Back story

Back in May, shortly after setting up a Google Apps account (to help me manage email for the various domains that I own), I had the idea to write an article on the blog explaining why it was awesome, and why anyone running a small business should use it (i.e. it was Gmail for your own domain, you had up to ten mailboxes for free, compatability with other Google services, etc..)

Google drop the bomb

Fast forward to the second week of December, during which time I was on holiday in Iceland (no I didn’t see the Aurora Borealis, but I did go spelunking), and the news broke that Google will no longer be offering their free plan to new subscribers.

The news continued to reassure existing customers that it would have no impact on them, and that they’ll be able to continue using the service for free – which of course was a big relief for me personally, but a huge disappointment as I knew that I’d no longer be able to offer it as a solution to my customers.

So what now?

So what do you do if you’re one of the unlucky ones that took too long to get an account set-up? Thankfully the answer to that question can be found in an article on Lifehacker.

For the most part, I’m only be interested in the email hosting facilities, for which the article offers a couple of solutions, including that of sticking with Google Apps (after all, $50 per user per year isn’t too expensive, considering everything you get for the money), which I would happily recommend to my customers that can afford it, but for anyone looking for a free lunch, depending upon their needs, I think I’d recommend Zoho Mail or Outlook.com:

Zoho Mail

Zoho offer a single domain with up to three 5GB mailboxes, which (importantly) features two-way mobile sync functionality (which I think it fancy talk for IMAP). You might be slightly put off by the fact you might have never heard of Zoho before, but they offer a wide range of business apps, and reportedly have seven million users.

Outlook.com

Outlook.com offer a very generous 500 mailboxes for free (far more than many of my customers are going to need), and I believe that you’re able to host multiple domains with them, but they don’t offer IMAP (although it is apparently coming soon). Being a Microsoft product should also put your mind at rest in relation to stability (and the fact that they’ll hopefully not be going anywhere for a while).

Watch this space

At this time I’ve not yet used either of these services, so I can’t yet give any opinions on them, but as I intend to try them out with future customers as soon as possible, I’ll come back and update this post accordingly once this happens.