Your custom domain.
Unlimited amount of users.
No storage limit, but attachments stored only for 1 month.
Option for saving attachments before deleting.
Some safe ads in web client.
I'd love to switch to the one on iCloud+, which I already pay for anyway, but Apple's restrictions on what constitutes a "family" are bizarre - as soon as I add anyone to the family, I'm also paying for any apps they buy. This is fine with my kids, but what right do I have to know what apps my wife is installing on her own phone? Feels like such a creepy restriction.
Ahh, interesting. I could swear this wasn't possible last I checked, but this page [0] suggests it may be, however it's not very clear at all what is being turned off. Does this mean if I buy an app, my wife doesn't automatically get to use it too, or does this mean if she buys an app it doesn't get billed to me? It's the shared billing that was always the creepy bit.
What did you use before? How did you find the transition? I am on gSuite and would move over but all the ways of getting past emails up to iCloud seemed messy.
I was using Protonmail. The transition was as simple backing up all my emails, changing my DNS records and re-creating my filters. But I didn’t import my Proton email archive into iCloud as I don’t (hopefully) need any emails from it.
Not OP but yes. Perfectly happy with the prices, and would be willing to pay more if the featureset provided. The only thing that keeps me on gmail is the inertia of my existing email address.
I would register if there was a storage limit and you were prompted to manually delete attachments when you are nearing it. I’d rather do it myself and save what’s needed that risk losing important documents.
No. But if it were with a paid option and no ads or marketing/data sharing partnerships of any kind and if it has limited storage and lets the user manage it (or move to a higher pricing tier), then I might consider it.
I really dislike the per user or per mailbox pricing model followed by some platforms. It gets very expensive to use for a few people in the family.
Copying my other comment on attachments [1]:
> People get bank statements, investment transaction statements and other important information as attachments, and they may need to get those years later from emails (it may not be easy to get from the original source and they may have lost their local copies).
> Like it or not, e-mail is a document storage medium for most people.
Note the following services that provide what I’ve listed above, except that they don’t meet some other criteria I have:
> Auto-purge - Automatically delete messages after they have been in the folder for a certain amount of time, from 1 day to 1 year. Pinned messages are never deleted.
At 129 RUB(~1.50 EUR)/month, it isn't free but it's drastically cheaper than O365 or G Suite. However i wonder how often it would be blocked by useless "block all Russia and China" firewall rules.
> Free alternative to paid G Suite.
>
> Your custom domain.
I love it! I need more than one domain.
> Unlimited amount of users.
For the free tier specifically, maybe organizations otherwise giving you $0 should have a limit like 20 or 100. Or "unlimited users" could be a $10/month addon for the free plan.
> No storage limit
too unfair for you, I'd rather pay B2 style prices for each GB past 10GB or something.
> but attachments stored only for 1 month.
Surprise deletions are an instant No. Most inboxes just show you your % usage in the corner and allow me to handle deletions on my schedule.
No, because when a product is free then you are the product.
I'd much rather pay for the services I use (e.g. Fastmail) knowing that there's company who's purpose is to build and support a product for me, not advertisers or some other interest.
free or not, i'd rather have a storage limit but no time limit. either way i'd have to forward all emails to my local machine, so the storage won't do me much good other than as a temporary buffer.
with a storage limit the worst that can happen is that mails get rejected, but the senders do get notified. and, if set up well, forwarding should work even if the storage is full, so even rejections would not happen.
with a time limit i am relying on the forwarding always working, and, in case of failure i'd be loosing mail possibly without noticing. because it's attachments from old mail that i am not looking at now that would get deleted. that's not something i'd want to ever happen.
any system that deletes stuff automatically without oversight is dangerous and can lead to critical loss of data.
the only time it is ok is when it is backups that are superseded by new backups, or a trash storage where i put things manually, and even there i prefer to empty the trash manually too.
but this is just how i am used to working. i realize that i accept messages in irc disappearing if i don't log them too (but then i set up logs for quite a number of channels that matter to me), and i could accept this service for certain use cases like for mailing lists which are usually archived elsewhere anyways.
but i could not use it for emails from family, friends or customers who might send me things that i want to keep.
furthermore, if you consider encrypted email you can't even tell what is an attachment and what is the body. removing the attachment would also affect unencrypted, but signed emails.
I disagree completely on this. People get bank statements, investment transaction statements and other important information as attachments, and they may need to get those years later from emails (it may not be easy to get from the original source and they may have lost their local copies).
Like it or not, e-mail is a document storage medium for most people.
