[shevy-java]

"Despite repeatedly explaining this, they ignored my assertions and continue to hold my email hostage."

Well, you have become the product here. That also happens by other "free" email providers too. I had this happen to me on inbox.lt; the guy demanded I use a smartphone to "prove" my identity. At that point I realised they want to connect this data to the account and sell it to others who are interested in that.

[dagss]

Google Workspace isn't free, it is a paid for plan.

[izacus]

What do you add to humanity with this crappy take? Why are you shitty to the victim?

[techteach00]

Because his honest and accurate diagnosis for why mega tech corps treat people inhumanely is the first step towards stopping it. In my opinion of course.

[skeeter2020]

1. they're wrong in their basic understanding; this is not a free product

2. the response is glib and lacks any empathy

3. there's no suggestions of possible action or resolution path

4. it is all opinion and low value / low effort

So even if it's an "honest and accurate diagnosis" that you agree with, it's not helpful, valuable or even comforting. We can do better.

[walterbell]

What's a good alternative to Google Workspace for SMB customers?

[EvanAnderson]

Microsoft 365 is a reasonable alternative. It's easy to buy and even tiny Customers can get a degree of real human (read: tier 1 is unhelpful contractors that you have to fight thru) support.

It's still repugnant to me, as compared to self-hosting, but I would never self-host for a greenfield SMB Customer today. The economics don't make sense and the talent pool of knowledgeable and reasonable sysadmins is dwindling by the day. (I wouldn't want to make a Customer so beholden to me if they were willing to pay for it.)

I miss being able to spin-up an on-prem email server on a box with reasonable hardware redundancy, some external USB disks to rotate for off-site backup, a UPS, a couple consumer-grade "business class" Internet connections, and a contracted "backup MX" to catch email in the event of an outage. It was a good enough for a lot of small SMBs who had a physical office, and was cheap.

[herewulf]

It's not. Support is about on par with Google for SMBs. I had a client get locked out of the admin panel for about 2 weeks before getting through with support.

The difference is that everyone's account kept working during that time so business kept on as usual, just the admins couldn't change anything.

The sad thing is I don't think anyone did anything unusual and it was some kind of bug of Microsoft's end.

[EvanAnderson]

Good to know. I'm only dealing with 7 M365 tenants regularly and we have "break glass" accounts in each one (not tied to Customer's SSO, MFA unrelated to other admins, email address outside the tenant) to try to minimize the possibility of getting locked out, but I know it's always a possibility.

Moving the MX for the domain and limping along from backups is my worst-case contingency but given that there's no place other than M365 to restore the backups to it isn't a very good strategy.

[Lihh27]

The economics make perfect sense once "30 days of a suspended business email with no timely recourse" shows up as a line item. That USB disk and a UPS is looking pretty cheap right about now.

[EvanAnderson]

OP really should be moving the MX somewhere else and going into disaster contingency mode. It sucks, but there's a level of survival there they should be willing to accept, at least temporarily.

[samlinnfer]

Office365?

[zenincognito]

its $13 per month for a basic plan.