I had a domain with them for years, a couple months ago they ditched their entire IMAP/POP3/SMTP email platform and moved all customers to a trial of Microsoft Office365.
I guess that was another part of their ‘legacy platform’?
I transferred the domain to Gandi which offers a couple of email addresses with each domain, something I kept putting off expecting GoDaddy to make it difficult, but it was fine.
But I do wonder how competent a registrar/web/email tech company is if they can’t run email services, and now apparently can’t run websites securely either? I spent a while mulling Fastmail and Rollernet and Mxroute vs paying for Office365 and thinking about how impossible it is to know if a company has the tech skills to back their product offering - and then if they actually do use them - or are just marketing.
> they ditched their entire IMAP/POP3/SMTP email platform and moved all customers to a trial of Microsoft Office365
For browser access to your mailbox, yes they did move to Office365 (free, not a trial), but POP3 and SMTP still work just fine, no change required.
I have been using GoDaddy for many years for a handful of domains, including my own business, and have had no problems using their interface and avoiding paying for add-on products.
Perhaps if you pay them for email already in some way? They sent me emails saying "We're retiring Workspace and moving your email to a new platform. For each of the following accounts you'll get a two-month free trial to test Microsoft 365 from GoDaddy. Asterisk Asterisk your free trial will expire at the end of two months, if you'd like to continue using the product after that you'll be billed at the current rate".
After the move, I had to update my email client to connect to Microsoft servers for POP3/SMTP, it didn't keep working pointing at GoDaddy's securemail address.
Then after two months, they sent me emails saying "Your free trial is expiring soon" and "Urgent: you'll lose access to your email; you'll need to move to a paid plan from your free trial, or you'll lose access to your emails." and when I logged in to the domain management page, a banner saying I'd lose access to my email unless I paid $28/year for a Microsoft Office 365 emails basics plan.
So, if it did actually keep working no change, I'll chalk this up to another GoDaddy dark pattern, and the push to finally move me away from them.
I stand corrected; yes apparently I am paying something extra for email support. Even though I renewed my business domain as usual in March 2021, I now see I paid another invoice for "Microsoft 365 Email Essentials Basic - Renewal" in late June, in the amount of $28.68 (annual). It's now coming back to me that I even conversed with an online operator at GoDaddy to confirm this charge was necessary for me.
Now that I recognize that, I suppose I see it as acceptable. My SMTP and POP3 mail service has continued uninterrupted, and when I log in to GoDaddy webmail every 3 weeks or so to check for spam that I care about, I just click on the "Outlook" web icon to see my mailbox via the web browser.
This was my excuse to move to Fastmail - I was "forwarding" (actually POP3ing) my email into Gmail from GoDaddy. Now it's all in Fastmail. It was also losing the catch-all address that was unacceptable at the time.
They broke my catchall too; Gandi don't have catchall, but they do have unlimited aliases with wildcard support after two characters, so there's all possible AA%, AB%, AC% etc ~1300 aliases listed on this blog which will act like a catchall https://robsblog.robertwatts.com/2020/02/25/gandi-catchall-e...
RollerNet.us has a really nice setup, I've used them at work for years and they don't get much discussion on HN. They say "Roller Network accounts are very different from our competitors: we don’t charge you for domains, mailboxes, users, aliases, etc. All of those settings and configurable items are intangible items in our database. We only track tangible resources: data transfer, data processing, and data storage."
They do primary and secondary DNS (they will slave to your DNS servers), and SMTP relaying (they will be secondary MX and store and forward email to your higher priority MX if they go offline, or store and ETRN if you have some intermittent connection), SMTP frontend (forwarding and relaying and filtering), outbound SMTP relay, and mailbox server. They have a web interface to maillog and a simple REST API. It's just that they're not a domain registrar and their personal account is $50/year, and I have no personal use for most of the features; Gandi was $15 for a year of domain hosting and email, so it won.
I guess that was another part of their ‘legacy platform’?
I transferred the domain to Gandi which offers a couple of email addresses with each domain, something I kept putting off expecting GoDaddy to make it difficult, but it was fine.
But I do wonder how competent a registrar/web/email tech company is if they can’t run email services, and now apparently can’t run websites securely either? I spent a while mulling Fastmail and Rollernet and Mxroute vs paying for Office365 and thinking about how impossible it is to know if a company has the tech skills to back their product offering - and then if they actually do use them - or are just marketing.