Dilemma: Which Email Provider Should I Use?

One of the most popular question in web hosting forums, Facebook groups, or Quora is, “Which Email Provider Should I Use?” In this post, you will get introduced to hosted email service providers. I have used or tested some of them, while others have mostly positive reviews. You will also find a list of references or resources at the end of this post.

You will also find lists published by many tech blogs on this topic. Many of the blogs and “Technical” websites update the lists regularly, or republish their lists of email providers.

Their new posts are typically titled,

“Which are the Top Email Hosts for 2019” “Which are the Top Email service providers for 2020”

For your personal or small business email needs, do you use one of the large, established email providers like Outlook (Office 365) or Google Apps? Or, do you use the free gmail (or yahoo, or outlook or yandex account), Or maybe you have an Apple account and use the icloud service? At gaathastory and also for my personal blog, we do not use any of the above email providers. In this post, I will talk about “alternative” email service providers.

Back to Basics: What is Email Hosting ?

In plain, simple words, email hosting service offers you to send and receive emails for your domain. The service provider takes care of setting up and managing the underlying infrastructure which includes hardware, software, backups, security, etc. These services are available via a web browser or through desktop and mobile applications. In order to use a hosted email service, you have to ‘connect’ your domain to the email service provider. We will cover this later in a separate post.

Examples of hosted email services

Some popular providers of hosted email services include large enterprise grade services to smaller startups. In no particular order, these include Google Workspace, Microsoft 265, Zoho Mail and many others. The following section has a rather long list of hosted email service providers for your perusal.

Typical Features offered by Hosted Email Providers

These providers offer a range of plans and pricing options to suit different needs, from small businesses to large enterprises. They generally provide features like spam filtering, antivirus protection, email archiving, and collaboration tools like shared calendars and contacts. In addition to email, many providers also offer calendar, scheduling, and “groupware” or team communication tools.

In the web hosting world, any shared web hosting plans include an email hosting plan.This offers a great option for those who have a limited budget or, for those who are looking for convenience and single source for support. This bundled service is not without its limitations. Some have a limit on the number of email accounts, others have a cap on the number of emails that can be sent per hour.

Some email providers such as inbox.eu also offer complimentary file storage

Also read: My personal email Journey, or How Many Email Services Do You Really Need?

Types of Email hosting

Before we get into answering the question, “_{Which email Provider Should I use}“, let us try and understand different types of email hosting. Some of them are mentioned below. This is my understanding as on end- 2022, and may not be entirely accurate. Also note that the below list only includes providers for sending and receiving personal or business email communication. Transactional emails, email relays, newsletters, etc. are excluded.

We can classify the hosted email service providers as below. In a future post I might do a deep dive into some of these services. In this post, we will take a look at select service providers.

Which are the Most Recommended Email Service Providers?

In no particular order, I will list the providers I have used or tested over the years. In this list, you will also find my remarks, or feedback if any.

Email Hosting for Small business or Startups (or solopreneurs)

Most of us are okay with the free email hosting services like Hotmail, gmail, yandex, yahoo, and the likes. But if you want email with your custom domain (e.g. you @ yourdomain.com) then a hosted email plan is the way to go. But the cost might be prohibitive, and the email plans offered might be an overkill for most small businesses, startups and solopreneurs. For them, a service like hosted email from MxRoute might be an option.

Tip: You can also sign up for email hosting plans offered by resellers of some of the above providers. For example, Webhorizon offers reseller plans for MXRoute.

Brief overview of some hosted email providers

MxRoute : they are one of the most mentioned, well regarded (or maligned, depending on who you ask) services. The opinions of most people are positive. Others have offered extreme feedback because of lack of support or the policies of this provider. You might want to check out the blog posts on how MxRoute email delivery works. Additionally, blog posts on MxRoute’s site as well as this post on blog by Bikegremlin has some good introduction level information. You can also check out the review of MXroute by WPJohnny.

Zoho offer a freemium service, we use the Paid plan for gaathastory. Previously, they used to offer imap service under their free pla, but that is no longer the case. The Free plan is limited to 5 users per domain. Their server locations are in the US, Europe, India (Chennai) and China. The website / desktop clients are fast and responsive, for some un-explainable reason all of Zoho apps on my iOs device do not load up the sign-in page so I do not use those apps anymore. Update Feb 0224: This issue was resolved with an iOs update.

Yandex mail– Many people have misgivings about them. I had used them briefly in the past, before moving to zoho mail.You can connect multiple domains for free, and their service was quite speedy and responsive. The desktop and mobile apps worked well when I last used then in 2018/19.

Inbox.eu : This Latvia based company offers two plans- Personal and Business. I had used inbox.eu in the early days of baalgatha, and am quite pleased with the service. I would recommend you check it out!

I have written an in depth review of inbox.eu on this blog. You can read it here.

Some more hosted email services I have tried out include Protonmail, and Tutanota.

Web hosts, domain registrars and ISP who provide email hosting

Many web hosts such as Webhorizon (reseller for MxRoute), drserver (zimbra based mail) offer paid services for email hosting. Some also offer email service that is bundled with the web hosting plan. Domain registrars such as GoDaddy and Porkbun also offer email hosting.

Consider Separate providers for Domain, web hosting and Email

It is a prudent practice to separate your web hosting from email hosting. I recommend this approach for a couple of reasons: Let us say your website goes down because of some issue with the server on which it is hosted, or network at the datacenter is affected due to reasons beyond your control. Or, your service provider, that is, web host goes under.

In that case, your website and email communication systems are both down. There are of course channels like social media sites, or email newsletter, but not everyone subscribes to them. It will be difficult for you to connect with your customers or update them about what is going on.

All of the above have happened to me at some point in time or another. In such a case, access to your e-mails will become challenging. You can not only lose your website, but possibly all your communication, contacts, calendar entries with important appointments, and so on. Discussing the pro’s and cons of bundled services versus separating them is beyond the scope of this blog post, especially when different sign-ups, billing cycles and costs are involved. For now, let us get back to different types of email hosting.

Wrapping it up : Which email provider should I use?

My first introduction to email was via the Unix terminal in the early 1990s when I was in school. I believe it was a VAX system. This was followed by Hotmail, and brief dalliances with Yahoo, Rocketmail, excite, Mailcity (now Lycos Mail: in 2023, they still exist, though as a paid service since 2018.) When I was in graduate school, I first became familiar with a .edu email address. This was towards the turn of the century. I did indeed have an @ aol.com email address once upon a time !

Three decades of email use has taught me a thing or two – barring a few exceptions, no service (or service provider) lasts “for a long time.”forever”. In other words, the “forever free” account is a myth. You are responsible for maintaining your own backups, and updating the email address/ records periodically.There is much more to email than hosted email. Using email aliases, relays, transactional email, email newsletter services, etc. are some of the advanced topics that I may cover in a future posts.

Update: using email aliases

If you do not want to give away your real email address to anybody, you can use an email aliasing service. Here are a couple of examples: Improvmx and Lastmx.Use my post titled “How To Use eMail Relay Service” that covers this topic in detail.

Frequently Asked Questions

_{This post about “which email provider should I use” published under technology category originally and was updated on 25 Feb 2024.}