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Ask HN: Migrate from G Suite, keep email addresses?

by armagon on 4/9/22, 4:41 PM with 41 comments

• by p0d on 4/9/22, 9:51 PM

  I was in the same boat but made the shift a month or two ago.

  My family and I created free Google accounts.

  I bought a subscription to Fastmail

  I have multiple domains sending mail to Fastmail

  Fastmail has rules to forward to the free Gmail accounts.

  The free Gmail accounts reply from the address they are sent.

  All been working well. I like Gmail/Cal which is why I have stuck with them. This setup however gives me the freedom to move to a different mail client or calendar if I choose.

  The only reason I wanted G Suite Legacy was for custom domains. I would have paid Google for this service. I think they dropped the ball there.

• by r6203 on 4/9/22, 5:25 PM

  I discovered Fastmail a few years ago and couldn't be happier. Migrating from Gmail was easy via the import option built into Fastmail.

  I'm using a custom domain and pay $5/month for my account.

  https://www.fastmail.com/

• by Tutanota on 4/9/22, 5:42 PM

  Hi there, we came across this discussion and just wanted to recommend to take a look at Tutanota. You could move your custom domain accounts over, starting at €1 per user per month. Let us know if you have any questions!

• by ajb on 4/9/22, 6:31 PM

  Migadu has an interesting model of not pricing by number of users, which may be worth looking at if you have 10 accounts but not excessive usage. Ultimately I didn't go with them because I wanted an account that supports second factor.

  Edited to add: migadu's pro/con list: https://www.migadu.com/procon/#the-drawbacks-list

  Everyone else I know of prices per user. If you just need aliases and not separate mailboxes, protonmail is good.

• by ronzensci on 4/9/22, 7:07 PM

  We have 40 email accounts on our custom domain and pay $0 per month for both sending & receiving emails on our custom domain.

  We have very simple tech for that. We use the free email forwarding option from our domain provider. This allows us to receive emails sent to our custom domain. To send emails we use the free sendgrid SMTP servers configured for that same custom domain email account in our forwarded email account.

  Maybe not the most elegant solution, but we can run upto 100 free custom domain email accounts using this.

• by ValentineC on 4/9/22, 7:43 PM

  I think most of my users (and myself) would like to continue being able to use Gmail search, so I'd probably move all my domains to my single-user paid Google Workspace account (or maybe to Cloudflare email forwarding), set up forwarding/catchall rules for them, and forward them to personal Gmail addresses.

  Still hoping that Google launches a family plan that has custom domains. I think around $5/month for up to 5 users would be fabulous.

• by feistypharit on 4/10/22, 12:05 AM

  I host some domains with migadu and have been pleased. For my newer, less used domains anyway.

  I also bought a lifetime account in mxroute. It’s also fine, but wonky, as they’ve repurposed other tools to admin it.

  However, some of my users have a lot of old email, and the storage options on migadu suck. I don’t want to pay more per month because two accounts need more space.

  Lately, I found https://purelymail.com and put a domain with them. They’re neat because it’s usage based billing for storage. The billing model is exactly as I want, however, I think it’s a one man show, so reliability and longevity could be an issue.

  Ultimately, I may use cloudflare email routing and migrate people to free gmail accounts. Sadly, the multiple logins (gmail and custom domain) will be confusing.

• by AdrienPoupa on 4/9/22, 6:59 PM

  I was facing the same dilemma in January, I settled on Infomaniak and I've been quite happy so far. They support DKIM/DMARC, catchall, domain aliases and are reasonably priced (18EUR yearly for 5 addresses). They have their own webmail that I find really pleasant to use. Unfortunately no mobile application for the moment, but it should be coming this year.

  I listed the main providers I could find here, in case you are interested: https://adrien.poupa.net/migrating-away-from-g-suite-legacy-...

• by JaggedJax on 4/9/22, 6:34 PM

  There's Zoho Mail which supports custom domains for email. Their paid tiers are cheap as long as you don't need a lot of storage. I was able to switch over to their free tier since I didn't need extra users.

• by theogravity on 4/9/22, 9:02 PM

  I'm more concerned about sites I use OAuth with under my GSuite account - how are people migrating taking this into account? My biggest fear is I forgot to change the auth provider of a site I use away from GSuite.

• by NorwegianDude on 4/9/22, 7:01 PM

  > I gather that running your own e-mail server is horrible unless you want to spend your life running the server.

  Running a mail server is not hard at all. Setting it up is the annoying part as it requires you to know a bit about how email works and how all the different services are tied together. If you are a technical person then you would probably be able to research how email works and set it up in a couple of days.

  Email is not exactly something new with a lot of innovation, so once it's set up you'll likely be good for quite some time(until the OS is EOL).

• by zeagle on 4/10/22, 3:25 AM

  I switched to migadu. Works great and would recommend. Prior to this I used proton mail but found it cost prohibitive got two users with two domains. Hopefully their solution involves me keeping my play store purchases because that is the only reasonable I care about my Google account.

• by gigglesupstairs on 4/9/22, 4:51 PM

  Have you checked out paid plans of Protonmail? I am quite sure it will suffice your needs.

  https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/paid-plans/

• by mymllnthaccount on 4/10/22, 3:49 AM

  I was looking at this tonight and I think Google lets you set up "alias emails" in the admin. So if you have multiple users for just yourself, you could collapse those into a 1 user with multiple aliases. That should help with your cost under Google.

• by chad_strategic on 4/10/22, 4:04 AM

  Okay, confused here. I have a G Suite Legacy Free edition account. So I have one domain, with 20 emails associated with that domain.

  chad@example.com,wife@example.com, kid@example.com, dog@example.com,etc...

  So am I going to pay for each email or just $6 a month for that one domain?

• by floatinglotus on 4/9/22, 8:51 PM

  If you pay for Apple iCloud+ they just enabled support for custom domain names for email.

• by Daegalus on 4/10/22, 3:25 AM

  you can try an MX forwarding service like https://improvmx.com I use it when i left gsuite.

  it lets you forward the emails to any free or paid service. I have my domain pointing to a @gmail.com account while my mom has hers pointing to @outlook.com.

  if you pay $9 (total) you get SMTP servers and more domains, etc. (though the free tier is plenty generous already.

  look into it. it's a great service. let's you move your domains at the user level fairly easily.

• by slartibardfast0 on 4/9/22, 7:22 PM

  I went with https://postale.io/ for about 20 mailboxes. Very simple and effective, recommend.

• by unmole on 4/9/22, 5:41 PM

  I moved to iCloud+. It's fairly inexpensive and works fine for me. But you do need access to an Apple device to initially sign-up though.

• by Crontab on 4/9/22, 9:42 PM

  My domain is registered with Gandhi, which provides basic free mail hosting for no additional cost, so that is where I am going.

• by Ir0nMan on 4/9/22, 11:22 PM

  Check out Migadu.

  You pay for a plan based on your usage and are then not limited by number of domains or number of accounts.

• by danamit on 4/9/22, 8:00 PM

  Try Namecheap, I am using it for 4 years now. No issues.

• by easrng on 4/9/22, 9:21 PM

  I use gmail with forwardemail.net and it works great.

• by zhte415 on 4/9/22, 6:18 PM

  Gandi?