A non-profit with a very low budget is looking for an email only hosting service. They are moving the web site hosting to Squarespace and are looking at wanting email elsewhere. Multiple email accounts, for officers and BOD members. Needs to support both IMAP and POP protocols.
Combination of folks who will not use Microsoft and folks who will not use Google making this very difficult. If forces a google based option works but the Google Workspace prices are too high for tthem at this time.
Namecheap does email only hosting for around $1 per month per user. I used it a while back for a small project, and it worked well, but it’s not the most intuitive to use. If your users are tech-phobic, it might not be a good choice.
Unlimited email accounts, unlimited domains, POP3/IMAP/webmail. However do note that they do not provide contacts/calendar syncing, and you’ll need to be able to set up everything (MX records etc.) yourself.
There’s also a lifetime promo every now and then, including currently, with their policy on this explained here: Aren't lifetime promos scammy?
I considered and researched them during the G Suite exodus a while back as they were recommended on reddit but have moved my email elsewhere.
This is when allegiances like this become annoying. I have used both Office 365 for non-profits and Google Workspace. Both completely free, and both are superb. The offerings you get from Microsoft without paying a dime are quite extraordinary. I feel like MS is an easier sell than Google from a privacy standpoint, but also from a features standpoint as well. Having worked at a few non-profits myself, I feel like the head of the organization needs to make the decision that’s best for the organization and not listen to petty squabbles amongst the staff.
As far as reliably cheap email hosting solutions: Fastmail is the one that gets my vote.
I also don’t know of any options that are going to be much cheaper than $3-5/mo/user.
Hover provides email at $20/year, IMAP, POP and web access, 10GB of storage.
I’ve been using that for years, and I think set up is pretty easy. They have good online help, and chat or phone (!) support. I think it’s easier to use than Namecheap or Godaddy (but bear in mind that I haven’t used either of those for several years).
I’m not sure if you need to have your domain name hosted there in order to use email, but it certainly makes things easier.
Hover’s mail is pretty good. I don’t use it myself, but I used to and it was fine. I just moved to Fastmail due to some server-side filtering stuff that I wanted to use. And if somebody wants MORE than the 10 GB, it’s not much more expensive - like $30/year.
I am considering moving one of my email accounts there just to not have all of my eggs in one basket. And there definitely is more flexibility on server-side filtering (or there was when I looked into it a few years ago).
mailbox.org is great and comes in at about 3.50 per month and it’s private and secure and hosted in Germany. They have everything you’d need and then some, occasionally they send messages in German too, lol
FastMail is fabulous, I’ve setup a couple clients with it and been very impressed every time.
For cheap I like Migadu. Another small, independent company. Charge by total storage and messages sent) rather than number of users. Starting at US$19 / year (for very basic account).
I have used Hostgator for many years. I chose it because I can use Plesk to manage my accounts. It gave me more capabilities to manage my e-mail addresses than did cPanel. (I made this decision several years ago, cPanel might be better now.) YMMV
I’d recommend taking a look at Runbox. They are Norway-based, only do e-mail and as a bonus are powered by renewable hydroelectricity. They have the usual webmail, IMAP, SMTP etc and it’s also straightforwards to set up DKIM and SPF if you are using your own domain which I can’t say is true for all mail providers.
I’m not affiliated with them in any way but have been a happy user for a few years (moved from FastMail) for both personal and small business use.
I recall using Runbox over 10 years ago. Its so good to seem them still around and doing well. I do not recall why I moved… Probably at the time I didnt have my custome domain and was not keen to use myname@runbox.com
Anyway, I am curious as to why you moved from Fastmail to Runbox?