

Ask HN: Favorite paid e-mail hosting service - graffitici

I am one of the few people I know who pays for e-mail. And I&#x27;m very happy to see my Gmail account get 3 e-mails a week. So far, I&#x27;ve been using GoDaddy as an e-mail host, mainly because it came with the domain purchase. I&#x27;m really not happy though, and I&#x27;d like to switch.<p>What are your suggestions for a paid e-mail hosting service? Reasonable storage, IMAP access, and reliability are the most important.<p>I read that Fastmail was a good contender. Any other options?<p>EDIT: Forgot to say that some of the e-mails that I send from GoDaddy end up in Gmail&#x27;s Spam folder, which is of course terrible. I read that this could be avoided by a properly configuring DKIM. Thoughts on this would also be appreciated.
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nickfromseattle
I strongly recommend against IMAP, it's an email only protocol which means
your contacts and calendars will not sync between devices. E.G you send a
meeting invite to a customer from your desktop, you're not going to be able to
check it from your phone during the day or on your way to the meeting. I live
and die by my calendar so this is a deal killer for me, although if you don't
use calendars or contacts much it may not be for you, IMAP is certainly less
expensive.

If calendaring is important you should check out Office 365, lots of storage,
syncing between devices, and depending on the SKU, you can install the latest
Microsoft suite locally on 5 devices.

The industry leaders in the US are Rackspace and AppRiver and their success
can be directly attributed to their bend-over-backwards support so you won't
go wrong with either. Rackspace also has a Google Apps offering if that's more
your flavor.

If the only reason you are compelled to leave GoDaddy is related to the spam
issue mentioned, you can also check out their Office 365 offering, it's hosted
by Microsoft so upgrading should eliminate this issue.

Email is pretty much a commodity nowadays, so if support isn't a big deal
there are hundreds of smaller providers. Look for Hosted Exchange, it's like
Office 365 but without the Microsoft Office suite (although with the way the
industry is moving they'll probably force upgrade you to Office 365 within the
next 2-5 years anyway).

Disclaimer: I work for a startup managing our large mail provider
partnerships, I'm recommending these companies because of first hand
experience - (despite their size) they're as passionate as we are, the best at
what they do, and relentlessly focus on providing outstanding customer
experiences.

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graffitici
Thanks for your reply! This is very enlightening! I think I'll go for
FastMail, but I'll also keep RS and AppRiver in mind.

I actually like the way IMAP is email-only. FastMail also offers CalDAV for
calendar syncing, which should address most of your points about invitations,
right?

I'll think about Office 365, but I'm not using much of the Microsoft stack
beyond the obligatory Office apps.

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dangrossman
Rackspace Mail if you can do $10/month. It's $2 per mailbox, but there's a $10
monthly minimum per billing account.

They're the pros for hosted business e-mail. 3 million paid mailboxes. 100%
uptime guarantee with an SLA behind it. 24x7x365 live support. If you want to
talk to someone at 3AM on Christmas Eve, someone will pick up the phone. And
you get all the stuff you expect: IMAP/POP/webmail, 25GB mailboxes, automatic
backups, good spam filters, forwarding/aliasing/routing, SSL endpoints. I've
never had deliverability problems, and in 7+ years can't ever remember there
being downtime.

[http://www.rackspace.com/email-
hosting/webmail/](http://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/webmail/)

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graffitici
Looks neat, although $120/year is a bit steep for using a single mailbox.
Maybe I can try to find 4 others to share the costs.

On that note, anybody else looking for a paid e-mail service..? :)

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akoster
Not exactly, hosting, but this has worked for me: NameCheap forwards mail from
my domain email address to a free Yahoo mail account. Yahoo mail allows for
sending mail from a custom "from" address, masking my Yahoo address. I'm not
an expert on DKIM/DMARC but it seems that the ymail.com domain (different from
yahoo.com) has few restrictions on rejecting messages. It's worked pretty
reliably and includes iOS Push support, though due to seemingly slow IMAP
servers and a web interface that could use some improvements, I think I'll be
switching to zoho, fastmail, or rackspace one of these days for better
reliability.

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sumodirjo
Google Apps is good. Have large storage, IMAP and POP access and also you can
sync calendar, contacts etc to your devices.

If you use MS office a lot perhaps office 365 subscription is better suit for
you.

I heard fastmail is also provide good mail service.

If you want free wan zoho also provide free mail service with your own domain
[http://www.zoho.com/mail/](http://www.zoho.com/mail/)

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msh
I am a very happy customer of mailbox.org (
[https://mailbox.org/en/](https://mailbox.org/en/) )

It's not so obvious but they also support using your own domain.

Good but not super fast support and for me the most important thing, they
support active sync so you get push on mobiles.

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thekonqueror
We use Zoho mail [1] and it has been a really good experience.

[1] [https://www.zoho.com/mail/](https://www.zoho.com/mail/)

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jeremiahstover
I use a mix of services including Gmail, Rackspace, and MXroute
[http://mxroute.com](http://mxroute.com)

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coreyp_1
I just run my own email server.

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graffitici
Yes, I did that years ago when I was in high-school, but I currently don't
mind paying for it. I don't have too much to configure sendmail, procmail,
IMAP server, etc.. Maybe I'm getting old. It was definitely fun and a good
learning experience..

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mrcold
Why though? There are zero reasons and guarantees that the company hosting it
isn't data-mining your emails. It's just like free email, but you pay for it.

With your own server, it costs way less and you control everything.

