Hey everyone! I’ll be starting a new business here, as a side gig for a bit until it can replace my day job unfortunately.
Question though for all who have gone before me, when looking at email providers, primarily Office 365 and GSuite, who did you settle on? A couple details that may help, this will primarily be an Apple shop and I’d love to automate things it at least have the ability to as much as possible.
Any thoughts, ideas, or experiences are extremely welcome!
Are you looking for just an email provider, or do you want more than that? I ask because Office365 and gsuite both do a whole lot of other things besides email. If you need those things, they’re good choices. If you only need email, maybe a good IMAP email provider like Fastmail might be better for you.
I would love to only need an email provider, I will be going into a business where I need the office suit or something similar to it for the sake of communicating with clients. I’ve just picked up a ton of new tricks here recently and just want to find the solution that plays the nicest with all of them haha! Thanks for the help!
Note that fastmail does calendars and contacts as well, and has decent automation capabilities built in on the server side. (Happy paid user since 2002 here).
I run my business through GSuite and am pretty happy with it.
I could sit here and Say that you should, but it’s your business, you know it best and what will work best for you.
For me it came down to email, my business is software development, so google docs is all the fancy formatting I need and I try to avoid spreadsheets like the plauge.
Having the gmail backend with its server side rules was awesome for me because I already knew how it worked. But your mileage may vary.
zoho.com are an interesting alternative to the Google/Microsoft world. I use their email service, because for free I can have a username@mydomain.xyz. They’ve also got bucketloads of other products which are worth looking in to.
+1 for Fastmail. I use them for email, calendar, and contacts and have been a happy paying customer for about 5 years. They are serious about Email and Email standards and actively participate in the development and promotion of email standards. I’ve been impressed.
G-Suite!
Don’t forget that you can assign up to 45 alias account to one $5 month account.
if security and privacy is a big concern consider protonmail.com
I use both. I happily pay google for email and calendars as I find what little automation I’ve mastered much easier to do through IFTTT and Zapier if I’m using Google. I also pay for Office 365 each year because they’re the industry standard apps for the work I do.
+1 for Fastmail. I have a handful of domains and lots more email aliases and have never had a problem with their service or support.
Another vote for Fastmail.
Does anyone use Hover for their mail? I’ve bought my domains through hover and was considering using them for email hosting too.
+1 for Fastmail, this is reliable email hosting. I would recommend using IMAP though as their apps sometimes do random things.
If you are ever going to need to work with clients who use the MS Office Suite, then Office 365 is really a great value.
If your clients are not likely to be Office Suite users then you may be happier with GSuite if you are not a MS fan.
From an email perspective, I think both are very solid reliable solutions that work across most email apps you might want to use.
I use Office365 myself and have been very happy with it. For email I use a combination of Outlook and Airmail and it works seamlessly between the two.
Hover email hosting is “ok” but not great.
I like the ones who integrate calendar & contacts like G-Suite, Office 365 and some others.
G Suite hands down. Killer shortcuts, available everywhere, fantastic Google and other integrations such as Zapier.
+1 for Fastmail. I have 1 business using Fastmail and another using G Suite. I started getting a bit hesitant around privacy with Google and will migrate the other business away eventually.
I think any of the systems noted here can solve the problem. As I noted above, I have been very happy with Fastmail… and there were a couple of considerations that factored into my decision. As @stulennon noted, I also was a bit nervous about privacy with Google although that very well might not an issue at all with a paid G.Suite service. The other is standardization. Gmail is not standard and therefore you have to be very careful about the mail client that you use and some are fussier than others. Microsoft mail also isn’t fully standard as anybody who has ever received a winmail.dat file knows… So that factored heavily into my decision to use a service was a completely standard IMAP service. It works with virtually every mail client out there.
Keep in mind that you can save cost and avoid having lots of inboxes in your Mail Client by usiing alias email addresses. For example you can add info@, cusomterservice@ etc etc to your one paid account.
G-Suite alias account setup
Fastmail alias account setup
Bejond the scope of this topic but might be helpfull to know for iCloud users is to know you cancreate up to 3 iCloud alias email accounts. This can be very handy so create a disposable email account 
Yes. Good point. I have a single email account with Fastmail and several alias (including info@)…