Email hosting....

[stevewm]

Been trying to decide what to do with our company email... We currently use POP accounts included with our web hosting package from 1And1.

Our biggest issue is SPAM. 1and1's spam filtering is absolutely worthless. It provides very little in the way of customization. It either marks everything as spam ("High"), or doesn't catch anything at all ("Medium" or, "Low" as they put it) Their customer service could care less... But anyways...


Anyone have any suggestions for hosted email providers? Specifically ones with good SPAM filtering.

Gmail's paid service would be perfect, but $50 per user/year is much more than we are paying now, and the boss won't even consider it.

We currently have around 60 users. About half use Outlook, the rest Webmail.

 

[stephenb]

Gmail's paid service would be perfect, but $50 per user/year is much more than we are paying now, and the boss won't even consider it.

How much time is spent dealing with spam? If it's more than 1 hour per year, then it's not much more. Also, google apps is much more than email. Calendars and the apps are great also. Not to mention the ability to work out of the office.

Won't even get into backups and such.

 

[molo]

Yeah, $50 per user/per year is pretty cheap. Your only other alternatives all involve getting your own mail server (or paying someone else to host one for you), and even then, you'd still end up spending money on anti-spam software/services/appliances.

If you are willing and able, you *could* make a really nice mail server with all the anti-spam goodies using Linux and Postfix and a bunch of other stuff. But it's fairly complex if you aren't familiar with it.

 

[erratick]

50 per user/per year is pretty cheap.

Consider that at 50 users that is 2500$ total for a year. A server to run mail and untangle using opensource tools for 50 users is about 2000$ much less power, time of sysadmin, backups, implementation pain, etc.

Your good options are:

1) pay the 50$ a year for some one else to do it
2) get 1and1 to improve the spam stuff or pay for that privilege
3) do it yourself and it will probably cost about the same or more. If you have a VM and expertise, then the additional cost is probably lower. If you don't it is probably higher.

Basically if email or technology are not your core business then, it is probably worth the 50$ a year as it doesn't waste time or resources.

 

[stevewm]

I wish Google provided a "email only" plan.... We only need email functionality, but would like to have some of the administrative functionality the paid account does.

We currently only pay $200 per YEAR for email. $3,000 per year as it would be with Google is a very hard sell to my boss, especially now with the current business climate.

We can't really host our own due to bandwidth limitations. None of our locations has access to anything other than DSL with 768kbps upload. We already have an intranet application that suffers with this limitation, I don't want to throw email in the mix as well.

So as you can see I am stuck between my boss' shoe string budget on one side, and limitations on the other..

Guess I'm just gonna have to lay it really hard on him. The wallet is going to have to open wider -- --

 

[chalex]

60 users. What's the total size of the mailboxes?

One option is to go with a more powerful hosting plan. A VPS starts at $20/mo and gives you the power of a complete Linux box.

So assuming you're not too busy, you can get a $20/mo plan, invest a bunch of your admin time and have your own mailserver in a datacenter somewhere. However, if you're not a Linux admin, this is probably not the way to go, and then you're back to the "hosted e-mail", $50 per year per user cost.

 

[erratick]

you can also shop email hosts:

http://www.emailhosting.com/email_business.html

or whatever. I don't recommend them particularly, they were just one of the top google hits.

 

[molo]

Guess I'm just gonna have to lay it really hard on him. The wallet is going to have to open wider Smile

It's the best option, really.

And if this business can't afford to spend $3000/year on e-mail, then they probably need to rethink their business plan. $3000/year, for a company with 60 users/employees, is NOTHING. I mean, it's a rounding error. Your boss must be one cheap motherfucker.

 

[esposj]

Originally posted by stevewm:

We currently only pay $200 per YEAR for email. $3,000 per year as it would be with Google is a very hard sell to my boss, especially now with the current business climate.

This tells me you aren't using much space at all, true?

We can't really host our own due to bandwidth limitations. None of our locations has access to anything other than DSL with 768kbps upload. We already have an intranet application that suffers with this limitation, I don't want to throw email in the mix as well.

No doubt. I run email for a similarly sized biz (75 users) and we host it outside for the same reason.

So as you can see I am stuck between my boss' shoe string budget on one side, and limitations on the other..

This is the reality. You aren't even near a shoestring budget -- -- We host email on a dedicated machine at a self managed hosting company (VoxRox.com part of Voxel). We grew from internal to shared to cheap dedicated (service killed us when the server failed) to Voxel (drives pulled out of bad server and brought back up in identical hardware within 2 hours last time there was a problem).

The problem is, that I have no redundancy. To my eyes this is where Google for Domains looks amazing. Not only do I get gmail, the space, and the spam filtering, but I get 6 SMTP servers and some sort of an SLA.

Unfortunately for me, The price of the dedicated server is
Email today is relatively expensive. Fighting SPAM takes CPU. IMAP takes space. These are things that are a bit tough to do on a VPS.

On a side note, for my small side biz (hosting /email) I've been so much more happy since offloading most of my clients onto Google for Domains. They are small enough that they A) Don't hit the 50 user limit and B)understand that the lack of a Google SLA is still better then what I provide as far as email redundancy goes. Spam fighting sucks!

 

[DLH]

Originally posted by stevewm:
I wish Google provided a "email only" plan.... We only need email functionality, but would like to have some of the administrative functionality the paid account does.

If the SPAM problem is your only issue, you could also use an e-mail filtering service with your current e-mail. Google has this option for $12 per user/ per year. Google's Postini

There are similar services you can look at too like MX Logic, Messagelabs, etc.

 

[sryan2k1]

Appriver.

 

[stevewm]

Originally posted by chalex:
60 users. What's the total size of the mailboxes?
One option is to go with a more powerful hosting plan. A VPS starts at $20/mo and gives you the power of a complete Linux box.

So assuming you're not too busy, you can get a $20/mo plan, invest a bunch of your admin time and have your own mailserver in a datacenter somewhere. However, if you're not a Linux admin, this is probably not the way to go, and then you're back to the "hosted e-mail", $50 per year per user cost.

1And1 allows for 2000 at 1GB each, though no one actually uses that right now. The heaviest users all use POP, not IMAP, so its not stored on the server anyways.

I just don't have the time to setup and administer our own. To much involved, especially if you go the cheaper open-source route.

Originally posted by molo:
And if this business can't afford to spend $3000/year on e-mail, then they probably need to rethink their business plan. $3000/year, for a company with 60 users/employees, is NOTHING. I mean, it's a rounding error. Your boss must be one cheap motherfucker.

He is not that cheap. Its just like most technically illiterate owners/CEOs they don't understand why they have to now pay $2,000+ from $200 per year, despite your best explanations. Bandwidth, SPAM, etc.. sound like a different language to some...



Thanks again for all the replies...

I managed to find a host called Mailtrust that seems to have a good reputation. I am looking into their Noteworthy hosting. Allows for calendar and contact syncing with Outlook for $2.60/month per mailbox. With a nice webmail interface. That works about to about $1500 per year. Still far from $200, but its the best I have found so far.

I ran some of my options by the boss and managed to possibly talk him into them.. When the accountant gets back from vacation they are going to make a decision then. If I can convince the accountant, my boss usually follows -- --

DLH: I had looked that direction too, but I am trying to get away from our current mail host, 1And1, entirely. Emails sent from our own domain, to our own domain should not take 4+ hours to show up, or get flagged as SPAM for that matter. According to their customer service, this should be considered normal operation.

 

[rob3r]

Try and work some numbers up, figuring out what people get paid per hour and how much time they spend deleting spam.

Google Apps really is a great option for a company like yours, as others have stated, $3000 is nothing. Sounds like you understand that but your boss is just having an issue with it.

Also, you might be surprised how quickly people will start using things like shared calendaring if they see that the option is there.

I wrote up a fairly in-depth article on the differences between Google Apps and MS Hosted Exchange, maybe it can be of some use to you, http://www.budboytech.com/bud-...ange-comparison.html

 

[stmiller]

I use 1and1 IMAP and it works OK with no real spam probs, though it's just me and not a business. -- --

 

[The ToOTaLL]

Originally posted by DLH:
If the SPAM problem is your only issue, you could also use an e-mail filtering service with your current e-mail. Google has this option for $12 per user/ per year. Google's Postini

There are similar services you can look at too like MX Logic, Messagelabs, etc.

Originally posted by sryan2k1:
Appriver.

I would have to agree. If you're happy with your service, work with them to turn off the spam filtering and find a company to oursource it to.

We've used AppRiver, MXLogic, and brought in an appliance to our datacenter to provide these services to our customers at a cheaper price, so I'm sure you could find someone out there that would charge between $30-50 a month to eliminate this issue.