You can have this exact thing cheaper if you set up a server and forward your mail to Gmail. And you'll also have a server to host a website or whatever else.
Back in 2010 this was reasonable. Now? Anti-spam functions have become quite the specialty, with DNS and email strongly intertwined. And that's all on top of the already significant burdens to run a non-relay hacker-proof server. There's a lot going on to operate reliable basic services on the Internet today.
Isn't it a pain to avoid getting your outgoing emails marked as spam, if you aren't using one of the established providers (google, microsoft, fastmail etc)?
100% this... there is a product definition and the free bring your own domain model is not part of the free product definition any more. I'm having trouble understanding how technically literate people are grumpy about this. It was only a matter of time. Google is a business, not your friend and you should treat interaction with them in this lens. It's not 2002 when Google was the cool hip thing to use and they seemed to demonstrate the do no evil mantra. It's a publicly trading business, one of the largest in world by revenue and market position and financial tactical decisions will trump your feelings for what you think they owe you.
> 100% this... there is a product definition and the free bring your own domain model is not part of the free product definition any more. I'm having trouble understanding how technically literate people are grumpy about this.
People often react badly to bait and switch tactics.
The solution is to offer people a way to revert to a free personal account without losing access to their files, data, and digital goods they have purchased.
People got a decade or more of free email hosting from Google and now need to pay for it. I know one small business that sells physical products and got 200 free accounts through this program. To this day they never delete old employees accounts as a result because it had zero cost to them to keep it around (not that they cared about security).
I kind of chuckled reading this thinking about how Google even bothered to spend resources closing this legacy service. I wondered what metric they used to determine it was worth spending effort to shut this down.
That's what I'm doing. I wanted a vanity domain, but didn't want to deal with email server BS so I got a Google Workspace. The 1TB of cloud storage helps too.
