As of December 6th, 2012 Google Apps Free is not available for new accounts. I've been parking my email accounts on Google. So I had a new email address to put up today and I found out that new accounts with a domain different than gmail.com are going to be $5 per month.

Have any of you faced this situation? I might have to learn how to host email accounts on my own server. I'm I missing something?

i can answer this because it was discussed on irc.

if you open an incognito window and go to appengine, you can sign up for for a new google account and then google apps, but you only get 1 account, not 10.
but you need a non google email address that isn't already associated with a google account, and a phone number.

dwfreed posted a url with more details, i can't find it atm.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/g ... 1SmipM2Y0J

Here you go

(Source thread for easier findings later: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=9634 )

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Disclaimer: I am no longer employed by Linode; opinions are my own alone.

I created a free account with Microsoft and they give you up to 500 email accounts per domain.

https://domains.live.com

I had to change the MX & TXT part of the DNS records for the domain.

I would have tried harder to use Google Apps as per dwfreed's suggestions but I had already registered the domain with the Google Apps (for pay) and even after I canceled the Google Apps account they had the domain locked for other uses for 2 weeks. Turns out you must have a minimum of 2 users at $5/month each to use Google Apps for business. I needed an email address on that domain immediately and the Microsoft connection is doing it.