I got my first private email address back in the early 90s through
yahoo, which has gone through some changes over the years. It was
originally unlimited storage for free, then became 1TB storage for
$5/month. They eventually changed that to 200GB storage for the same $5.
I've had that address now for over 30 years, but I still have quite a
bit of room in there.
I got my gmail address not too long after that, but with only 15GB
storage, it's not as great a deal, so I forward all my gmail to yahoo
mail, and keep on trucking.
I don't throw anything away, but after 10 years or so, I archive the
email to cloud storage which is a lot cheaper.
bp
<part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com>
On 1/16/2026 3:24 PM, Ken Hohhof wrote:
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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