Definitely don't do this yourself if you're not familiar with how it works. If you don't set up all the SPF, DMARC, DKIM etc. perfectly, you're going to get terrible deliverability (your outgoing emails will get auto marked as spam).<p>Just pay Google or Microsoft or Yahoo or whoever to do it for you. Reliable email is not something to skimp on.<p>Edit: Also, IMHO: gsuite (or whatever they renamed it to) is a huge productivity booster, between meet and groups and drive and docs and calendar and sheets and such, not to mention chrome sync and sign-in with google, etc. And federated management of all of that together in the admin interface, along with integrated legal archival and discovery. Well worth the monthly cost (what is it, like $10?). If your employees aren't worth that much every month, you shouldn't be hiring them.<p>It's also much more usable cross platforms than the nightmare that is MS Office. Outlook is terrrrrrrrible.
If you're going to be partially or fully on the Microsoft ecosystem (Office most obviously, especially if you're going to be doing document exchange), just go ahead and get M365 Business Premium - along with Office it gets you Azure AD for signins, Onedrive for per user storage, SharePoint for shared storage, email, etc. Premium adds email encryption, plus Intune as a somewhat replacement for domain Group Policy, Windows Defender for Business and IIRC some level of mobile device management. I think BP also includes some level of the data loss prevention tools as well.<p>If you're on Chromebooks instead, Google's offering obviously makes sense there.<p>If you're on Macs or pure Linux not sure, but you may end up using web interfaces a fair amount anyway.
It's a long running meme on /r/webhosting. A person buys "email hosting " somehow, insists they don't need the spend of o365 or Google, loses time and money and ends up on one of those.<p>For background, the number's coming down these days but not long back I managed a lot of Exchange clusters. I'm not afraid to manage mail, I just know it isn't worth it.
imo, Zoho has got a decent free plan: 5 users, 5GB, incl groups <a href="https://mail.zoho.in/signup?type=org&plan=free" rel="nofollow">https://mail.zoho.in/signup?type=org&plan=free</a> The only free-plan limitation is you can't IMAP / POP your way to another email client. You'd have to use Zoho's.<p>The customer support group emails are forwarded from Zoho to Freshdesk (also free for <i>one</i> support email).<p>Automated emails (like login alerts) are sent from Cloudflare MailChannels / AWS SES; and replies, if any, to those automated emails are routed back in to a Zoho group mail.
Google or Microsoft.<p>At a prior startup, we only choose Microsoft because of their willingness to sign a BAA (HIPAA).<p>Elsewise, just do Google Workspace. Cost is reasonably for what it costs.
If the term 'soc2' makes sense within 2-3y, gsuite/ms and move on to more important tasks. Counterproductive area to innovate or penny pinch on.
I run O365 for the obvious tools and AD but use GSuite for email. SSO for GSuite using AzureAD makes me laugh, plus your employees can use both ‘sign-in with’ Microsoft or Google account for other services and have a single log-in page that ends up just being Microsoft. There’s some tedium with creating accounts on both GSuite and AzureAD, and I’m sure that can be fixed and combined, but who can be bothered when it’s at most 1 employee a week to on-board for early days. Pick your poison, both is an option and works surprisingly well.
It depends on the nature of your company, customers, and staff. We went with M365 because outlook is far and away the best and most professional email client, we need to be able to collaborate live on documents, teams allows built in presentation of slides without screen sharing, and our partners understand how to be invited into SharePoint repositories.<p>I know this is anathema to many people here. If you have a business made of 5 coders and your customers are other coders, you can do whatever you want.
AWS workmail or Google workspace are both great.<p>Workmail has a better management interface for the admin whereas Google has a better user UI (at least for the webapp).
I use O365 for email, and have Gsuite for Google Docs / Sheets / etc.<p>Here's why we use O365 for email:<p>1. Gmail tabs get lost in your sea of tabs, while Outlook being a desktop app means it's easy to alt / tab over at any time.<p>2. It's really easy to manage multiple mailboxes with O365 (via Outlook), while Google doesn't work super well for multiple profiles.<p>3. O365 has better support through their reseller partners (we use AppRiver) while dealing with things we don't know a lot about (SPF / DKIM / distribution lists / shared mailboxes / etc).<p>4. (I believe) O365 is much less likely to shutdown our account for unknown reasons than Google.<p>5. Lastly, I was exposed to O365 while working at a SaaS in the Microsoft ecosystem. For the first few weeks I hated it, and missed Gsuite, but overtime I came to love O365 and hate Gmail.
Google Workspaces or Microsoft 365. If you don’t need the collaboration tools Fastmail is pretty good.<p>Don’t waste time self-hosting. You job is to make sure your company is successful, product-market fit, blah, blah, you know the drill: that is core. Everything else is context.
I built Paced Email which has team support. You can spin up any number of email addresses quite quickly. It has the added benefit of making email a little more async which helps keep your employees a little less distracted.