zoho mail was the mail service i decided to go with. the previous month i did a free trial of their mail premium tier. it included many features which were not included in their free trial. the main feature i was looking for was imap, this would be useful for email retrieval from services, like a help desk.

the setup was very easy, and their walk through makes it simple to follow. pointing your domain to their mx servers was easy, and its all dns record setup. i made sure to also secure this with spf, dkim, and dmarc. the main selling point was so that i can have custom emails with my domain.

i think it looks clean and professional from a business perspective. it can also serve as a way to segment personal and work related activities. the always free tier is the one i recommend if you are starting off. you get five free users which all include their own mailbox of five gigabytes each. you get an smtp server where you can send mail from their servers using your credentials. it comes with unlimited alias’, so you can create many alias’ for your mailboxes and send and receive from them. good for a throwaway email, but mainly for create many emails without a new user or mailbox for each.

example could be to create a contact@domain.com mailbox, and then have alias’ like info@domain.com, hello@domain.com, and etc. if you want the ability to retrieve emails from services, then you have to upgrade to their paid tier. i went with their mail lite tier for one dollar per user per month annual plan. this also means it restricts you to the number of users, and you cannot stack a free tier with mail lite tier. which sucks, but it is the price you pay for their services i suppose.

lets say you just wanted one mailbox to have imap and pop access, but not the others. that is not possible since it is run by a license model for the users now. cannot mix tiers, have to either stick with the free tier or upgrade.