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Comment by Tijdreiziger | Hacker News Reader

I’ve actually been evaluating email providers for a small business, and it turns out that if you need:

1) shared mailboxes (that multiple people can manage)

2) sane auth[entication|orization]

3) retention of deleted emails

then there are only 2 players in the game: Microsoft and Google… and once you pick one of them, it makes sense to also buy into the rest of their respective ecosystems, since everything is well-integrated.

The choice then ends up coming down to whether your users prefer Google Docs/Sheets/Mail or Microsoft Word/Excel/Outlook…

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are there really no other alternatives?

did you also evaluate standalone email platforms?

is there just no commercial email provider with those features or is there not even any tech out there that solves those problems?

with shared mailboxes i assume you mean the ability for multiple people to access mails to an address and have everyone synced on responses without sharing login.

There really are no other [sane] alternatives ... unless you want to go to 50 vendors to save 50 cents per user per year on licensing (and waste 50 hours a month of everyone's time trying to get them use tools that don't integrate in any understandable/low-friction manner)

this is not about saving money, but about avoiding the behemoths that dominate the market. it would be rather disappointing if the options were so limited.

This is a business decision

Wasting 10s or 100s or 1000s of 1000s of hours of time across an organization is stupid just for the sake of "avoiding the behemoths that dominate the market"

sleeping better at night because the fate of my business does not depend on the whims of these companies is also a business decision

As a business owner, do you want to be concerned about one company's potential whims? Or 50?

i prefer 50 because the likelihood of them failing or denying service all at once is lower. much lower. this goes beyond email, but it would be insane to put put everything my business depends on into the hands of a single company.

That's not a rational business decision

The fewer the points of failure, the better

Your choice of 50 unrelated, unintegrated vendors introduces 50 single points of failure to business

That's incredibly stupid - unless you truly have no choice

It introduces a huge amount of unnecessary risk to the company, and immense overhead in additional personnel (product admins, contract management, vulnerability monitoring, end user time/training, etc)

It's why multicloud is mostly not a thing: outside of a few niche cases, running cloud workloads across multiple providers is more expensive than running it all in one. Sure GCP might have something that's cheaper than AWS, and AWS than Azure, and Azure than GCP - but now you have to manage data going into and out of three providers instead of one, three separate contracts, three sets of credential groups, etc

Re: shared mailboxes, yes, correct.

I've been doing a bit more research and I have to amend my previous comment: there's also Zoho, which has its own ecosystem.

Other than that, all of the standalone email providers seem to be running a standard Linux or Windows email stack (i.e. Postfix/Dovecot/Roundcube or Exchange Server). The Linux stack doesn't seem to be able to do it (well, either that or the providers don't offer it).

Exchange Server might be able to do it, but it looks hard to wrangle it together with other tools. Even the Exchange hosting providers just give up and resell MS365 at that point (e.g. https://www.combell.com/en/email-hosting/exchange-hosting, https://www.combell.com/en/work-online-office365).

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