Email can be a real pain when free services like Hotmail decide to block you or other good emails. Unfortunately, free email services run by Microsoft like Hotmail, Live, Outlook, and some other companies, do not care much about getting good email to their users. They are more focused on blocking any possible spam and they want to achieve this with the least amount of work and servers possible. Filtering and managing SPAM takes lot of work and computer power, it’s much easier for them to do broad blocks that could even potentially send SPAM. For example; If one IP address sends even a little SPAM from say a WordPress site getting hacked. Microsoft will block 100’s of surrounding IPs that are not even related to the issue. With Gmail, a much better free email service, they only block the offending IPs.
This means if you have your email on the same server as your website, all Microsoft email services will most likely block you. They won’t risk your website being hacked and used to send SPAM. This is why you’ll need remote eMail if you need to send to Hotmail, Outlook, or Live email accounts.
You can still send to Microsoft email services, but you’ll need remote email to do this. Remote email is where your email is on a different server than your website.
Here’s a short list of remote email options, prices, and some pros and cons.
Listed in order of popularity
Sadly, WorkSpace at EZ Domain Name will convert to Outlook email in mid 2022. This was our favorite remote email option for years. The price is low but with their recent decision to use Outlook for their email instead of running their own system means they are no longer a good option. This will block millions of good emails and websites from communicating with you. And Microsoft has zero support to fix their issues.
G-Suite from Google is probably the best overall option if you don’t mind the price and lack of support. I believe it’s about $10-15 a month and comes with extra options like file storage. G-mail is the best overall professional email service, we liked ZoHo better because we didn’t need an entire suite of options and it’s much easier to set up. If you just want email, than ZoHo is the way to go. If you want the extra options with G-Suite and are tech savvy, it’s the best overall remote email service available.
ZoHo email starts as low as $1 a month per email which comes in as the lowest price. They don’t have the best support but once you get the settings going, you will have reliable remote email and a great ongoing price. Web Host Pro plans to use ZoHo for certain internal email in the near future.
Proton Mail seems to hide their prices (which can’t be good). But we do see a lot of email coming from them, so their could be something good there that we just don’t know about. We recently heard it’s about $10 per email a month. Since Gmail is far better and about the same rate, we would recommend them or SoHo mail.
FastMail is a no non-sense high quality email service. The only draw back is they charge $5 per email if you want full access and IMAP like most people do.
Remote email services to avoid
Like we said before, anything Microsoft, Outlook 360, Live, or Hotmail related will block thousand of good email services and probably give you an aneurysm trying to figure out how to configure it and keep it going.