Rackspace went from $2.99 to $10 a mailbox

In January 2026 Rackspace told customers that Email hosting would go from roughly $2.99 to $10 per mailbox per month, effective March. Partners reported increases between 110% and nearly 500%; one reseller, Laughing Squid, reported 706%. Notice was about six weeks. Add-ons like Email Plus and Archiving went up too.

If you are reading this you have probably already done the arithmetic. Here it is anyway, because the shape of it matters more than the number.

What it costs you now

The column that doesn't move is the point. We don't charge per mailbox at all — a dormant inbox costs us a database row, so metering it would be charging you for nothing. What we meter is the three things that genuinely cost us money: mail received, mail sent, and bytes stored. Pro is $12/month for 15,000 received, 5,000 sent and 25 GB pooled across every mailbox you create.

Being straight about it: if you have two mailboxes and low volume, our free tier or a $19/year plan from Purelymail will both beat us on price. The per-mailbox maths only becomes dramatic once you have more than a couple of addresses, which is exactly the situation Rackspace customers are in.

What actually makes this hard

Price is not the reason people stay on a mail host they resent. Migration is. Every shared-inbox vendor knows it, which is why they all quietly require you to keep your existing provider.

Three things worry people, in this order:

1. "I'll lose my archive." You won't. Rackspace speaks IMAP, and so do we.
2. "Mail will bounce during the switch." It won't, if you cut over in the right order — see below.
3. "I'll have to reconfigure everyone's phone." You will, once. There is no way around this with any provider.

The cutover, in order

1. Create the mailboxes first, while Rackspace is still live. Same local parts — hello@, billing@, everyone's personal address. No per-mailbox charge, so create every one you have, including the ones you were about to cancel to save money.
2. Run the importer. It connects to Rackspace over IMAP with each mailbox's credentials and copies every folder across with its structure intact. Read and unread state comes with it. Nothing is deleted at the far end.
3. Then move MX. Two records, plus SPF and a DKIM CNAME. New mail starts arriving with us on the next delivery attempt; anything already delivered to Rackspace stays there, which is why the import comes first.
4. Re-run the importer once, a day later. It picks up whatever landed at Rackspace during propagation. This is the step people skip and then miss a day of mail.
5. Cancel Rackspace — after you have confirmed a week of mail arriving normally, not before.

Realistically it is an afternoon for a small team, and the fiddly part is client reconfiguration rather than anything server-side.

What you should check before committing

Two things we would want to know if we were you:

• Calendars and contacts. If your team relies on Rackspace's calendar sharing, we don't replace it — we host mail, not a groupware suite. Fastmail or Google Workspace do, and cost more accordingly.
• Outbound volume. Every new domain with us starts reply-only: you can answer anyone who has written to you immediately, but originating mail to strangers — invoices to new customers, onboarding sequences, an app's transactional mail — needs outbound access. We review it per domain on any plan, free included. Ask for it during migration rather than discovering it on day one.

What you get that Rackspace never gave you

The dashboard groups every message by customer instead of by mailbox. One person who wrote to billing@ about an invoice, hello@ about a renewal and support@ about SSO shows up as one person with three threads, across every inbox in the account. Mailbox hosts don't do this because they have no interface; shared-inbox tools do it but host no mail, so you'd be paying two vendors.

Start free and run the importer against Rackspace before you cancel anything. Free tier, no card.

Sources

• The Register — Rackspace tests customer loyalty with brutal email price hike
• TechRadar — customers call the hike "devastating"