Microsoft ends support for custom domains in free email service | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft ends support for custom domains in free email service

zdnet.com

45 pointssgy45 comments

I currently use outlook's services on my own personal domain, a simple me@myname.com

I have no business aspirations here with my one account. Google apps would have been my first choice, but now that it is not free and I'm a mere college student, I looked elsewhere.

Does anybody have solutions for those like me that only desire 1 or two emails for an entire personal domain?

I'm in very much the same position as you so any replies would be greatly appreciated!

Zoho is the only one I know of that still offers free domain email hosting:

https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html

https://en.mail.qq.com/ also offers free domain email hosting. It is a good alternative.

Isn't that chinese site so caution should be taken?

Google grandfathered in users on the free Google Apps Accounts. They also let you add new domains to it, so you can pick up an account from someone else.

The other option is to just use some simple email system and forward it to a personal free gmail account.

It seems that this is great opportunity for email hosting startup right here. A lot of people in your situation now.

Hm? How is free email hosting a great opportunity in 2014?

I'd be willing to pay a dollar a month for a daily email flow of like 1-10 Max a day in, 2 out.

Well, Max being "regular maximum I've goo ten so far" hot a hard limit.

But also why I choose Microsoft or Google would be because of decent spam detection and overall filtering,

pobox.com is $20 per year, which is $1.67 per month

It seems appealing except the lack of IMAP and/or POP access.

How am I to see email notifications on my phone or through a simple email client on my desktop?

I use a personal GMail account, and forward my @domain.com emails to it. You can set up a "reply from" email address, and it works great. (Your @gmail.com account is still in the headers, but it's probably fine.)

Most registrars will offer an option to forward. If not, I've used ImprovMX [1] and it worked like a charm.

[1] http://improvmx.com

(Note: With something like ImprovMX, you have to trust whomever made it. In this case, it was made by https://twitter.com/atereshkin)

> Your @gmail.com account is still in the headers

you can easily remedy this btw set up your smtp server inside gmail's settings

https://raamdev.com/2009/removing-the-gmail-on-behalf-of-sen...

Gandi gives you email for domains registered with them: http://en.gandi.net/domain/mail

It's not free, but Fastmail would be my recommendation. I really love it. (If you look through my history, it's probably my most discussed topic)

https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html

$40 a year is $3.30 a month. Price of a cup of coffee.

If you don't need a lot of disk space, it's even possible to use your own domain for $15/year by using a family account. That's $1.25/mo. Price of a McDonald's cup of coffee.

I've looked at dumping Google apps in the past. It looks like you could get Yahoo! Mail at your domain relatively cheaply if you went with one of their small business hosting packages: https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting

Of course then you have to use Yahoo! Mail...

Edit: I forgot to mention that I've used Rackspace's Hosted Email in the past. $2/account/month, so that might fit your needs: http://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/pricing/

It's worth mentioning that the Rackspace product requires a minimum of 5 mailboxes, so the actual cost is $10 a month.

The cheapest email hosting service that I can confidently recommend (i.e. isn't crappy and doesn't sell you to advertisers) is PolarisMail. It's based in Montreal, Canada, and a basic account with your own domain costs $12/yr.

I currently use outlook's services on my own personal domain, a simple me@myname.com ... Does anybody have solutions for those like me that only desire 1 or two emails for an entire personal domain?

Well for people just like you, I'd recommend doing nothing. Your custom domain will continue to work just fine [1]:

Microsoft will “wind down the Custom Domains product” while continuing to support existing custom email addresses “indefinitely.”

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/7000028306/

The Outlook.com UI is great, but last time I checked, the signup and management interface for free custom domains was as clunky and unnavigable as it could possibly be.

It was still on the old Live.com UI, with no links to/from any other part of Outlook.com. The features were poorly documented, it was too easy to mess up something and lose data, and worst of all, Microsoft refused to activate my domain unless its randomly generated MX record was added to the DNS with the lowest priority. That left no room for a period of testing and graceful migration from the previous email host. Moreover, it would deactivate the domain as soon as it detected another MX record with a lower priority, so it was impossible to gracefully migrate away from Microsoft, either.

I hope the paid option (Office 365) has a better management interface.

For Office 365 you actually have to change your nameservers over to Microsoft and they handle your DNS. The plus side of this is that Exchange Autoconfigure works, but the downside is that you have to use their UI for custom DNS records.

That's terrible. Email Service Provider and DNS Service Provider should remain separate, not be required to be the same entity in order for the services to work. They'll get a lot of small businesses and home users, I bet, but I bet it'll be an uphill battle to get larger businesses and enterprises on this, especially if the domain is used for something other than just email.

If you're a large business or "enterprise", Microsoft will be happy to let you customize the system to your heart's content.

> For Office 365 you actually have to change your nameservers over to Microsoft and they handle your DNS.

No, you don't. That is just an option. The other option is to use a third-party nameserver.

See: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office-365-domain...

Thanks for the correction! Unfortunately I cannot edit my incorrect statement now. Upvoting so people can see the correction.

It's a real shame that Microsoft dropped it on the floor, because Outlook.com itself is very nice. I even prefer it to Exchange, because it syncs better with Outlook.

Outlook connects to Outlook.com using Exchange ActiveSync, a push protocol that sends changes out instantaneously. Outlook connects to Exchange using RPC-over-HTTP, using a cached model that delays the sync.

Many an Outlook user has triaged a bunch of messages in Outlook, closed Outlook a bit too quickly, gone home for the day, and then discovered that none of the changes had made it to Exchange. This scenario simply doesn't happen with Outlook.com because Exchange ActiveSync is instant.

I'd love (and would pay for) a hosted email service that charged in some fashion other than per user or per domain. I've got various low volume addresses on various domains that I'd love to consolidate under one roof, and MS's custom domains was the closest thing to that. What keeps me from migrating to so many of these other services is the flat $x/address structure. That gets pricey fast if you have two or three per domain, and three, four, or more domains.

Other tacts might be charging by space consumed, messages sent, or a flat fee for a bucket with resource limits. Anyone know any providers offering models like that?

You can host up to 50 domains (with up to 500 addresses) for $40/year with a FastMail Enhanced account (all delivered to the same mailbox).

+1 for FastMail.

People should seriously realize that Google, Yahoo, and MS are not the only webmail services left in the world. There are lots of small to medium-sized, independent businesses that offer excellent email service with lots of cool features. The only reason they're not world-famous is because they don't hand out free accounts like candy, but that's also exactly why they can afford to treat you as a real customer (not a product).

Google Apps charge you per user but you can still have as many aliases as you want, I redirect several aliases to my main mailbox and manage them with filters.

I just created 4 account on Tuesday and as i was creating them, i was thinking to myself "I bet MS will soon start charging for this..." How did i know...? Because their support system sucks, if you go on their support forum you will easily see 6 months old tickets without a single response. I still have one untouched for about 5 weeks. Now that you will have to pay, hopefully they will start giving a shti about support

I don't mind paying for the service. I just hope they handle migration to Office 365 well. I currently sign in to my Windows Phone with an account made through this, and it automatically sets up contacts/calendar/email sync. What I don't want to happen when I move to Office 365 (which seems to use a different "Organizational" account system) is to have two email accounts for the same email address, when only the Office 365 (Exchange) one works.

Edit: same goes for Windows 8(.1) as to automatic accounts. Deleting and recreating would be an option (I don't keep emails around for long), except this Microsoft account also has all my Xbox games and a few licenses of Windows attached to it.

This is relatively upsetting... I really liked the service, and had been planning on moving a couple domains of mine to them so I could shut down my mail server.

Really not worth over $5/month per account to maintain a half dozen custom email addresses. And a few for friends/family.

Also, not fond of running my own mail server any longer. Any suggestions for a hosting service that supports accounts with multiple domains that doesn't cost an arm and a leg... if I could get ~5 domains and ~15 email addresses in them for < $20/month I'd be up for it... similar features to outlook.com/ymail/gmail, spam filters etc would be top priority.

Really not worth over $5/month per account to maintain a half dozen custom email addresses. And a few for friends/family.

Moreover, it misses a few features that outlook.com has, like subadressing.

Better use Fastmail, which has a ton of features. Is actually fast (I tried Exchange Online, it was slow). And if you take a family account, you can make accounts for family relatively cheaply.

Of course, if you use calendars and ActiveSync, Exchange is currently the better option.

Glad I got in when I had the chance! I use to use googles service, but tend to like outlook just a bit more. Not that I favor microsoft, just like the interface and features more.

I left Google apps when they started to charge and started the free custom live outlook , Now that Microsoft was unable to find a way to be innovative and different from Google, and find a way to profit off of their free email service, I will be going back to Google Apps and signing up for their paid product.

Turns out Yahoo offers a business mail plan to Indian users which provides 1000 email accounts (!) for ~ $5 / month

Link: https://in.business.yahoo.com/business-email/features/

From admin.live.com, here is the kicker:

"We will continue to support the ability to log in to Outlook.com with your existing custom domain email address, but you will no longer be able to add or remove accounts in your domain."

No changes at all. That is not fun.

I have been using Zoho.

Wow, this is unexpected. Microsoft is trying to redesign itself and now it is doing this? Google have much more public approval and trust than Microsoft. Why anyone would prefer to pay Microsoft to be its main email hosting rather than pay the same money for amazing Gmail features? I am using Live.com at the moment for my own domain, but the news will probably make me to move to Gmail. Live is really nice service but if priced the same as Google - Gmail is in the lead. To be honest I would prefer to see untargeted ad in main inbox field (thus no tracking) rather than pay... What happened to basic FREE features on the web? If free business email was possible in 2000s, why now in era of cheap hosting is becoming extinct?

I don't know if you've tried using outlook.com lately, but it is refreshingly simple compared to how complicated the Gmail interface has become.

Gmail has literally become everything I hate in webmail interface. Classic interface is mostly all I use anymore.

I just tried Outlook for the first time in a while, and I am pretty surprised. It's quite good.

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