Mail forwarding because some people want to use their personal emails. Problem is that personal emails are not known (their server email address would be known) so this way someone can send an email via the server and if that person chooses to respond with their personal email that is on them.
I don’t know what you consider “cheap”, but we use Gmail for business. It’s about $10 a month per email address. We also use our domain name in the email address, not gmail.com .
I use WebQuarry (webquarry.com). I pay $8/month and get everything you need except the 200 email addresses. But I think you get unlimited email addresses with the $20/month plan.
You probably need full domain hosting, whether you need a website or not. I pay Dreamhost $120/year for hosting, plus the annual domain registration fee of ~$15, and get unlimited email addresses.
You *definitely *need DNS hosting, although many registrars, like Dreamhost, bundle it up so many people don’t realize it’s a separate service.
I use GoDaddy for a personal domain name registration, DNS hosting, web hosting and email hosting. They’re not bad and offer very good customer support. I have not done comparison shopping for price.
Since acquiring my own domain name, which I use only for email, I’ve used two companies. The first, going back ten years maybe, was Go Daddy. It’s user interface was great. Very simple. Very easy to use. At one point, however, I started to have technical problems (my messages wouldn’t go through). Couldn’t resolve the problem. For the last few years I’ve been using Web Hosting Hub. My guess is that most of their customers are hosting sites. It’s interface is a bit more complicated, but I’ve never had a problem. I’ve been thinking about Go Daddy again just because it seems to be more oriented to smaller users. However, and although WHH is more complex, I have to admit I’ve never had a problem.
Gmail for business is $6/user/month for the lowest tier.
Rackspace Email for business is $3/user/month. In my experience (10 years ago) the moment your users want something slightly more advanced beyond basic email - shared calendaring, mobile push, etc - it becomes more trouble than it’s worth.
So basically it’s about your budget and what you can get for that budget. You could set up an IMAP/sendmail server running on an old PC in your basement and hook it up to your home broadband connection if you wanted to, and that would easily handle 200 users. TCO would be about $60/year for a static IP and $20/year for DNS hosting, plus power, and all the time you’d waste setting it up, maintaining it up, and listening to complaints from your end users about a messaging experience reminiscent of 1997.
GoDaddy’s CEO is a major dick and really quite evil of a man. It’s a shit company, ethically speaking. Don’t use their services if you care about stuff like that…
Dreamhost offers unlimited email for $72/year (total, including a free domain) if you are OK with prepaying for 3 years upfront: Shared Hosting - Fast & Secure - 24/7 Support - DreamHost (with a 97-day money back guarantee). If you want a referral code for a little bit more off, let me know.
If you just want email forwarding to personal mailboxes (and not actual email boxes that can be independently accessed), Nearlyfreespeech.net does that for $10.95/year/domain total.
That said, if your company can afford it, I’d totally pay for GSuite (Gmail for business) and move all your company’s calendaring, documents, storage, chat, etc. over to it. Worth every penny. If your employees’ online lives aren’t worth $6/mo… well… shrug
That page says 153 dollars per YEAR for 25 two-gigabyte mailboxes and 100 addresses.
I have used their Easy DNS for decades, very ethical company by my ethics (a bit libertarian) and works very well. I only use their domain registration and e-mail forwarding. The forwarding adds a noticeable delay (very noticebale e.g. for password reset emails, around a minute) but works really well. No experience with Easy Mail.
I had decided on Bluehost since it had unlimited email for the second tier plan but it looks like it’s turned into a Wordpress/Office 365 site. If I’m reading it right, gone are unlimited emails and now it is per licence which we cannot do. That really sucks because it was perfect for our needs.
I was going to suggest pobox.com, as this is right up their alley, but their pricing model isn’t independent of the number of addresses. I’ve used their basic-level service for email redirection since the early 90s so that I could maintain a permanent email address after university.
If you have a modicum of experience administering a Linux/Unix system, I’m pretty sure you could set something up on the free tier of Amazon Web Services that would meet your requirements. It would likely be pretty rudimentary and require more administrative attention than you might want, though.