--- title: Moving from Exchange to Zoho Mail date: 2024-06-03 publishDate: 2024-06-03 tags: - projects - technology --- Somewhere back around 2011 or 2012 I moved from my ISP's email service to Microsoft Office 365 Business plan that offered access to MS Exchange server. I had previously toyed with using Gmail's services with my own domain name but didn't find that it met my specific needs. Too, I really didn't have a great love for Gmail. My motivation for moving, as I recall now more than a dozen years later, is that I was starting my doctoral studies and needed to be able to coordinate more easily with classmates, access calendars and documents across multiple platforms, and generally have better control over my workflows. I was already using Microsoft Office for my word processing and spreadsheet needs, and was looking for an integrated solution that would allow me to plan and execute my work more easily. After playing around with several solutions I finally settled on Office 365. Some folks might argue that using Gmail's free service (which at the time allowed the use of personal domain name without incurring an additional cost) made more sense than spending money on O365. I saw it differently. First, there's the old mantra that if it's free then you're the product and there was some question (at least in my mind) about the security and privacy of [Gmail](I-dont-trust-gmail-heres-why). An issue that I still feel is valid today. Second, I was already using MS Word for my writing and rather than write in Google Docs then convert to .docx, it made more sense to use MS Word and save my documents to the Sharepoint site that was included in my O365 account. To be honest, I was not terribly keen on paying upwards of $60 a year for email but when I took a step back, I realized that the benefits I got from using O365 made the cost at least reasonable. Now, let's fast-forward to 2024. I completed my doctorate in 2018. With the degree behind me and my employer providing an O365 account for most of my work, I no longer really needed my personal O365 account. Inertia, more than anything else, kept me from switching away. I had thousands of emails tucked away in my email account and several hundred documents stored in Sharepoint. Moving all of that stuff was, it seemed, a daunting task. So, I just let it sit and paid the annual costs. In December, 2023, though, I retired and started taking a good look at what I was using. I realized pretty quickly that I wasn't using essentially any of the services offered by O365 beyond email and that was mostly junk mail. Why was I paying $60/ year for that service? Beside, over time the offerings that came with what was initially called "Business Essentials" were degraded with fewer and fewer services offered at that tier. The cost/benefit just wasn't there. So, I began looking for alternatives. One of the considerations was the amount of available storage for emails and attachments. I took a look at my O365 mail storage usage and realized that I had accumulated less than 1.5 GB of email storage over a 10 year period. I knew that even a small storage application would be fine. I looked at a variety of services, including some very popular, privacy oriented services such as ProtonMail, GMX, Mail.com, and several others. Overall, the costs for these services were not that much different from what I was already paying and the didn't provide the same benefits as O365 so there was really no incentive to move to any of them. I even considered simply using my extant iCloud+ account which allows you to include a custom domain for your email. Since I was already paying for iCloud+ that would have seemed the logical choice. The issue there is that your me@icloud.com, me@me.com, and your custom domain email all get dumped into one pot. I use my iCloud email as something of a filter when I need to sign up or provide an email address for a service or site that I'm not sure I trust. This way my legitimate mail and my 'junk' email has a bit of separation. I didn't want everything dumped in one bucket. After doing a bit more research, I found Zoho Mail. Doing a bit of research, I found that Zoho has been around since 1996, is based in India, has several locations around the world, including Texas in the US, and has a full suite of business applications. As of 2022, it had more than 80 million users, including some big names like Amazon, Netflix, Nike, etc [^1]. This was not fly-by-night operation that was likely to go belly-up anytime soon and, moreover, has demonstrated that it is a trustworthy operation in terms of security. Now the site is, to me, a bit confusing. But for a mere $1.25 (that's a dollar and a quarter!) a month you get full business level email with 10GB storage, well beyond my needs for the foreseeable future. From everything I can find out, it is as secure as O365. I made my decision! The thing I was dreading was moving from one service to another. However, Zoho provides a process for doing that which is simple and works fairly quickly. Overall the process took maybe an hour to complete and when it was done I had all of my emails from my O365 account now in my Zohomail account, and was appropriately accessing the account using my custom domain name[^2]. I waited a few weeks before deactivating my O365 account. This allowed me to ensure that everything was working as it should be and that I had downloaded from my Sharepoint site all that I wanted and deleted the rest. So far, I'm quite satisfied with Zoho as my mail provider. The service is responsive, secure, does a good job of filtering spam and even sorts mail into various buckets e.g. newsletters, notifications, etc. My email clients have no problems connecting to the service and I've had not issues with mail I send being rejected. [^1]: https://kgcrmsolutions.com/10-companies-using-zoho-crm/ [^2]: I did have to update my DNS records with my registrar in order to use my custom domain with my new email provider.