With the surprise announcement on Thursday, Dec 6, 2012 that Google Apps would immediately stop offering the Free Standard Edition of Google Apps, I'm wondering what other people who have been relying on this are planning to do instead.
I work with many very small, micro businesses and non-profits. For them the Free Standard Edition of Google App was perfect and paying $50 per yr per user is pretty much out of the question.
They're may be a better place for this discussion, but since I host everyone on my BOA server and BOA has no email system built in and it's not going to in order to preserve performance and security from what I undertand (see Feature Request for Horde, Squirrelmail, etc built-in to BOA), I figured I would start here with my BOA compatriots. BTW, I agree with Omega8cc decision here to not include email services with BOA.
So far these are the options that I think are:
- Poney up to the Goog
- As I already said, for many of the people I work with $50 per year per user is not really an option.
- Use free email that comes with a domain registration service.
- All to often these services do not provide enough free emails.
- On another post that I can't find at the moment, Omega8cc recommended Gandi.net. They offer 5 email addresses with domain registration, but you only get 1 GB of storgage to share before having to pay extra. Seems rather limited when you're use to Google Apps.
On the other hand they allow for 1,000 forwarding addresses and an unlimited number of mail aliases, so I could probably set people up with personal Gmail Accounts and forwarding address.
- Zoho Email
- I've been using Zoho Projects and Invoices for years now, and overall it's been good experience. They have been building themselves up to be the alternative to Google Apps for quite awhile, but I have't any experience with the email services yet. Their free version only gives you 3 email addresses but with 5 GB each, and you only get 3 groups. Furthermore, you can only have 1 domain related to them. The paid version is $24 per year per user and gives you 10GB of storage per user. Which is better price than Google, but I don't know if it's a better service.
Probably the primary reason we started using Google Apps over other services that came free with hosting or domain registration was that Gmail pretty much wiped out all of the spam. I don't know how well it will work if we use a forwarding email to a personal Gmail account. I'm concerned that the forwarding email will be considered to be the spammer. I also don't know how well Zoho does at protecting against spam.
If anyone out there has any other insights, I would love to hear about them!
Thanks in Advance!
Steve
Comments
I agree this is the wrong
I agree this is the wrong place ... but it is probably a common issue. As with some of the other basics - domain names, DNS, etc.. Maybe there needs to be a branch of BOA discussion for the rest of the stuff needed...? And other non-drupal hosting on the same server?
Running email off your own server can really effect performance. So I would hate to see email services included (by default) in BOA for that reason.
All you need is a spammer to choose one of the domains you manage and you will get millions of bounced emails a day. Each one needs to be spam checked and sorted. In the past I have had servers brought to their knees when this has happened.
Google Apps was the best solution in my opinion. It being stopped will really hurt.
Microsoft have a similar (free) option where you could host your domain with their live.com service. I think it is called outlook.com these days. I have a single client set up with them. Essentially, it is the same thing .... just Microsoft!
http://www.domains.live.com/
This may be an ideal
This may be an ideal opportunity for us to collaborate on a script that provisions a multi-tenant email server. On our self managed VPS accounts we could easily manage a large number of our small business clients on a $18/month server.
What would be our core requirements?
Webmail (Roundcube)
MTA (Postfix/Exim)
Postfix Admin to easily add accounts
IMAP/POP (Dovecot)
Spam (Spamassassin)
Backups to S3?
What else?
there is this but mail is a
there is this but mail is a different game and i know from personal experience that it's not something you should do when not having the resources to maintain it well.
To be honest I would not want
To be honest I would not want to get into maintaining an email server - far too much hard work...
Not only will it be a target for spam related crackers and will need to fend off inbound spam / mail bouncing caused by address spoofing - it takes concerted effort to keep the server on white lists and not get black listed. That's why I usually deferred to mail providers and why google apps made most sense.
I guess for clients not wanting to stump up for google apps I'll need to look for an equivalent service or setup mail forwarding to their existing email addresses with the registrar etc.
It's a shame as GAPPS standard really filled a gap - I can understand why it has been pulled though just disappointed.
JamieT
No surprise about Google apps
No surprise about Google apps changes. Adopting a closed source solution for an open source need will get you there every time but that is beside the point.
What I am trying to figure out is if there is any downside (other than the added cost) for dedicating a vps as a mail server and operating a BOA install on another server(most likely with a different provider). I have a vps with Plesk that work well as far as setting up email clients, providing webmail etc. but maintaining multiple sites on it is not ideal to say the least.
Also, if I was to install a pop3 server alongside BOA, is there a way to only restrict it to sending mail from the various sites?
Thanks,
Uzi
WALID Webmin, Aegir, a slightly hardened LAMP, ISPConfig, and Dr
could this sandbox project be folded in BOA?
http://drupal.org/sandbox/defconjuan/1157038
Willing to Update
You can download an already built virtual appliance (the x64 10.04 LTS flavor) in .ova format at https://www.box.com/walid. The sandbox project containing the build scripts is at http://drupal.org/sandbox/defconjuan/1157038 but I'd like to redo that repo and create branches for both 10 and 12 LTS so go with the appliance if you can.
Specific to replacing Free Google Apps, you'd get TLS and SSL enabled email, pop, smtp, and imap - but no shared contacts or calendars, no Google Docs, and no Google Drive.
I updated WALID recently to support Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and later versions of PHP and mySQL, although the 12.04 version does not have AEGIR yet. If you need AEGIR, go with the .ova file above or run the scripts in the repo on a 12.04 box and report back.
ISPConfig3 works well to admin sites, email accounts, shell accounts, certificates, databases, database users, and DNS (ISPConfig Screens: http://www.ispconfig.org/ispconfig-3/screenshots/).
There are some who (against my advice) use WALID in a production environment and their email flows fine (e.g. it is not getting flagged as spam and transits quickly). Of course, your SPF records and email structure have a lot to do with that, but...
Why not just plain Gmail?
If you have a more corporate-type client, then its probably worth spending the $25-40/month to set up a separate email server... just a VPS with something like roundcube as the front end.
However, for the average user, they have a primary email account (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) that they already use on a daily basis. Instead of setting up another vanity account (which many users may find annoying to check), just set up a virtual email account in postfix that just forwards the email.
I've done this on my Aegir setup, and it works great:
http://community.aegirproject.org/discuss/dealing-emails
Peace, Compassion, Prosperity