this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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That is such a crazy amount of money on license fees, especially when you consider that there are mostly free alternatives. I am always choosing foss options as I build my small business.
Right now, I am using onedrive, and Microsoft for my business email. Which I think comes out to like $5 a month.
My understanding is that for reliable email, you need to host with microsoft or google otherwise you are more likely to get sorted into junk mail. If that is incorrect, please let me know.
I agree with your assessment of e-mail... you either rent under a big provider or you spend countless hours playing whack-a-mole with whitelist-blacklist keepers. The big providers do this too, but they're so big it's not a major slice of their operation.
License fees pay for development, sales, support, and profit. When you go open source you can skip the sales and profit, but you have to pick up a bit of development and ALL the support, which is considerable during times of big changes, like migration to a new desktop.
I don't know. I never had a problems with a smaller mail provider.
These days it's really about managing SPF and DKIM records. But I usually tell people just "use an email provider". It doesn't have to be a big one or anything, just someone else because email is an enormous headache and it's just frankly not worth it.
Even if you set up all of your records correctly, every other email provider is going to look into the reputation of your email server and a lot of them will still filter your stuff into junk mail because its 99% of people running their own email server are using it to serve junk mail.
Define smaller.
I gave up running mail through my own domain hosted by a "smaller" provider (Canadian hosting company with less than 1M clients) because I was constantly having delivery issues because somebody somewhere on an adjacent subnet got blacklisted for SPAM, or worse.
I would guess a few thousand users.
That might be borderline - probably easiest (and most cost efficient) to work through a big provider (M$, Google, etc) to let them solve the problems for you, for a small fee, rather than tasking 0.1 FTEs on constantly whacking the moles.
I don't know why it should be easier. I pay this provider and I get a working email account without problems.
If your provider is working for you, then all is good. I suspect they either A) have hundreds of thousands or more e-mail users in total, or B) they work through one of the big providers for you.
If your provider only serves 20,000 or fewer e-mail clients, the costs for them to independently play white-list, black-list, whack-a-mole, pleading to keep their legitimate users' e-mail working smoothly would be prohibitive - upwards of $10 per year per e-mail account just for the employee(s) tasked with negotiating (and solving) those issues behind the scenes for their users (including you), not to mention policing their users to prevent them from abusing the e-mail system.
It's basically a problem of prejudice - if any e-mail account remotely linkable to yours by any metric mis-behaves, some admin somewhere will block it along with anything remotely associated with it - including your e-mail service. Then it's up to you, or your organization, or your organization's service provider, to track down the offended party and somehow negotiate with them to restore the blocked services for the innocent users.
That's technically accurate, but it depends on the context. For example, if you set up DMARC properly and use a brand new custom domain as a personal email, yeah, you're much more likely to get sent to spam, but not necessarily right away, and as you use that more frequently, or communicate with people using the larger providers like Google or Microsoft, the higher the "reputation" of your domain will get.
If you want the highest possible level of reliability though, then yeah, Google or Microsoft's options are likely gonna give you the highest chance right off the bat without any fuss.
The domain name doesn't matter at all. The really important thing is the IP of your MTA (the server sending mails). Eg. if it was previously used to send spam you need to get a new one from your server provider, as it will be blocked everywhere. Also the server configuration needs to be good. Use dkim, dmark, spf, mta-sts, etc.
Kinda lame, but at the same time I get it.
So, I guess I’m sticking with OneDrive and Microsoft email.
I eventually migrated all my e-mail to gmail, because I don't feel any satisfaction or value out of "beating the system" to make my personal domain work as an e-mail address.
It isn't or the op posted the wrong number: 6 EUR/user/year is nothing for organizations