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Comment by Tijdreiziger | Hacker News Reader

For (sane) business e-mail you basically have 3 choices: MS, Google or Zoho.

I recently commented on this topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30266721

Why is that? I know people who run large businesses on OVH hosted email. Own domain, SMTP/IMAP goodness, everything just works, cheap and portable. Why would I ever want to ensnare me or my users to a Microsoft owned service?

I just looked at OVH’s offerings and it looks like their email is just based on Microsoft Exchange Server? [1]

I still count that as Microsoft. It’s the same software, just in OVH’s instead of Microsoft’s datacenters.

[1] https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-ie/emails/

I actually didn't know that, thanks. Then I'd change OVH to Migadu, which works well too. And in my book it's already a good start if something is not hosted by Microsoft :)

Just checked out Migadu. Their support page is pretty sparse, but it looks to me like they fail on the same criteria Fastmail fails on, which a sibling commenter mentioned and I replied to here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30397414

Believe me, I am also a big proponent of open software and standards. But when the open options all seem to be inferior, then it doesn't make sense to go with them, especially when they have to support a business.

(also, the name is pretty funny to me, as 'mi gadu' is slang for 'oh my god' in the Netherlands :P)

I've been using Zoho for personal email with no issues for almost a decade, IIRC. But depending on what kind of business you're running, there are certainly more options than just those three.

If you know any other options that satisfy the constraints in the comment I linked, I would be interested to hear about them. I haven't been able to find any in my research.

Which option does Fastmail fail on?

Just checked them out. Looks to me like they don't offer 'real' shared mailboxes (where every user authorized for the mailbox has the same view of the mailbox), just 'distribution lists' (in essence, forwarders).

Consider the following scenario: Alice and Bob jointly manage a mailbox sales@acme.co. An email from a customer arrives and Alice replies to it.

With a real shared mailbox, Bob should be able to see the e-mail Alice sent, as they both have the same view on the shared mailbox. IIUC, with a simple distribution list this is not the case (the sent e-mail just resides in Alice's personal mailbox).

No, you can definitely share mailboxes in Fastmail: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060590733-Sha...

Interesting. Can this be managed from an admin panel or would you have to log in to each mailbox individually to manage settings?

For comparison, here's the MS documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/email/c...

I'm a big proponent of open standards, so if anybody on HN knows e-mail providers that can sanely do this and store your data within the EU (Fastmail says they don't [1]), I'm definitely interested to hear about them. We would also have to find decent alternatives for other parts of MS365, though (file sharing and single sign-on (currently our users have different logins for various systems, causing them to write their passwords on sticky notes...)).

[1] https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000280221#ph...

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