It all comes to enshitification; by Cory Doctorow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
bp
<part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com>
On 1/16/2026 5:39 PM, Ken Hohhof wrote:
I saw an article about it:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/01/rackspace-raises-email-hosting-prices-by-as-much-as-706-percent/
Unfortunately this is becoming common in the software world,
especially if companies are taken over by private equity. Eliminate
perpetual licenses and require multiyear subscriptions, and announce
huge price hikes. What was the story about killing the goose to get
the golden eggs?
*From:*AF <[email protected]> *On Behalf Of *Steve Jones
*Sent:* Friday, January 16, 2026 7:05 PM
*To:* AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <[email protected]>
*Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] Hosted emails
Yeah Gemini pro will connect to Gmail now, I'm planning on hitting my
original Gmail hard
We haven't decided what to do yet. But we are looking it as a great
opportunity to touch 250 customers, so we are building this to
incorporate a notice of home services we are looking to offer outside
isp.
Rackspace sent notice Monday of the change hitting March 1. Kinda
irritated. It's not a lot of money but its still money.
On Fri, Jan 16, 2026, 6:43 PM Bill Prince <[email protected]> wrote:
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 <http://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]>
<mailto:[email protected]> *On Behalf Of *Steve Jones
*Sent:* Friday, January 16, 2026 3:36 PM
*To:* AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <[email protected]>
<mailto:[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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