For teams choosing where their mail lives
Most plans send and receive mail without trouble. They part ways on how much each person can keep, how a team shares one inbox, how old mail moves across and what stops a stolen password.
Under the plan names
Every host offers a mailbox on your own domain. The differences show up later, when a mailbox fills, a teammate leaves or a password leaks.
A plan either gives each person their own limit or pools one allowance across the whole team. Attachments and old mail count toward it, and on many plans so do files kept in the host's cloud drive.
What happens at the limit varies too. Some hosts stop delivering new mail until space is cleared, and others offer an archive or charge for more.
A general address can work in three ways. A forwarding alias copies each message to several people, a group sends it to a list, and a shared mailbox gives the team one queue where everyone can see what has been answered.
The last one is the only one that stops two people replying to the same customer, and some hosts bill it as a full user.
Moving hosts means copying mail, contacts and calendars across, then pointing your domain's MX records at the new host. Hosts differ in how much of that their import tools handle, and in what they leave behind.
Folder structure usually survives. Inbox rules, signatures and calendar sharing often have to be set up again.
Two-step sign-in is the control that stops a stolen password from being enough. Check whether an administrator can require it for everyone, because a setting each person may skip protects little.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC are DNS records that let other mail servers check that a message from your domain really came from you. Hosts differ in how much of that setup they walk you through.
Read the plan page with these
An address like you@yourbusiness looks the same from outside whatever sits behind it. What sits behind it decides what you pay for and who can read the mail.
Changing hosts
The order matters more than the tool. Mail keeps arriving while you work, so the old host stays open until the new one has taken over.
Changing where mail goes is done in your domain's DNS settings, which may sit with the registrar, a web host or whoever built your site.
Create every person, alias and group on the new host with the same addresses, then bring across mail, contacts and calendars while the old host is still receiving.
Point them at the new host during a quiet period. The change takes time to spread, so some mail lands at the old host for a while.
Run a final copy to pick up late arrivals, and only then close the old account.
Before you commit
An introductory rate and a renewal rate can be quite different, so look for the per-user price once the first term ends.
Annual billing often costs less per month, and it can also limit how soon you can drop a user or leave.
Mail can move to any host as long as you control the domain. Register it in the business's name and keep the login yourself.
Check how you export a mailbox and how long the host keeps your data after you cancel.