One can get 15 free accounts in Zoho (10 de-facto + 5 extra), if you can refer another business. Both parties get 5 extra users. Helpful for info@, jobs@, privacy@ etc.
I don't know about Zoho, but in case of Google Apps, they allow you a configuration to route all mail through a host of yours which would allow you to create these aliases without having to pay for actual accounts.
At lest that's what I'm doing at our place. All mail to our domain goes to our MX which does alias expansion and then forwards is to Google Apps (after making a backup copy into a maildir in case Gmail goes away and we need emergency-access to mail).
Google Apps in turn forwards all outgoing mail to that machine too which then makes a backup copy in a Sent-Mail maildir, before actually sending the mails off to the recipients (this step is harder because now it's your responsibility to deal with SPF, PTR lookups and mail server rep in general - but it's no rocket science either)
I moved from google-apps to zoho, one reason is that google email is not available globally while zoho is, e.g. google-email is totally blocked for Chinese(employees)
Google Apps allows you to create groups for free, or you can alias individual mailboxes (if you're okay with thing@ going to just one person). No need to run through your own middlebox. You do need to make sure that external people can send to the given group, though.
Yeah. I know - but I also wanted the free backups with instant-imapd support for when Google decides that they want to cancel our account for $REASONS and we won't have anybody to call (to this day still my biggest worry with google apps)
Zoho has been great for me for a long time, but they recently had some major problems (coupled with hugely adverse external factors like a brutal flood), hopefully they've learned from their mistakes, I really want to keep using them and pay them eventually when my startup grows :) .
They're much better at support than Google (which isn't saying much, but at least you have someone that answers).
