Getting off of big tech e-mail. I set up my club as a G-suite customer when Google was a good bit less evil than it is now. While I’ve integrated a lot of our processes in with it, but I wasn’t so foolish as to strongly couple things. Switching wouldn’t be a breeze, but I could do it.
But I do have to admit that Google is very good at doing e-mail. The primary issue with e-mail is spam filtering. Without effective spam filtering, e-mail these days is useless.
I could use Office365 for most everything else. Hell, I could use Outlook 365 with exchange. If you had told me Microsoft would be the less evil tech behemoth 20 years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here we are.
I can easily integrate with anything that does Active Directory. Distribution lists are done in AD with PowerShell, then synced to Google. I can easily just sync to something else. So I may look into that. I’d love to be off Google. Hell, I’d like to be on our own systems, really.
Even though my career is now all about the cloud, I don’t actually believe in it. We’re losing a lot of robustness going to cloud-based systems, and in truth if your company is dependent on AWS, your investors don’t own your company: Jeff Bezos does.
I now would like to try a containerized company infrastructure that runs exclusively on an array of Raspberry Pis. Bandwidth is becoming ubiquitous. While I can appreciate Amazon’s Multi-AZ features, which is quite expensive to do with your own data center, I feel like as bandwidth becomes more commoditized, competition might get easier.
I moved from Gmail (where I’d had my personal domain’s mail for a decade or so) several years ago and moved to Fastmail. Simple, fast, elegant webmail and standards-compliant IMAP. Also does contacts and calendar in a standards compliant manner. Sure, it costs a little bit of money, but is very reasonable. Moving to a different provider would be, if not trivial, straightforward.
Gmail was awesome when google wasn’t as evil, and offered stunning amounts of storage at a time things were going the other way (Hotmail limited people to like 2-5 MB of storage at the time Gmail came out with 1 GB of storage). For that, I’m grateful, but times have changed.
The nice thing about being on our own systems would be I could offer any member a club e-mail. With g-suite, I’d have to pay or it. The only thing holding me back from that is I could never make open-source spam filtering work all that well.
I’ve been using Office 365 for probably 8 or 9 years now on multiple domains and accounts and with the exception of one brief outage for a few hours one time, I haven’t had any complaints.
While I’d love to just run my own mail server (even with paid anti-spam add-ons), it’s just not worth the aggravation, especially if your server’s IP gets on a spam list.
I don’t trust Google and it was never a consideration in mind mind, but I have thought about finding an alternative that wasn’t Microsoft either. I’ve experimented here and there, but in the end I’ve just stuck with Microsoft; I just can’t beat $5/month per user for enterprise grade email with a ton of storage.