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Ask Slashdot: Best Google Workplace (G Suite) Alternatives? 109

Posted by BeauHD from the time-to-jump-ship dept.
t0qer writes: So, I recently got an email that my [free edition G Suite subscription] will be going away soon (July 2022) and I'll have to subscribe for $6 per user per month. My domain is just my family last name and I have a few accounts for my immediate wife and kids. I'm not really sure if that's worth spending the money on for hosted email. I do use other parts of the suite (Drive, Sheets, and Docs) but I can happily use other products for that.

Just wondering if any /.'ers are in the same boat and what they're thinking of moving to? As a recap, Google announced in mid-January that all "G Suite Legacy Free Edition" (now formally called Google Workspace) users will be required to start paying for Workspace this year. This decision generated a ton of backlash, even prompting a potential class-action lawsuit. Now, the company appears to be backing down from most of the harsher terms of the initial announcement by allowing legacy G Suite users the ability to migrate to free accounts. They're also "promising a data-migration option (including your content purchases) to a consumer account before the shutdown hits," reports Ars Technica.

Still, it may be time to switch to a different service... Some alternatives include Office 365 Business, Zoho Workplace, Bitrix24, and Rackspace. Do you have a favorite?
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Ask Slashdot: Best Google Workplace (G Suite) Alternatives? More

Ask Slashdot: Best Google Workplace (G Suite) Alternatives?

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  • Same Boat, Same family situation, move this week to a free Zoho setup.

    • You don't need Google Workplace to use free Gmail with a custom domain. You just need to set MX records in your custom domain's DNS to point at gmail's servers and then do a little setup inside of Gmail. I have five domains aliased to my Gmail account. Look at the 'Account and Import' tab in Gmail setting.

      • You don't need Google Workplace to use free Gmail with a custom domain. You just need to set MX records in your custom domain's DNS to point at gmail's servers and then do a little setup inside of Gmail. I have five domains aliased to my Gmail account. Look at the 'Account and Import' tab in Gmail setting.

        Unfortunately the email you send (and calendar replies) will be displayed with the gmail account rather than your custom domain. Something like "On behalf of x" displays in the recipient email client.

        • This post can just be summarized as someone looking for a full featured online office solution and email. But they don't want to spend money or time to setup their own. Sounds like Google is trying monetize all the freeloaders. Considering I own alphabet stock I'm all for it!

        • Re:Same Boat (Score:4, Informative)

          by jonsmirl ( 114798 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @10:07PM (#62228959) Homepage

          Nope, if you have this set up you will get a dropdown on the "From" address in the compose windows and you can pick any of your domains. Pick any of the aliased domains and gmail will not attach any messages such as "on the behalf of", etc. It is also smart, if you are replying it automatically sets the "Send As" box to the domain you are using for the thread. This works with filters too so you can filter the mail based on the domain being used. It also supports different signatures for each domain if you want one. I use this feature everyday and it works well.

          • Not from what I have seen. The recipient email client detects that it's not setup as a proper mail handler and displays the actual one in the above situations I described.
          • If you're saying there are workarounds to fix the following it would be great to know:

            (1) meeting invites that you respond to are always sent from your gmail address and there is no way to change that.
            (2) There is a bug in Gmail for iOS which means you cannot use your proper email address if you use the share sheet to send something to the Gmail app.

            Google documentation (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en#zippy=%2Cmy-recipients-see-my-gmail-address)

            If your recipient uses Outlook o

          • Re:Same Boat (Score:4, Informative)

            by Anonymice ( 1400397 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @10:34PM (#62229033)

            Parent is correct. Many years ago, I used to use this function on my gmail account a lot - forwarding all email to gmail, and using it to set the from headers. However with the widespread adoption of DMARC & DKIM, it's become increasingly difficult to use this method without getting hit by spam filters or have warnings plastered across the email.

        • Unfortunately the email you send (and calendar replies) will be displayed with the gmail account rather than your custom domain. Something like "On behalf of x" displays in the recipient email client.

          That can be fixed by configuring Gmail to send email through an external SMTP server and then putting in Google's own SMTP settings. You'll have to allow insecure connections and also authenticate Google to access their own servers. It's completely nuts (especially as Google will nag you a couple of times a yea

          • Seems not worth it, plenty of extremely cheap email options mentioned in this discussion

            • Fair enough.

              Personally I'm not particularly bothered about the three minutes of one-time configuration effort that it takes to set up SMTP. I also only receive about 1 or 2 actual calendar invitations a year - most people just send an email or IM with details for me to manually add to my calendar.

              However I fully appreciate that people might prefer to pay and have it work out of the box.

              • Fair enough.

                Personally I'm not particularly bothered about the three minutes of one-time configuration effort that it takes to set up SMTP. I also only receive about 1 or 2 actual calendar invitations a year - most people just send an email or IM with details for me to manually add to my calendar.

                However I fully appreciate that people might prefer to pay and have it work out of the box.

                So you don't get the "on behalf of x" with this SMTP trick/hack?

                • So you don't get the "on behalf of x" with this SMTP trick/hack?

                  That's correct, Outlook will display the address simply as yourname@yourdomain.com and replies will go back to that address (as you would expect).

                  There is one very small caveat and that is that people can still find your Gmail address by delving into the headers and looking at Return-Path, however I doubt many people will go to that effort.

          • I know you can use Gmail as an SMTP server, but unless something has recently changed, you can't configure Gmail to use an external SMTP server.
            I've just had a quick search & I can see no indication that it's any different, so if I'm mistaken I'd love to know how.

            Gmail's spam filters are fantastic, so if I could use Gmail to manage incoming mail & configure it to use an external SMTP server for outgoing mail, I'll buy you a beer!

            • Go into Settings, then Accounts and Import and click on Add another email address. Pop in your email address, leave Treat as an alias checked and click on Next. You'll now get a screen asking for SMTP details, remove what Google have put and replace with smtp.gmail.com, port 465, your full Gmail address (including @gmail.com) as the username, your password and secure using SSL.

              You may find that the first time you send an email it'll be blocked with an error. You need to enable "allow insecure connections"

      • So if the domain's MX is pointing at Google's servers and you just "do a little setup inside of Gmail" but it's not part of G-Suite (Google Workspace, whatever). then does that mean that I can easily receive mail at something.unused@yourdomain.com?

    • Same Boat, Same family situation, move this week to a free Zoho setup.

      I'm holding fire on upgrading or migrating away until I hear more about Google's own alternatives for personal/family users. From their own help [google.com], in the "Legacy free edition upgrade questions" section:

      What if I use G Suite legacy free edition for personal use and don't want to upgrade to a Google Workspace subscription?

      Upgrading to a Google Workspace subscription is a seamless transition for all customers currently on the G Suite legacy free edition. However, we understand some customers may not use the

      • The link you posted currently say: "If you have 10 or fewer users in your group and do not use your G Suite legacy free edition for business, please sign in to your administrator account to provide more information." with a link to admin.google.com. However, there's no form to complete or anything else there beyond the normal admin page. Somehow I don't think they actually wanted us to provide more information.

        • The form worked for me, even though I hadn't yet actually received notice from Google yet about the change. I filled it out and good later got the basic remain about needing to transition.

          No other useful info from Google yet...

        • It's really badly phrased. What you need to do is sign into the FAQ page with your g-suite admin account, and the link to the form will then show up in that faq answer.

          • It's really badly phrased. What you need to do is sign into the FAQ page with your g-suite admin account, and the link to the form will then show up in that faq answer.

            Thank you! I would never have realized that's what they meant. They probably just assume that we're all logged into our Google accounts all the time. I've just submitted the form, for what it's worth. Now, we wait.

  • It's really good. Works rock solid. It's why there aren't any real competitors. Libre Office is good if you have no money. But I'll pay up for MS Office over it. I think Office and SQL Server are their best products. It's too bad they can't run on Linux (never mind WINE). But then Linux has PostgreSQL.

    • Re:As Much As MS Can Be C*nts, MS Office Is Good (Score:5, Informative)

      by John Bresnahan ( 638668 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @09:00PM (#62228785)
      SQL Server runs on Linux. https://www.microsoft.com/en-u... [microsoft.com]
    • I was happy using Apple's Pages, but when Pages on my iPad and iMac were no longer version-synchronized (can't update the iMac OS), I switched to LIbreOffice. The one or two docs a month - if that - I write aren't worth paying MS a dime.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The Office 365 package is $7.99/month for up to 6 users, and you get OneDrive with that. I don't think it's a complete replacement though as it doesn't have the domain based features that G Suite does.

    • Have to agree with you there. Microsoft maintains it's strength because of Office365. We use it at work. The home version has decent security, 6 users, works and syncs across multiple devices from computers to smartphones, and for a family Word and Powerpoint is great for kids in school needing to write reports and make presentations (and honestly developing good job skills because they'll be using it in work too).

      If you're going to pay for something, Office is the best choice.

  • I hear thats a thing...

    • I hear thats a thing...

      No! People want this megacorporation to provide their services for free.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        I don't buy that, no pun intended. All most people use Gapps for was e-mail and photos using their own domains for e-mail. How's that any different than Google's normal free accounts? It certainly doesn't cost them any less, and they still mine your data and make money off of you regardless.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AvitarX ( 172628 )

          Do they mine the free gsuite accounts?

          They stopped advertising in them about a decade ago, and I thought they stopped doing the mining too.

          I assumed it was too small a niche to keep a separate stream of maintenance for.

      • No! People want this megacorporation to provide their services for free.

        Won't somebody think of the trust fund babies!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by quenda ( 644621 )

      Google Apps users are already paying for their domain, when they could have a free gmail address, so it's just a question of value.
      Per user, per month can be hundreds of dollars per year, way too much for simple email-hosting.

      Microsoft 365 family is much better value at $99/year including 1TB of storage per user.

    • Here's the thing. I remember it being stated as "free forever" when Google first rolled it out. Much like Oracle cloud right now has a "free forever" tier as well :)

  • Zoho for their mix and match options (Score:5, Informative)

    by shm ( 235766 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @08:58PM (#62228775)

    We switched our small company to Zoho last year. What I like is that you can set every individual user to a different plan based on their needs, unlike the others where every account has to have the plan. Really helps keeping the costs low.

  • iCloud for Domains (Score:3)

    by blahbooboo ( 839709 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @08:58PM (#62228777)
    If you already pay for iCloud Plus (any level) then this is a good alternative for no extra cost. https://support.apple.com/guid... [apple.com] and https://support.apple.com/en-u... [apple.com]
    • I migrated to this. Spam was a bit of an issue so I've put mxguarddog.com infront. It's like 0.25c a month per email address, which is worth it to me because I despise spam and was so used to Google's excellent filtering. To do the migration from gmail to apple mail (with custom domain) I used imapsync which is an open source tool. Google's mbox export sucks because you loose all the folders including Sent, it just turns into one mega useless blob. No issues since switching in the past week.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      iCloud seems a bit stingy on the cloud storage you get for the money. That said, there aren't really any options that offer email and cloud storage that I'd say were competitive.

    • I tested this and discovered that, unless you are using the Apple Mail app you cannot send directly from the email address. In all other clients, it appears as a "SOMEONE sent this on behalf of CUSTOME EMAIL" email.

      • I tested this and discovered that, unless you are using the Apple Mail app you cannot send directly from the email address. In all other clients, it appears as a "SOMEONE sent this on behalf of CUSTOME EMAIL" email.

        Are you sure about this and you properly setup everything? I haven't read of this occurring in other reports

        • I tried it via Outlook and these were my results. Entirely possible I did something wrong...but I don't know what--if I did.

          Have a source?

          I think I'm just going to personally opt for migadu.com since the affected domains for me were low usage anyhow.

  • www.namecheap.com has email for very reasonable cost that includes IMAP access.
    • And you get dropped into SBLs and your email shows up in other people's junk mail instead of INBOX. My friend is currently having this problem, so I moved her to fastmail.com

  • Going through this also (Score:4, Informative)

    by caseih ( 160668 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @09:06PM (#62228801)

    I ran my own mail server for my family domain for many years, and it got harder and harder to do as time went on. The big players have made it quite difficult for self-hosted email to even function. It's certainly not impossible to do, but it takes some serious time and effort to get it right. I'm debating on whether it's worth it to do. My situation is complicated by the fact that my extended family began using e-mail accounts on my domain, as Google made it so easy. If they are willing to cover the cost of their accounts, I'll probably stay with Google under protest.

    If you are going to do your own email server, it might be worth it to pay for MailRoute. They basically act as your internet-facing smtp server. They handle all the vagaries of getting mail through to the gmails and yahoos. They charge $1.50 a user per month, which could be reasonable. They forward mail to your server and you can run dovecat, webmail, or whatever. and of course do spamassassin.

    Personally I don't understand why Google is pushing organizations, including small family groups, to pay for it, especially those not using any corporate features. How would free domain accounts be any different from free gmail accounts? They are still advertising to us, still data mining. If my users all moved to free gmail accounts the cost to google is exactly the same. Someone got greedy.

    • Yeah, I'm still running my own mail server, just for my immediate family and my elderly mother. It's really cheap to do, because you can get a low end server for nearly nothing nowadays.
      Buy yeah, it's really a pain to set all this crap up and keep it working. I'm going to keep going it alone until they actually make it impossible for me though, at least for my own email.

    • pay for MailRoute. [...] $1.50 a user per month

      Check out AWS SES (Simple Email Service), they charge fractions of a cent per email.

      $0.10 for every 1,000 emails you send.
      $0 for the first 1,000 emails you receive, and $0.10 for every 1,000 emails you receive after that.

      https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pri... [amazon.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gaspyy ( 514539 )

      Zoho is $0.9/user/month for 5GB inbox. No need for your own server. After you set up IMAP/SMTP in your favourite email client, you're good to go.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I have email via my personal domain, using a free GMail account. The web host I use for my domain offers email redirection, so I send it to GMail. In GMail I have those forwarded addresses added as secondary ones for my Google Account, and outgoing mail gets the From: field filled out with my domain email address instead of the GMail one.

      It has been working great for years. I could probably save a few quid by moving to a different host for my domain, but I'm too lazy and the cost is quite low as I'm on one

    • I started to "outsource" all that mail server business to 1984.is - it's pretty cheap and pretty simple, but it does what you need (and stays off the block lists). I run a bunch of domains through them, all on one plan too.

      But going from "free" to paying feels expensive. Lack of ads is quite nice though, and knowing your data is about as safe as data gets (legally speaking) is a nice bonus.

    • Like you and many others, I too am going through the same thing. I've had a domain on the free G Suite for years that I've got many family members emails on. I also have a subdomain on a different free G Suite instance where the same family members also have email addresses with MANY aliases, so that we can where desired use a almost-throw-away email address to sign up for web services.

      I've decided that since Google is moving to charging us, to take away both domains and to "self host" my email. But not bei

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      Kinda weird. It seems like shared hosting packages still go for about $4/month and you can get a webserver, shell access, AND free SMTP, IMAP, POP, etc for as many domains as you want. You were really still running your own mailserver out of a closet after 2001?

  • Custom email domains (Score:4, Interesting)

    by denbesten ( 63853 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @09:11PM (#62228813)

    I use pobox.com for my family email domain. It supports mail boxing, webmail, forwarding to other addresses, blocking senders, etc.

    Particularly useful is that my spouse and I can both send and receive email sent to MomAndDad@myfamily.com from our individual gmail accounts, solving the fact that lots of school forms have just one email line.

  • Letâ(TM)s you forward email and âoesend asâ with a personal gmail account: https://support.google.com/dom... [google.com]

  • > for my immediate wife

    That would imply that you have more than one wife. How is that distant wife working out?

  • Nextcloud? Or is that too much work for a freeloader?
    • The people using this service only for their email (at Google's behest back when this service was first released) are using no more resources than the free Gmail account you're probably using. So they're no more freeloaders than free Gmail users are freeloaders. It's paid for by the user info Google mines from your activities. I only use it for my email, and frankly kinda wish I hadn't since managing certain settings is more of a hassle than a free Gmail account (I have to login as my GSuite account's admin

  • Not Enough Information (Score:3)

    by Voyager529 ( 1363959 ) <.voyager529. .at. .yahoo.com.> on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @09:42PM (#62228895)

    So the single simplest thing to do is to pony up, or as a friend once put it, "fix it with a check". If it's really going to be $6/month...I spend more than that hosting a nothingburger blog on AWS. It sucks that Google is pulling this crap, but if it's worth $6/month to not-think about it, it may well be the best option.

    E-mail is largely a two-horse race between Google and Microsoft. Each has their pros and cons, but O365 may be the next best option if you're using G-Suite features beyond e-mail. If you use Drive/Docs/Hangouts, the Onedrive/Office Online/Teams functions will tick all the main boxes.

    If you're looking at the niche providers, Rackspace is pretty good for hosted Exchange, Zoho has been serving their little groupware thing for a while, Icewarp is pretty good and integrates well with eM Client, and basic IMAP mail service has been offered by most domain registrars for decades.

    On the self-hosted side of things, first off, you'll probably want to sign up for something like Mailjet or Mailgun to use as an SMTP relay; SMTP traffic from residential IP blocks == spam as far as virtually every spam filtering company is concerned. Mailcow is pretty nice for a free option for e-mail only, most notably because of its implementation of Activesync for mobile device sync. OnlyOffice is all about being full-fledged groupware, and Nextcloud, while lacking its own mail server proper, deserves a quick mention for being a pretty solid replacement for the rest of the Google ecosystem. ...As you can see, there are no shortage of options, depending on exactly which functions of the Google ecosystem you're looking to recreate.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by quenda ( 644621 )

      "fix it with a check". If it's really going to be $6/month...

      $6 if it is just one mailbox. Some of us have families.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AvitarX ( 172628 )

      It's $6/month/user, but has pretty limited space.

      The $12/month/user plan is pretty great (1-2 TB/user depending on the number of users, and the space is pooled, not sperate, so with 5 users you can have 1 user using 8TB, and the read using 500GB), but obviously that's more than the article poster wants.

      I use my account by myself, and was happy to upgrade, but if I had a few other accounts that were all light use I'd be frustrated.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The $6 tier is pretty basic too, you only get 30GB of storage for all your email and Drive files. The next tier up is double the price and comes with 2TB of storage.

      It's actually pretty stingy, I have 50GB of storage free from back in the day when Google was giving away extra gigabytes for all sorts of things.

  • No question. As a long time unix zealot and MS hater, it's the absolute best bang for the buck and it just works. Hosts my domain email, all the office shit, even have a couple OpenBSD VM's set up in Azure for dirt cheap.

  • I've been a DreamHost customer for well over a decade now. I own a dozen or so domains with custom email. Back in the day I set up a few up with free Google email, but since they cut off the free tier I have just been using theirs. I already have a unlimited shared hosting plan with them, no extra cost to me to host my email there. $120/year, and you an effectively have as many emails on your domains as you like. iMAP/POP/SMTP and WebMail support. Not calendar or contact support though. But it works.

  • free is never free (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cjonslashdot ( 904508 ) on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @10:57PM (#62229105)
    If it is free, they are taking something from you.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If it is free, they are taking something from you.

      It wasn't "taking", it was "giving"
      In the 2008-ish era, off-prem hosting wasn't a big thing for any organization that wasn't also big.

      The initial wave of people that knew of and signed up for the service eventually renamed to "g-suite legacy" were technology enthusiasts, people that tended to steer the direction of others from their recommendations and opinions.
      It was the word-of-mouth suggestions that google was a viable hosting option for businesses to pay for, that "free for life" accounts were given in

  • Google are straying further and further from their don't be evil mantra, and trying to take over the free web by pushing Chrome, that they are truly the new Microsoft.

    Curiously enough, Microsoft are now the new Google.

    Sure, you have to pay for Office 365 email hosting, but it's very, very good. It works better with regular email clients (unlike Google's way they map labels to IMAP folders) and it all just works.

    You can mix and match licences, so you may only need one account with a Business Standard licence

  • Same (Score:4, Informative)

    by xlsior ( 524145 ) on Wednesday February 02, 2022 @12:12AM (#62229235) Homepage
    If you're just looking for email:

    I had been using godaddy's grandfathered-in free email hosting for eons. (they used to host one mailbox for free with each domain you registered through them), until a few months ago when they notified me that those plans were being discontinued and that they would be migrating my mailboxes to Microsoft's Office 365 email hosting and charge $6.95/mo per mailbox going forward.

    their migration script completely bungled my various aliases, and they couldn't make one of the domains work at all, so not a good start to put it mildly.

    I ended up canceling out of that crap during their free trial/transition period, and subscribed with OpenSRS (tucows) for a reseller account instead. OpenSRS charges an initial $95 setup fee to sign up as a reseller, which allows you to then (re)sell branded domain registrations and hosted email... But you can easily disable the public reseller portal and just 'sell' email hosting to yourself. The $95 registration fee converts to $95 in credit for services. They charge just $0.50/month per mailbox, and allow aliased domains and alias usernames for mailbox. Spam filtering, POP/IMAP/Webmail/Calendar/etc.
    So after initial configuration, I'm now paying $2.50/month total for 5 mailboxes across 4 domain names with a bunch of aliases, and as an added bonus don't have to deal with Microsoft's online Exchange 365.

    /Only caveat I ran into was to make sure that the DNS had the appropriate SPF txt records set up for your domain(s), otherwise their cluster's spam filter may silently eat your outgoing email

  • Microsoft O365 (Score:3)

    by Heir Of The Mess ( 939658 ) on Wednesday February 02, 2022 @12:13AM (#62229243)
    I'm going Microsoft O365, it's cheaper and you don't lose your entire business workflow because someone complains about one of your youtube videos. I've been thinking about reducing my dependencies on Google, and this seems like the perfect opportunity to start taking action.

  • I haven't messed with it but I noticed that Cloudflare has added a beta e-mail service and it says that it's free. I'm not sure what type of restrictions it has b/c I'm not going to request access to it, but it might be worth investigating. If they already handle your DNS records it would probably make sense to try it out because it's probably super simple to setup.

    • I should have looked it up first: this looks like just an alias creation tool. Which is useful, but certainly not a replacement for Workspace.

  • Roll your own server (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Wednesday February 02, 2022 @12:20AM (#62229267) Journal

    Get a cloud based server for $5-10 a month, then use Mail-in-a-Box [mailinabox.email] to configure and set up your own mail server. Unlimited accounts on your domain.

    Primary downside is potentially having an IP that is blacklisted, or not being whitelisted. I made the switch from G Suite to my own mail server several months ago and all in all I've been very pleased. It can be a bit of a pain to set up some of the DNS related mail server validation bits that are used these days as well. But that's just a one-time thing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gaspyy ( 514539 )

      Setting up the email server is the easy part. Whitelisting the IP(s) with all the services, monitoring, DMARC and so on, that's the hard part. Last time I tried was 10 years ago, I doubt it's easier now.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by C_Kode ( 102755 )

      In today's environment of increased cyber attacks, I cannot support this recommendation. Securing Internet facing services is a real issue these days. I've never really been a fan of outsourcing to 3rd parties for these types of services, but there are cases today where I do use them.

      Email is definitely one of those cases. Email is one of the most highly attacked services and securing an email server is a full time job and hence why I believe using a high profile email service is a good idea because t

  • Many domain registrars offer email forwarding/alias capability. Create a new Gmail account, create an alias to point to the Gmail address and then following these instructions [google.com] to set up Gmail to send from your address.

    (Rumour has it that Google may be offering a migration tool at some point, which makes moving to a standard Gmail account extremely easy)

    There are a couple of things you should be aware of, which I wrote about here [slashdot.org]. However it works well enough that I don't feel the need to pay for anything el

  • Back in the heady days of the 90's when google started the domain administration services, it seemed like an excellent free service for us techies. Saved running Postfix, Sendmail, ClamAV, Spamassassin etc. on our own servers. So like many other techies I moved ALL my domains MXs over to their email services warning family that all their emails would be used by Google for marketing, ad revenue & improving their own spam recognition services, family where happy with this. Come 2012 the service is renamed

  • I am surprised that nobody has mentioned Nextcloud / Owncloud so far. Both are growing very fast and provide already a good office setup. You can also get limited (2GB) hosted plans for free to check them out, and upgrading them (https://github.com/nextcloud/p...

  • I have been using Workplace pretty much from the alpha phase, so their move is a huge shock and very disappointing. But I am only really hosting my own domain since gmail is rock solid for email, so I really only have one account with a tiny mailing list to reach a group of old friends. My plan is to move to Apple since I already have iCloud+ for storage. Hope it works equally well.

  • Why not use a desktop office suite, e.g. LibreOffice & then some kind of p2p rsync client? One of you could have an always on sync server, e.g. a Raspberry PI, so that every edit is always kept up to date. Somebody must have turned this into a consumer product or at least a project kit already. It's a very useful idea. Perhaps OwnCloud has one?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      Mod parent up.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MoHaG ( 1002926 )

      Since the hosted email is the main use of GApps, I doubt that many people are using it for the "Office suite" (and that is still available with a Google account elsewhere anyway)

  • We had 50 free mailboxes on single account with google. After reading Google announcement I made a switch to Office 365. Was easy as we have experience and tenant with MS. So far so good, we will see how it goes. Microsoft stuff seems MUCH more advanced and much cheaper. And let me explain what "cheaper" means: We have plenty of shared inboxes which with free Gsuite were regular user which cost $$$. With Microsoft these come free. For me the only right option is: - For business move to O365 - For home us

  • Anyone able to get by using Google's shitty suite should be able to get about the same functionality from a pen and a piece of paper.

  • Wasn't the free tier supposed to be free forever when it first came out?

  • I’ve had a few domains for 20+ years, with additional ones added over the years. It is much more flexible than Google’s offerings. I pay about $100/year for the service it used to be closer to $30/year, but it is still less than what it would cost from Google.

    I have their webmail, but it is rarely used— just for my spammail addresses and one-time sign-up accounts. Everything else is imap.

    For the G-Suite services, I switched mostly to locally hosted NextCloud. Mixed emotions there; the

  • Synology office (Score:3)

    by Deal In One ( 6459326 ) on Wednesday February 02, 2022 @11:05AM (#62230245)

    I use Synology Office for all my web based / cloud based document editing.

    On the pro side : It runs off your own Synology NAS, so you hang on to all your data, and no recurring fees. No recurring fees as well. You can have it exposed to the WAN, or just the LAN, depending on your needs, assuming you do the appropriate safeguards.

    On the con side : It's basic, but still decent. No fancy stuff, if thats what you need. Maybe test it before you decide. The NAS does include email /hosting capabilities, but alot depends on your ISP, etc. And since all the data is with you, make sure you got your own backups, etc, as needed. You don't get to blame another company if something screws up.

  • iCloud now has support for domains, itâ(TM)s a bit fiddly to configure, but nothing a slashdotter canâ(TM)t handle.

    Itâ(TM)s simple, solid and really cheap particularly if you already have it. Two euros a month (I think) for family storage and unlimited domains and aliases.

  • I'm in the same boat. I essentially use it for hosted email. I used to also use it for free, basic website (my resume). One of the benefits was essentially unlimited emails (aliases) to my domain which came in hand for avoiding ads and spam and/or when wanting to use a unique email for free services (netflixtrial1@mydomain.com, netflixtrial2@mydomain.com, etc). The other benefit is the resiliency... my domain's email on Google Apps benefits from the same resiliency as gmail... which essentially never fails.

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