Microsoft Azure Websites - Custom domain mail

I feel your pain. Had to have some tough talks with many of my customers when the free Google Apps option was discontinued.

I found two routes:

1. Find a hosted Exchange type solution. This has the advantages of any hosted solution. It is managed for you. You can get started with around 50 USD / user / year and services are provided by the likes of Microsoft, Google and Rackspace, like stated in the other answers.
2. (Which is the route I chose) Host your own Exchange server on AWS EC2 or Azure. Thanks to Microsoft License Mobility, you can install an Exchange license on a cloud server and provide email addresses for your customers` domains yourself. This will allow you to share the cost of the Exchange license between all your customers and if you reach the critical mass, this can save a lot compared to the pay-per-user-per-month models for most hosted solutions.

I am stil looking for a free alternative, but have yet to find one that can match the features that were available in the free version of Google Apps.

EDIT: I was thinking about this again last night and came up with another idea. I am not a Linux guy, so I would not be happy to do this for production mail server. For someone who is "bilingual" (i.e. ok with both MS and Linux solutions) or of a more adventurous nature than me, could take route 2 with a linux server and an open source mail server solution. I am sure this will lower the cost even more significantly, since you will not need to pay for the mail server licence and also per-hour instance costs for Linux servers are lower. This might even create a whole new revenue stream.

Your cheapest option is to have one (single) google apps account which will cost you around $5 per month. Make it something very general like [email protected]. Then in the google apps dashboard make it a catch all address. This will make the single inbox catch all email for accounts such as Sales@, support@ bob@ or whatever at your domain.

Then you can set Gmail filters to sort (label) each incomming message based on who it was sent to. For example you can have messages sent to frank@ automatically labeled as frank.

Next you want to create regular old gmail accounts for all of your individual users. I am going to follow the example of creating a box for [email protected] for this instance.

1. Create Google Apps primary account (catch all) as [email protected]
2. Create Gmail account for [email protected] (regular gmail account)
3. Create filter rule on Google Apps account for all messages sent to [email protected] to be forwarded to [email protected]. You can further mark them as read or delete them upon forward.
4. In the [email protected] create a sending alias as [email protected]. Google will give you a 4 digit code, and now when logging in as [email protected] i can both send as [email protected] and recieve all email since its forwarded to this account.

Also make sure to set default reply:to addresses in case you send from the [email protected] address.

Using the technique above you can get all the benefits of having a pro google apps account (dkim, spf, 25gb inbox) and with a little bit of configuration you can setup multiple gmail accounts which run off the single account. We use the technique above and it works flawlessly. The only thing that doesn't work is mailbox delegation, which is not that great.

If you wanted to save the $5 you could get away with using something like GoDaddy free email forwarding, but then you would be limited to godaddys 250 message limit per day.

The approach above just works.