Email provider for your clients

@stefr What do you mean by “email server”? Do you mean SMTP for sending emails? Or mailboxes that your customer can send and receive emails?

@martinbean I mean an email server where they can create email addresses and corresponding boxes.

@stefr Unfortunately that’s the downside of moving away from shared hosting: you lose infrastructure such as email services like this. You’re going to have to opt for a third-party service instead. Most ISPs and hosting companies offer this as a separate service for a couple of bucks per email address per month.

I know transip offers a good service for this, pretty cheap for €3,- per month!

• Dutch site: https://www.transip.nl/webhosting/emailonly/
• UK site: https://www.transip.co.uk/webhosting/emailonly/

Do yourself a favour and encourage the client to use Google Apps for Business. It's $5/month per user, gives loads of storage - probably more than you're going to want to manage for them - web access, mobile, endless clients, and best of all you don't have to worry about supporting it. They get the benefit of all the other Google Apps, too.

Peace of mind for you and the client, and chances of support headaches for you get very small.

Thanks @martinbean and @bobbybouwmann I was affraid this would be the only option. But it'll have to do.

Google apps is a good options as well ;)

Thanks @deringer. This is what I usually do (Google Apps or Office365). But sometimes there's a client with a really small budget.

I definitely recommend Google Business Apps https://www.google.co.uk/a

Or maybe something like OVH emails: http://www.ovh.co.uk/emails/hosted-exchange-2013/

If they can't afford $5/month per user, maybe they don't need email lol

Of course, there is the option of installing your own email server on your existing server, but providing support for Email related issues can be crippling for a small business or freelancer. Hand that problem off to someone else :)

you could use directadmin/virtualmin/usermin, is gpl (have a free version) and comes with smtp, httpd, database and all you need to sharing hosting. https://www.virtualmin.com/

Thank you all for your suggestions!

I also had the same problem, moving from CPanel to Forge/DigitalOcean.

Some domains registrars also offers hosted emails in their service. Great option, as you don't have to manage servers in this case. There are also "email only" providers like Zoho Mail, Fastmail, Rackspace Email, ...