I'm trying to find a good alternative to google-apps free custom domain email hosting for a client that doesn't want use there services. Doesn't necessarily have to be free but it does need to support custom domains.
For clients that are after 'free' email I set them up with an account at Gandi (transferring the domain if necessary) and for those willing to pay a little bit more, the Fastmail business account is definitely the way to go.
Both options are very inexpensive and if the client still wants cheaper I would probably refer them to someone else for advice.
Do they still do that awesome thing where if your invoice isn't paid they delete all your mail and give you no way to recover it? This has actually happened to someone I know, where he didn't respond to the invoice fast enough.
Edit: I should say that of course they need to have a recourse to stop providing services to people who don't pay. However, giving maybe 30 to 90 days to at least download your mail after your payment is late would be nicer than going "remember years of email you have saved here? Say goodbye to it all".
As the "someone" in question, I should clarify that the core screw-up was that the invoice emails were going to the account's "master" mailbox, which was unmonitored because the domain it was managing was being forwarded (IIRC I couldn't figure out how to forward the master mailbox or something).
This was a while ago, so my memory may be failing me, but I'm fairly certain we had an alternate "recovery" address set up - just no one thought to send an invoice there, or call the phone number on file, or whatever... it was a "hey, you show no signs of having received the invoice, so we assume you're a PITA deadbeat and we're going to perma-delete the account for you!"
Moral of the story (from my perspective) - if a customer isn't responding to your invoice, it might just be that they don't have it... try to reach on them a side channel before cutting off service!
The powerful FastMail Web Interface to the rescue.
You can set up a 'Personailty' address to match the alias, & select that when sending the reply. There may be a way to always use a specific personality with certain addresses, but I haven't used the feature in so long I don't remember.
Rackspace's hosted mail services are very good. I've used the hosted Exchange ($10/mailbox/month) and they have a lower-end service for $2/mailbox/month.
Curious if anyone here (possibly besides parent) who is running this in production? I thought it looked like the best option for a custom configurable stack (and keeping it up-to-date with security fixes), but there are so many moving parts in a full e-mail stack. Any experiences good or bad?
Setup a supported Linux distribution on any cloud provider (eg. Linode, DigitalOcean) and run the Virtualmin 1-liner on it. 10 minutes later you'll have a control panel where you can create domains. Each domain can have Web sites, email accounts, git repositories, databases, DNS management, and more. Don't want to use half of those things? Turn them off. You can add as many as you want and it's open source. It works great.
While I like the suggestion of something so easy and quick to setup, I dislike the idea that it will be my responsibility to maintain any sort of hosted VM.
How long before I'm scrambling to patch updates or recover some kind of hack?
I wish there was a simple domain email service targeted at individuals rather than businesses. Allow wildcard forwarding of email at the domain to specified email address (e.g. for parked domains or retired ones). Allow arbitrary smtp access at the domain for any email using the same password (plus DKIM & SPF support). I'd pay Google Apps prices for something simple that accomplished this.
With Google Domains you get 100 email forwards and one of them could be * (I'm using this config). The cost is just the domain registration, e.g. $12/y for a .com.
As far as I can see from the console, you can both change the DNS servers (if you don't like Google's ones) and edit the zone file. So, I guess, you could support DKIM via another SMTP, e.g. Amazon SES. (please note that I have no affiliation with G domains, I'm just trying to reply to the original question to the best of my knowledge)
I've been using "Atmail Cloud" for about 18 months now and have had no issues, I've got about 20 domains using the service.
https://www.atmail.com/product
Microsoft ended free custom domain support earlier this year [0]. To use custom domains with Outlook.com, you either have to have already configured Outlook to use a domain name or pay $5/user/month for Office 365 [1].
I don't use it, but a friend of mine does and has lots of good things to say about it. Wildcard forwarding, hosted email, good privacy policy, etc etc.
Is anyone else's spam protection on par with Google Mail's? That's the GApps killer feature. The rest of their groupware suite, especially Writely/Document editing, is pretty mediocre, IMO.
I realise HN doesn't like people saying 'thanks, me too'... however... in this particular case I just wanted to say "Thanks!!!" ... I'd not realised you could do this and I'm now 5 minutes into migrating a few domains across. Brilliant.
