Your free email from GoDaddy/Bluehost/Google Domains disappeared — what now?

What changed and when

A compressed timeline of the "free email is over" era:

The underlying driver: email is expensive to run well. Spam filtering, DKIM/SPF/DMARC enforcement, and IP reputation management cost real money, and the "free email with hosting" era assumed it was cheap marketing glue. It turned out not to be, especially as deliverability requirements tightened.

Your four real options

1. Host-included email. Providers like LaunchPad Host, SiteGround, and some others still include 5–10 mailboxes in shared hosting. If your domain is already at a host that does this, you are done. Watch for quota limits (often 1–5GB per mailbox).

2. Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace. $6/user/month for the entry tier. You get the full productivity suite, not just email. Best if you already use Office or Google Docs. Migration is well-trodden and both providers offer free migration tools.

3. Privacy-forward paid. Proton Mail Business at €6.99/user/month, Tutanota Business at €2.40/user/month, Mailbox.org at €1–3/month. Strong end-to-end encryption; smaller ecosystem but growing. Good fit for privacy-sensitive users.

4. Self-hosted. Mailcow, Mail-in-a-Box, Mailu, Postfix+Dovecot+Rspamd manually. Cost: ~$5/month for a small VPS. Caveat: email deliverability is hard, not technically but politically — see the self-hosting section below.

How to migrate email without losing mail

The ordering matters. If you do it wrong, you lose mid-flight messages.

1. Back up every mailbox first. IMAP-backup tools like imapsync or mbsync grab everything into a local archive. Do this before changing anything.
2. Set up new mailboxes with the new provider, but do not switch MX records yet.
3. Forward mail from old mailboxes to new for a transition week. Both sides get copies.
4. Update DNS MX records to point to the new provider. Propagation takes 24–72 hours; during this time, some senders will deliver to the old server and some to the new.
5. Lower the old MX TTL before the cutover (set TTL to 300 seconds a week in advance, then execute the cutover). This minimizes split-delivery window.
6. Keep the old mailbox active for 30 days after cutover. Stragglers will trickle in. After 30 days, archive and close.

Every step has DNS implications (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC). A mistake in SPF is the most common cause of "my outbound mail is going to spam" after migration.

Is self-hosting email worth it?

Technically, self-hosting email is easier than it has ever been. Mailcow installs in 20 minutes. Mail-in-a-Box in 15. Configuration is reasonable.

Politically, self-hosting email is harder than it has ever been. Here is why:

• IP reputation. Cloud-VPS IPs (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Linode, OVH) are on default deny-lists at Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo. Your mail lands in spam even when perfectly configured. Moving to a "clean" IP takes months of consistent delivery.
• Domain reputation. A newly-configured domain sending mail starts with no reputation. Warmup is slow — start with 50 messages per day for 3–4 weeks before scaling up.
• Blacklist monitoring. Being listed on Spamhaus, Barracuda, or SORBS happens overnight and requires active delisting requests.
• DMARC enforcement. Gmail and Yahoo now require valid DMARC records on sending domains. One misconfigured DKIM record and half your outbound mail is rejected.

Self-host if you have a specific privacy/sovereignty reason. For a small business that just wants sales@yourdomain.com to work, host-included email or Microsoft 365 is strictly better value.

What's included at LaunchPad Host

All hosting plans include:

• 10 mailboxes with 10GB each
• Full IMAP / SMTP / webmail (Roundcube)
• DKIM, SPF, and DMARC configured automatically
• Spam filtering via rspamd
• Relay through clean transactional IPs (not shared with bulk senders)
• Per-mailbox forwarding, aliases, and vacation autoresponders

Overage is $1/mailbox/month. We do not charge extra for "business class" features — you get everything on Starter.

If you need something beyond that (e.g., a team of 50, or Outlook calendaring), Microsoft 365 is what we recommend. We do not resell it — it is cheaper direct from Microsoft — but we help configure MX records for customers who ask.