that to the growing list of reasons not to use GSuite.

Because most people hate lock-in from surveillance capitalism companies but that choice was made before most understood the bait and switch and changing email providers is a pain. We took a seemingly-free deal we took a decade ago as our data was used to sell manipulation-as-a-service to the highest bidder.

Now weaponizing our data against us for profit is not enough money and they want to keep doing that and bill us monthly too? This finally gives the added motivation to put in the effort to leave a company that already lost our trust years ago.

Agreed. I guess quite a lot of people were already considering moving but since Google in own domain worked fine and was free it was not enough to spend time moving.

Yeah, very much the case for me. "Well is Fastmail any better?" "Oh Protonmail doesn't support IMAP or custom domains" "Ehh, maybe I'll check something later"

Well now Google have given me an ultimatum. And honestly the same service from Google is worth less than from a competitor because of the risks of being banned from ML and the level of risk from having so much stuff being bundled. So when being a Google product is a negative to the value proposition, yet Google are charging more, time to move.

I've looked at moving away from the google's data slurping for a while, but when including things like gvoice features, it integrates nicely for my custom domain fully. If you use voice through a browser, the web version is falling apart though. Seems like voice might die soon, one less reason to hang around if so.

What super annoys me is I use GSuite for personal use, but Google seems to think only businesses would actually pay. So much so they restrict things like my ability to leave reviews on either maps or play stores. I simply can't review anything, it doesn't even give me the option with a gsuite-based account. I was told because it's a "business" service, but certain some of us obviously do use this for personal as well for my personal domain alone and not using my employer to slander products in reviews.

Even more odd, I can't review maps locations from my pc, but I can my phone. Play store simply gives me to review option what so ever on both. My tickets and complaints went nowhere with them.

Caveat emptor for using GSuite.

Thanks for the headsup- looks like I'll be impacted by this too. My admin page links to a google form which lets you say you're using it for personal use only (I am) -- wondering if they'll grandfather folks in. Otherwise it sounds like fastmail is the favorite for HN! I found the form via their FAQ @ https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217#nonbiz&zippy=%2Cwh...

I qualify based on what the FAQ says (fewer than 10 users, no commercial use), but see nothing relevant when I log into admin.google.com. Hopefully something will appear for me.

EDIT: A link to the Google Form is at https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/28/google-will-let-legacy-g-s...

I can recommend Fastmail. Switched to them a few years back. Privacy they aren't the greatest - Australia based company.

Besides that:

* They do mail, and do it well

* Calendar/contacts support

* they use standards (IMAP/caldav/cardav)

* Webclient is OK - faster than Google, and for me it just works better.

* They have labels! This is a killer feature, I really did miss it coming from Google. I have a bunch of filters that label my mails accordingly, I just hit archive when I'm done with them so they disappear from view

* Android client is 'ok'. To get the contacts/calendar in the Android apps I recommend DavX5.

* Catchall

* Recently added "Masked Email" - you create a random alias on your mail account to use to sign up for services. If you have 1Password it'll even generated a pw for you.

When I first switched I had issues with an iCal feed from O365 where MS didn't honor the spec, and this caused duplicate issues. FM implemented a fix. Forget about this kind of service from Google or MS, unless you are an international multi-million dollar company.

Slightly OT, but since you mention accidentally deleting it, how do I delete my G Suite?

The screen to delete says

> You have at least 1 active subscription. You need to cancel your subscriptions before you can delete this account.

and when I click to cancel my subscription it says

> All administrative controls available only with G Suite legacy (such as sharing policies, audit and reporting, and alerts) will be removed. To continue accessing these administrative controls, you'll need to purchase G Suite legacy again. > To use the Admin console free of charge to delete your organisation’s account, you agree to the Cloud Identity agreement. > You’ll lose access to your G Suite legacy service immediately You can’t undo this action

So I'm paranoid of locking myself out with no way to still access the admin console to delete it... and with no support obviously

I use zoho. The free tier lets you use your own domain and so far that's been plenty for me.

Be careful. Zoho could perform a Google style rug-pull on you. Always scout for other options in that scenario. Personally I enjoy Purelymail[0]

[0] https://purelymail.com/

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

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

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

Well I've had my free gsuite account for almost 15 years so you still have some time before you get to Google levels of screwed over.

Purelymail has calendar syncing using CalDAV.

> Zoho could perform a Google style rug-pull on you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey, just to clarify, as someone who has been on the Zoho Mail team, of course our plans have undergone changes, the free plan including. But we always grandfather our existing users, we removed support only for new signups. If a feature was available when someone signed up for the tier, it will always be available.

No IMAP on their free tier but their Lite tier doesn't appear to be missing anything important and is only $12/year/user.

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

I use Hover for my personal domain, and added a "small mailbox" for my email address. For calendaring, I use iCloud, which works fine since I'm an iPhone user and that thing is _always_ with me. I switched my personal website (which I basically never utilize), from Blogger to GitHub Pages. Should I ever want to post things, the Jekyll integration will be plenty. At the moment the page has 90s style "under construction" notice, which I find mildly amusing and is all I wanted over Hover's own missing website page.

I looked at other options -- ProtonMail or FastMail -- but figured my needs were fairly basic. I don't use multiple mailboxes, I very rarely search my email history, iCloud handles my calendar (I had switch this up already), and I don't need a huge amount of space. After 10+ years on G Suite, my personal email was 1.5GB, so I figured any email host would work.

I didn't bother importing all of my email to the new Hover email, nor did I want to. Instead I archived my G Suite email and copy / pasted my current Inbox across, which was 20-some messages (I practice a slightly messy version of Inbox Zero). If I ever need to search the old email history, I'll import the old G Suite email archive to Thunderbird or Apple Mail.

About having my domain and email hosted by the same provider: I understand the risk, however I have managed to keep my personal website and email going consistently for over two decades, and I'm not terribly worried. Plus I have auto-renew enabled.

If you have iCloud+, you can add your domain to your account. I use Mail.app so I don't know how exactly to set up them in an email app (you receive email through your iCloud account in Mail.app). There is no real need to change, but it is a nice feature and as good as free.

I use MXRoute [0] which is still offering a lifetime promo. Looks like it increased to $175 since I bought it. I haven't been disappointed and it is faster than Gmail from my experience. I host Cypht [1] instead of using their webmail which allows me to aggregate other emails and RSS feeds together in one interface.

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

Tangential : Remember reading somewhere that 'lifetime' means the product's lifetime, not the user's

Yes, it does however:

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

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

+1 for MXRoute. I switched a few of my domains from Legacy GSuite in the last week, and the transition has been seamless. I am going to check out Cypht - that looks to be the answer to my last minor quibble.

I'm always very wary of those. Once you buy it, they have no financial incentive to care at all what kind of service you get.

I was also skeptical before I tried it however I have found it to be a quality reliable service.

I haven't signed up yet, but I like that the pricing is by storage space, not per user or domain!

AWS SES Inbound + a Lambda function to drop the mail where you want it (e.g. a topic, an S3 bucket, or forward it to somewhere else). Overall monthly cost is practically $0.

That sounds like the exact experience I'd get for zero dollars.

If you've got a lot of domains, but need the `admin@<domain>.<tld>` registration emails to work correctly, you can route them all through SES + Lambda for nothing, rather than having to add hosting to all the domains. Impl works well for some use cases.

Would you have some more info on how to set this up ?

Here's an example [0].

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/forward...

Then route your messages into S3, mount the bucket using s3fs, and point Dovecot at it (Maildir) to enable IMAP. Or just use a MUA that could read a Maildir directly.

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

I use Protonmail.com and I'm quite happy with their service. It does allow custom email domains, etc., but is paid.

I switched to a http://www.migadu.com trial plan last weekend and transfered my mail to a free Gmail account with https://github.com/imapsync/imapsync.

I hope Google makes up it's mind soon about family accounts, otherwise I'm not going back.

Just out of curiosity which email client do you use on mobile with Migadu?

K-9 mail.

I'm currently deciding between Office365 Family or Fastmail. I would prefer Fastmail, they seem modern & less headache inducing than configuring Office365 for my custom domain. But some family members would benefit from having access to the Office suite of products, so that benefit is quite nice.

In case you didn't know Office365 family only works with GoDaddy domains, they used to support other registrars but have dropped that support which is why I'm looking for an alternative.

Hmm, I found a sort of workaround involving a temporary transfer to godaddy to get the records and then back to your preferred registrar. Any chance you know more about that?

If you look around on reddit there are ways to use any domain registrar. Just needs some txt records.

I've done the research (and already some action) even though I have only 2 non-related users on 2 different GSuites who use solely GMail.

For myself I use FastMail and there is nothing I can complain about, however I wasn't really fond of migrating towards it, since that'd require 2 separate organizations, which would pretty much beat the point (pricing would be similar, but it takes some time).

Few random thoughts about whole thing: - Fastmail is OK, there's nothing good or bad about it, however if someone is GMail user (with their fancy UI and filtering) they will be disappointed. One can add Sanebox but that's additional cost.

- I'd stay away from Protonmail for two reasons - first is they don't really have IMAP (as it's encrypted etc.), so it's either hack your own bridge or use their applications. Second reason is that I've worked with few organization which perceived protonmail-based e-mails as spam and phishing (it's super easy to create anonymous e-mail account there so...)

- iCloud+ provides custom domain support, it's kind of interesting how it works, and might save you few bucks, but the migration process is not exactly Apple-like

- Migrating away is going to take a lot of effort. When I made decision I noticed that my DNS TTL were set to 604800. I set that domain LONG time ago, so I suppose those were recommended values back then.

- Either forget about archives or be prepared for a long time to sync it. Google allows export (and that's pretty much the only way as there is 2500MB daily download quota for IMAP) but getting it uploaded is something else.

- iCloud is funny because you can't really admin it - you add and setup domain and when you share it within family it's theirs to setup, one cannot make overreaching management

For my 2 users I'm going for iCloud, cause they are already in the ecosystem quite deep, as paying customers and also it integrates nicely with other services.

I've got a question if you don't mind. I'm set on moving to iCloud too for my domain as the only thing I really care about in the G Suite is just personal email via custom domain. Should I change the Apple ID of my account off my custom domain ? I can see a scenario where I can't access my iCloud because I need access to iCloud to verify the email.... I could move the domain records, but this won't be a 5 minute job.

I can't unfortunately help you with that because the accounts I'm moving both have "custom domain e-mail" set as account. However for verification it usually uses either other iDevice (so popups happen on phone etc.) and there's also option to have printed emergency access card and one can also set emergency contact details to off-icloud e-mails and phone numbers.

I'd say that getting access to account in iCloud was much easier than getting back to locked GMail account.

Thanks for the tip on the emergency access card, I wasn't aware this was a thing! Sounds like I should be fine :)

You don't. You just add the domain and set up the settings. Very fast. My iCloud account uses the icloud.com domain, and I haven't changed that. I did not need to migrate data, so I don't know anything about that.

I thought ElGoog announced yesterday that they’ve decided (for now) to reverse course on the plan to take away legacy G-suite accounts?

Relevant links:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/28/google-will-let-legacy-g-s...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30114343

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30118907

In any case, good riddance. I’d love to get out of the abusive relationship I have with google and “Legacy G-suite”, so a workable long-term alternative would be great!

I think we're way beyond the point where Google is simply not to be trusted with any of its communications regarding the longevity of legacy products. See the killed by google graveyard guy (https://github.com/codyogden/killedbygoogle) for all examples there.

No, they've promised some as of yet undefined ability to move to consumer google accounts. Because of the limits that gsuite accounts have had for consumer products over time, this is something people have been asking for and google hasn't delivered in quite some time, so until they announce details, I'm expecting many strings attached to the migration process if it's something they've been pressured into doing quickly.

As explained in the Techcrunch regurgitation of an Ars Technica article [0], in addition to the migration, they're also inviting small (<10), non-business users to identify themselves, dangling the possibility of a better option for them (which might be a continuation of G Suite Legacy as-is, a slightly cheaper pricing tier, or something else).

Nothing is happening to G Suite Legacy until May so there's no need to get off it now. It makes sense to start researching options now but there's plenty of time to wait and see what happens.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/google-relents-legac...

I know about the survey and signed up for it, but I'm not really expecting much. Probably a month in there'll be an upsell on gsuite business, then offers of reduced introductory rates, before finally details of whatever the migration option is for those who didn't take them up on introductory offers.

I switched to iCloud despite the fact that I have zero personal Apple devices.

I've been thinking about iCloud because it's so inexpensive. How difficult was the transfer? Did you follow any online guides?

> iCloud because it's so inexpensive.

That was part of why I went with it.

> How difficult was the transfer?

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

iCloud+ offers custom email domains on the $1 per month tier. Just point a few dns records and it “just works”.

https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/add-a-custom-domain-m...

Having just done this myself I would HIGHLY recommend transferring email using a IMAP based tool. Any POP based tool will not retain any of the folder organization you may have in your Gmail mailbox.

Gmail implements folders via labels, and the only way that I know of how to pass these through to the new mailbox (whether it be Gmail or not) is by using IMAP.

I used:

https://imapsync.lamiral.info/#install

This one is free if you don't need support. There are others.

The email hosting service I settled for is:

https://mxroute.com

Use them only for forwarding, so their cheapest package is OK for me.

I've just switched to fastmail for email from gsuite and Gmail. It was effortless and I feel it works better than the Gmail systems did. I also enjoy the ease with which alias and catch all emails from my various domain names work.

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

There's no need to stop using Google Calendar (Android App) because you stopped using Google Calendar (provider) if that's what you prefer, it'll let you view calendars from any provider installed on your phone. Fastmail themselves recommend DAVx to sync with your Fastmail account for this purpose (https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000279881-Se...), though it would be nice if Fastmail's own app integrated with the OS a bit more in terms of providing a calender to the OS, and having widgets for mail folders.

That's right. Just by coincidence I moved my calendars to Etesync recently and thanks to Android's great calendar provider architecture the frontend calendar app did not change (I'm using Etar). This nice API was designed in good old times when Google actually cared about interoperability.

I just helped a couple friends move to iCloud+ for the custom domain email feature. It was very simple to set up and got it working under 15 mins. Highly recommended, especially if you're already on iCloud+.

I was looking into iCloud+ myself, but the biggest issue is there doesn't seem to be support for catch-alls?

Both iCloud and Zoho free tier were good options to park one's custom domain for email. Both services support security features like SPF and DKIM, without which you may experience bounced email due to the spam filter on receiving sides. Eventually I picked Zoho because it supported catch-all email account, and its instruction to set up DNS records were easy to follow too.

I used Namecheap for domain transfer, and found its support responsive. For example, I found that I could immediately resubmit transfer request with its refund, after I failed the first transfer attempt due to GoDaddy's "protection" measures.

For old emails, Google Takeout let you download a mbox file that you can easily open on Mozilla Thunderbird. Takeout also downloaded all your content in Photos and Drive etc that you can keep offline.

Now that I don't have a custom domain associated with my G Suite account, I can sit back and let Google do its things. Overall, on positive note, this was a good excuse to learn about / brush up one's knowledge on domain transfer, DNS records (MX/TXT/CNAME), SPF/DKIM email security, mbox import.

I’ve loved Fastmail. Wildcard emails are really nice. It’s also much faster than Gmail, in my experience (I still have a Gmail account at work.)

If you have a high volume email inbox (role-based address), neither G Suit nor fastmail will suffice. Or they will, but you'll live in fear of a super high volume day when you get blocked, or start dropping messages.

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

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

Fastmail Professional allows 80,000 inbound, 16,000 outbound per day [1].

[1]: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000277382-Ac...

Check if your domain comes with free web forwarding and SMTP outgoing mail because you can wire this up to a free gmail account to get email behind a custom domain. I know Gandi offers this for every domain for example but I don't know how common it is (Namecheap offers web forwarding but not mail sending for example). Do other registrars offer this?

Agree. I have a domain with Gandi and use it for my primary email address as well. For silly websites I used protonmail.

Fastmail. Been using them for ever and they have been nothing but great. Really nice to have actual support if you do need it (I did once for a misconfig on my end of my domain records, they got it sorted in a few hours).

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

I really like pobox.net. They handle storing and forwarding email for my domain. I forward from my domain to a regular Gmail account and primarily use Superhuman as my interface to Gmail.

If Gmail ever goes away or I want to switch services I can just point pobox (and thus my domain) at another service, or use pobox directly.

I'm in the same boat - I have a free GSuite account and need to either pay Google for it or move elsewhere. What's not clear is that I have a YouTube channel attached to this Google identity and I don't know if when my custom .com GMail address enters the 'suspended' state whether I will lose access to my YouTube channel.

Both the email and the YouTube channel are for my video games business, so I'm okay paying for the privilege of my domain with my email, but I'm unsure that I want to trust Google with that. The whole way they have announced cancelling this GSuite deal, which they originally promised they would never do (it was "for life"), makes me think that all the more. But my YouTube account is pretty important to my business and I don't want to lose that.

> What's not clear is that I have a YouTube channel attached to this Google identity and I don't know if when my custom .com GMail address enters the 'suspended' state whether I will lose access to my YouTube channel.

I believe the prevailing proposed solution is to migrate your accounts to the free Google Cloud Identity service [1] before cancelling your Workspace subscription.

[1] https://support.google.com/cloudidentity/answer/7319251?hl=e...

> I have a YouTube channel attached to this Google identity and I don't know if when my custom .com GMail address enters the 'suspended' state whether I will lose access to my YouTube channel.

You will not.

"If you don’t upgrade to a Google Workspace subscription, you will not lose access to other Google services, including YouTube, Google Photos, and Google Play, nor paid content, including YouTube and Play Store purchases." [0]

Basically, your account is still a valid Google Account, you just lose access to the services that are actually a part of Workspace (Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and Meet).

[0] https://support.google.com/a/answer/60217

I think it depends on the price point you are comfortable with .

There is Zoho at $2/user, Rackspace at $3/user and then GSuite and Office 365 at $5/user per month if paid annually.

There is also Namecheap business email from $.90 to $1.50 per user price point depending on how many users you are looking for.

https://www.infomaniak.com/en/free-email- free email if you move the domain to their service. Pretty inexpensive (1/4 of go daddy).

I’d go with fastmail or proton if it were just me, but my extended family is using my domain and I’m not paying $60+ a year per user.

I’m currently evaluating Zoho Mail as their prices are pretty reasonable.

I use Tutanota due to its privacy focus. 1€/mo is very affordable.

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

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

It works fine. Lacks a lot of configuration functionality and the web interface is sub par but it works. There is no catch all feature though.

Any suggestions on maintaining Gmail labels in the migration?

Works fine for me so far. From memory (like 7 years ago) gmail’s filtering rules are more powerful, but iCloud has the basics at least

After I switch to an alternate email host will my Google account still exist? Will I still be able to login to Google services using my@personaldomain.com?

Migadu is an alternative with a competitive pricing model - https://www.migadu.com

Are you using Migadu on a daily basis? If so how is it?

I use Migadu on a daily basis and the experience is absolutely incredible. The UX is very satisfying: everything is well described, it's a simple website and seems to just work. It serves a bit as a buffer for all my email traffic so I can use any client I like (even redirect to gmail if need be). The pricing looks reasonable to me. Overall I can highly recommend this.

Another vote for migadu. I've used migadu for my family between two domains on their cheapest plan. I've been very happy with it. Their webclient while functional is a bit barebones so we use phone email + emclient on laptops with nextcloud handling contacts and calendar.

I also notice someone mentioned iCloud+ as an alternative. I have an apple ecosystem at home so this would make the most sense for me.

Seems like Fastmail is extremely popular here, based on the other comments. What are its advantages compared to say, Protonmail?

I use Fastmail but can’t speak for Protonmail. I wanted to use Protonmail actually, because Australia, but they have an incomprehensible 5GB allowance. Fastmail is better with 30GB which still seems low IMO.

The main reason why I switched from Fastmail to Proton is that you don't have to rely on their apps, even though they're far better designed and much more powerful. Example: Proton's Android application still does not support conversation/thread view but you can't even use IMAP/POP3 because of the encryption.

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

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

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

Thanks for the detailed reply!

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

> The main reason why I switched from Fastmail to Proton

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

The reason I chose it was because they have email snoozing which I found hugely useful in Inbox and I wanted to get away from using Google, so I switched. Never looked back since.

I'm going to switch to fastmail. Purelymail looks appealing but it seems less established. I may try it for my non-main e-mail.

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

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

My current direction is to setup an email server on one of my Linux boxes and forward everything to my gmail account. That way my regular gmail account has full domain support like before.

Cloudflares forwarding is great for one email but useless for many emails/domains as I have quite a few domains and a few users.

Funny, I do the opposite. I pass email through Gmail just for the spam filtering and then to my real inbox.

I've been using Zoho. Seems to work well and is one of the cheaper ones out there.

I have been using Purelymail since July 2021 and it's worked very well for me so far. You can have as many domains and accounts as you want and the pricing comes down to total usage. For me it's been $0.40 per month.

I am currently using Cloudflare as an email forwarder, but used forwardemail.net before, and saw both are equally fast and secure. They forward emails to my random Gmail account, which I reply to as that domain.

Aws WorkMail is ok.

Zoho or Fastmail. Have been using both for years. Zoho is more of a GSuite competitor, Fastmail is perfect for family or personal.

I'd recommend picking one between (1) Fastmail and (2) Hey.

There are some pros and cons, but both are good.

I went with Fastmail.

What’s the best way to transfer or archive your gmail in a way that keeps it searchable?

There is a button to import to fastmail, which worked very well--basically a seamless transition. The only manual part I had to do was copy over my filter rules.

Fastmail also has a filter rule importer for Gmail!

Try the search function. There’s been lots of discussion about this the past weeks :)

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

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

Protonmail's been fantastic

fastmail is one of the very few good options. it’s not great, but it’s OK.

mailbox.org is good if you want to avoid the USA and Australia.

Zoho Mail

I am quite pleased with zoho feature rich and modestly prized. The nice thing is that zoho.com and zoho.eu are different entities.

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