There is no other service with feature parity on the UI alone out there. I've searched one for ages and would switch the whole org over in a New York minute if there was an (ideally open-source) "copy" of the Gmail UI available as front-end for one of the other mail servers. Features we can't do without nowadays are tagging; advanced filter and forwarding rules; split inbox with tabs for ads, newsletters, social media; support for multiple domains (10+) and dozens of aliases per user which you can easily switch between; 30 sec undo after sending an email; send later function; snappy UI that's not from the 90s.
Also, unfortunately Gmail/Gsuite is very cost-effective for us. We've looked at ProtonMail which seemed nice and potentially worth supporting but they would have cost us probably ten times or more what Gsuite costs (for email service only!) thanks to having to buy a ton of add-ons to get feature parity (they actually do charge extra for pretty much each custom domain and alias you want to use). And buying 100 GB of storage costs an eye-watering $120/month ($1.99 on Gsuite). I really don't know why their pricing is so weird. I know they can't probably scale as well on storage but adding aliases does not cause any measurable additional cost for them...
Anyway, if anyone decides to make a Gmail UI clone with a reasonable spam filter and pricing that's at most 2x what Google charges: Please let me know, I will migrate 120 new users to you within a couple weeks (not much on a grand scale but it's what I can offer...) :-)
I think Fastmail ticks all your boxes except the split tab for messages and ads. Not sure about pricing. They’re cheap enough for my use case.
The UI is much better than the gmail one, and the mobile apps are excellent. It supports tags or folders, depending on user preference (I prefer folders, so this is a huge advantage vs gmail.)
The spam filter is much better than gmail’s, at least for my account. Over the same corpus (my email went to both during a transition period), they both let zero spam through, but gmail was incorrectly blocking 10-30% of incoming email until I disabled its spam filter.
are you kidding? Gmail UI is absolutely horrendous! I haven't used it in 4 months, and last week had to go there and was shocked and the mess it is. I guess I'm spoiled by Fastmail, which is actually fast, efficient and clean.
Sounds like I'll have to check out Fastmail :-) However, please bear in mind that if you've got to switch over a whole organisation, you'll have to keep UI friction to a minimum. Users who have used Gmail for almost a decade (our Outlook, for that matter) will be extremely hesitant to be dragged over on to a new service. I guess, a fully featured mail server doing all the work in the background while offering you a front and that looks like OWA, Gmail or $UI would be ideal (pipe-dream, I know, but wouldn't it be great?).
Still, I get what you're saying and I'll look into it.
Do you have any experience with Fastmail for business? Can it be branded and used with different domains and aliases without paying through the nose?
I think Office 365 / Exchange / Outlook has all of that for around 2x the cost. Possibly missing automatic email categorisation, but it does sort into 'focussed' and 'general' buckets.
Plus you get an absolutely fantastic desktop app on Windows & Mac.
And for that you also get full Microsoft Office desktop apps included too.
Also, unfortunately Gmail/Gsuite is very cost-effective for us. We've looked at ProtonMail which seemed nice and potentially worth supporting but they would have cost us probably ten times or more what Gsuite costs (for email service only!) thanks to having to buy a ton of add-ons to get feature parity (they actually do charge extra for pretty much each custom domain and alias you want to use). And buying 100 GB of storage costs an eye-watering $120/month ($1.99 on Gsuite). I really don't know why their pricing is so weird. I know they can't probably scale as well on storage but adding aliases does not cause any measurable additional cost for them...
Anyway, if anyone decides to make a Gmail UI clone with a reasonable spam filter and pricing that's at most 2x what Google charges: Please let me know, I will migrate 120 new users to you within a couple weeks (not much on a grand scale but it's what I can offer...) :-)