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Leaving Gandi

Posted on: 2023-10-16 - Fixed link

I've used gandi for domains and email support for many years. Unfortunately they have been bought, and decided to change their whole payment setup.

In February 2023, Gandi was acquired by Total Webhosting Solutions, forming a new brand, Your.Online. In June, the company announced drastic price increases, including a new monthly fee for mailboxes previously included for free.

wiki

Previously with each domain, you had 5 mailboxes for free. Now they want to charge you 4 USD per month per mailbox. The domain renewal for a year costs 25 USD, which is not exactly cheap. Now if I used all of the mailboxes which were previously free it would cost me 4 * 5 * 12 = 240 USD per year. In other words around 10 times as much as the domain. The change happens at the end of Oct 2023.

So I've been looking around for what my options are. Ideally I'd like to move to another domain registrar that has something similar. I don't mind paying for email per se, but this is way too much.

Requirements:

Ideally:

Potential solutions include

  1. A domain registrar that supports email
  2. A third party email solution
  3. Private mail server - install and configure
  4. Private mail server - use a script to setup
  5. Private mail server - used as a container

I already have a server in the cloud. It is probably underpowered for what it currently does and supporting an email service. It seems if a server supports SpamAssassin it needs to have 3 GB of RAM. For some mail server configurations it needs a whole server to itself.

I have 3 domains currently. I need one domain to have multiple emails, the others could get away with one.

Using a 3rd party email service is my preference because

Self hosting has the advantage

Migration

I want to test out with a domain that I don't use any email with initially. If that works out correctly I can try out with a domain I only have one email address on. If that all works out I can move my main domain that has multiple email addresses, some of which aren't mine.

Things to test:

I will backup my thunderbird profile by copying it.

Once that appears to work, I'll move over copying an active email account. For doing the copying I'm going to use imapsync. I thought there was a way to do this in thunderbird, but it appears not without installing a plugin.

My plan right now is to try Obambu, since that seems to provide what I need at the best price.

If that fails, my next option would be Zoho.

In terms of domain registrar, I'm currently looking at cloudflare, its around 10USD per year.

The pressure here is on email, since the domains are already paid for.

Mail Services

20 EU for 1 year. 30 email addresses with multiple domains (!).

This seems like a fairly small french based company. Most of their documentation is not in english, so to work around this I used google translate. I couldn't make this work initially with multiple domains, because it required using their DNS being used, which I didn't want to do to test. I contacted support, and explained the situation and they added my extra domains. Their tech support did this in a timely manner, and were helpful in making the transition. All the more impressive for such a good value service.

When trying to migrate with imapsync, I did have a problem where I could no longer connect to cp3.obambu.com. If I did the connection outside of VPN connection it seemed ok. If I moved to a different VPN service it started to work again. I wonder if there is some kind of limiting on the VPN or perhaps more likely on cp3.obambu.com. This is a little worrying, but it seems that using imapsync, will pickup from where it last left off if there is a problem. I'm hoping it's going to just be friction whilst migrating.

Their VPS is pretty good deal - 50GB SSD/1 CPU/2 GB Ram for 5USD per month.

Looks like an email 1 USD per user month. 5GB.

There is the "Forever Free Plan" option, but it doesn't support IMAP/POP, so that isn't an option.

A small problem is that payment appears to only be "by year". So to migrate, requires paying 12 USD for a domain where I don't use email typically, which is a little irritating. It does have a money back guarantee.

Looks like it's 2 USD per mailbox per month. 10GB.

Also https://kb.porkbun.com/article/24-how-to-set-up-email-hosting-services seems to imply 2USD per inbox.

48USD per year. "1 user with up to 10 email addresses" - seems to imply 10 aliases.

1.59 USD per mailbox (normally 3 USD). 10GB.

1.25 USD per mailbox. 25 GB.

Says there is a "regular rate", but not clear what that is.

1.67 USD per mailbox. 25 GB. Has web email, IMAP.

Doesn't appear to support IMAP/POP3/SMTP.

3 EU per mailbox per month.

Requires special app on mobile so no go.

1 email for free. 20 USD per year for any amount (for a domain).

The free email service doesn't support IMAP/POP3/SMTP.

Self Hosting

It seems the actual requirements for a VPS is fairly high - you need 3GB of RAM for SpamAssassin. On digital ocean that puts you are 24USD per month(!). On obambu, it's 9USD for 4GB.

Mail in a Box

Mail in a Box looks straight forward. Doesn't run in a container. Seems most sensible to setup on its own VPS.

Looks like needs 1GB of RAM. So that's the 6 USD per month option on digital ocean.

Pros:

Elsewhere it seems if SpamAssassin is used 3GB of RAM is needed.

Modoboa

Modoboa is perhaps more configurable and extendable, but also more complicated.

So probably not a good fit.

mailu

mailu

If has antivirus needs 3 GB of RAM. Can run from docker image.

Docker Mail Server

Docker Mail Server

I don't think it has web mail interface, so not an option.

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