It took me 3 reads to realize 296 mailboxes, not 296 hardware boxes in a datacenter rack. Doh!
Not really answering your question, but I feel the responsible thing is to give customers adequate notice to migrate their email (like 3 months or more) and pay Rackspace the $4 until then. Now you only need to find a solution for your own internal email, unless that’s already on a different system. Best thing for these senior, longtime customers is some tough love, they need to get a Gmail account. Not my favorite, but that way their grandkids can do tech support for them. They should have migrated their email 20 years ago, but they’re not getting any younger, migrating won’t get any easier, and not giving them a shove is like continuing to sell drugs to an addict. You could provide some instructions to migrate from your system to Gmail and maybe other popular mail services. Another option although it wouldn’t appeal to me is to instead announce that after such-and-such date, email will no longer be free, and price it at your cost plus a little. This would cause most of the customers to switch, but inevitably some won’t, and now you have a couple dozen customers paying maybe $5/month for the legacy system just to keep their email address or because of inertia. They would be better served with an ultimatum. Although I remember lots of people paying $20/month for an AOL account even though they no longer used dialup, because they didn’t realize they could convert to a free account and keep their aol.com email address. Customers with the same email address for 20 years probably get tons of spam, so you have a tough spam filtering task to balance false positives and negatives, once you are getting 500 spams per day, the solution is to get a new email address. There’s also the storage quota issue. People get their email on their phone using IMAP and leave every email they ever got on the server, including their Deleted folder. I used to think Gmail was unlimited storage, at least it seemed that way. But I see that many people are having to pay for extra Google storage, especially since the quota is shared with Google Drive. From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Steve Jones Sent: Friday, January 16, 2026 3:36 PM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <[email protected]> Subject: [AFMUG] Hosted emails We still provide legacy email. Debating on whether to continue. Rackspace just bumped our cost from .47 a box to 4 bucks a box and we still have about 296 boxes. 85 are paid (weird, right) and about 211 are free. Its was pretty hands off, with rackspace. Kind of irritating, we just went through a family acquisition and ended up migrating to a new business domain to get into a collaborative email environment without needing 300 boxes. and now we may dump the email anyway. There is zero interest in self hosting, or managing an email server whatsoever. Email stickiness isnt what it used to be. but I do feel for some of these folks, elderly, been with us for 20 years. The following is our current list of contenders, any im missing, any who are plague, and who are great? These are just set and forget imap boxes PolarisMail * Pros: Best fit. Base plan includes 25GB (supports our heavy users). Free managed migration services (saves us ~40 hours). Dedicated reseller program. * Cons: Slightly higher cost than OpenSRS (~$1.50/mo), but significantly lower than Rackspace. * Status: Inquiry Sent. Tucows / OpenSRS * Pros: Lowest cost. Pay-per-tier model ($0.50 for 5GB users). We only pay extra for the few heavy users. * Cons: High admin overhead. We must manually monitor and upgrade user quotas to prevent full mailboxes. DIY Migration. * Status: Inquiry Sent. DreamHost * Pros: Simple flat pricing (~$1.67/mo) with 25GB for everyone. No quota management needed. * Cons: Retail-focused support (Chat only), DIY migration, less "ISP-aware" than Polaris/Tucows. * Status: Inquiry Sent. _____ ⚠️ THE "PROCEED WITH CAUTION" LIST Sherweb (Existing Partner) * Pros: We already have a relationship; reliable infrastructure. * Cons: Pricing likely too high ($2.00–$3.00/user) to solve our core cost issue. * Status: Reaching out to rep. Namecheap * Pros: Cheap first-year pricing. * Cons: "Trap" pricing. Basic plan has low storage (5GB) and NO mobile sync (ActiveSync). Upgrading to Pro for features/storage makes it expensive ($42/yr). * Status: Inquiry Sent (Low priority). Zoho Mail * Pros: Great interface, reliable. * Cons: Storage Limits. Strict 5GB/10GB caps on cheap plans. Migrating our 25GB users will fail unless we buy expensive enterprise licenses for them. * Status: Inquiry Sent (Likely incompatible). Migadu * Pros: Flat fee for unlimited users. * Cons: Critical Risk. Uses a "Shared Sending Limit." If one customer spams, all our customers get blocked. No ActiveSync. * Status: Inquiry Sent (Not recommended).
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