Zoho Mail

Zoho Free Mail is a great free software that has fantastic capabilities. The ability to add up to five users for free and different groups such as support, info, no-reply, etc. are powerful for freemium software.

It's hard to set up if you don't know what you're doing. It requires adding and editing entries to you DNS host server for your domain hosting. If you don't know what that is, you might want to consider another solution.

Zoho Mail worked well as a provider for my email on my custom domain. It has all of the features you would need out of a typical email provider, like Gmail​ or Outlook. It was simple to set up, just by adding an MX record into my DNS which took until 5 minutes. The UI is simple but powerful, and their advanced search tools helped me find emails from long ago that I wouldn't be able to find otherwise.

Since my only user was myself and an additional service account for miscellaneous sending purposes, I was using the "free" version, which is fully featured, but limited to 5 users. While the free version includes quite a lot of mail features, it is ultimately limited on mail storage, eventually causing me to move away. The free version also included access to some of Zoho's other products, including their contacts and calendar suite (expected with any email provider these days), as well as their office suite (think Word/Excel/Powerpoint). These were nice features to have included, but I ultimately did not use them too much, except for Contacts and Calendar.

Zoho is the underdog in the category of SaaS business suites, competing against GSuite and O365. While the product is fully featured and includes plenty of powerful tools, what it lacks is widespread support and integration, which ultimately made me move to O365, after using Zoho for 5 years. Their propriety storage and document solution are​ basically unheard of compared to Office Online (with OneDrive) and Google Docs (with Drive). Their IMAP/POP3, CalDav, and CardDav solutions are basic and fragmented, though the features are there. Furthermore, with the free account, I didn't get/expect any customer support so any problems were left to myself to fix (not many came up anyways).

Primarily, you lack integration with third parties and industry leaders with their services. They don't provide many plugins or connectors to external parties, and when they do, the options are lackluster. Don't expect to be able to automate things with Zoho.

What I love about all Zoho products is how seamless the complete experience is. The way all the apps communicate with each other is super convenient. This integration is particularly evident between Zoho Mail and Zoho CRM. It's in the simple things, like how the email contact list is integrated with contacts/leads/deals added in CRM. I also love how when you receive an email, you can see, from the Mail app itself, whether this address is a lead, deal or just contact. It's a nice touch. The UI is also extremely easy to navigate. All buttons are where they're supposed to be, and I appreciate the night mode. It's a boon while working in low light conditions.

Despite its amazing features, my experience of using Zoho Mail on desktop was extremely sub-par. Everything is just slow; there's no other way to put it. The app itself takes a few seconds extra to load occasionally, but that's just the beginning. Formatting emails is infuriating, to say the least. Uploading images in between text can take minutes (these are compressed photos of less than 1MB) even on solid wifi. I often use GIFs, and these take even longer to upload if they don't fail altogether. Resizing images within the emails is glitchy. The font picker does not switch to the right font sometimes. Also, before I send out emails with images/videos/gifs, I usually send out a test to my Zoho and Gmail accounts to see if it looks alright. More often than not, the images and videos will not load on Zoho Mail at all, while Gmail would load them in a split second.

As someone who writes a lot of emails, these are not things I can put up with. Also, the UI, while dead easy to navigate, is extremely dull and boring. Gmail is leagues ahead in this regard.

I hope this is a one-off incident since I don't see many other reviewers complaining about these on Capterra. It's a shame though, because the overall proposition is so solid and appealing.