Mailtrust (Webmail.us) - or other hosted email services

I think you are 100% on the money to outsource your email service.
Email has become a critical component of business communication, so
it's necessary to make it universally accessible, and keep it running
100% of the time. Most small organizations simply don't have the
expertise to do that, and larger organizations typically have
something better to do with their IT departments.

In fact, I really don't know why ANY companies host their own email
unless their user base is so huge that it's monumentally cheaper to
handle it in-house.

There are LOTS of providers for this kind of service, so shop around
and make sure you get the best one for your purposes. On the low end,
you can use any hosting account that provides IMAP/POP email access.
On the high end, you can get managed Zimbra or Exchange hosting will
full groupware.

As for my experience, I recently set up my wife's shared psychology
practice with Google Apps for Your Domain.

The ups are that it's super-easy to use, permits POP3 and IMAP access
or a stellar webmail interface, and it incorporates calendaring,
document sharing, secure(ish) IM, and other enterprisey groupware
features. It's dead simple to set up and administer, and has some
other niceties that I've come to appreciate. (Start pages for your
users, easy web page setup)

If you only have a few users, you can go with the no-tech-support
version free of charge. If you have more users or want tech support
and the ability to schedule resources/rooms on your calendars, you pay
$50/user/year. Quite cheap for what you get.

A hidden bonus is that because of the great webmail interface, you
don't have to provide desktop email clients for your users. So you
save on software and (most importantly) support of those programs.

Uptime is fabulous. I've never had it fail. In fact, I was so
impressed, that I moved my email off of Fastmail.fm (of which I was a
very happy customer) and haven't looked back. It's faster and more
reliable and does a better job catching spam.

The downside is that you're giving your company information to Google.
That freaks out some folks, but with ANY outsourced solution, you'll
have the same problems.

On Jan 23, 2008, at 09:21, Ben Rubinstein wrote:

> Does anyone have experience, good or bad, to share regarding
> mailtrust.com
> (ne้ Webmail.us)?

Never actually used them . . . but I did a comparison of the various
mail/hosting services awhile back and they were one of the top 3 or 4
in the evaluation. I've got a buddy that's been with them for awhile
and he's got no complaints.

On Jan 23, 2008, at 6:21 AM, Ben Rubinstein wrote:

> Does anyone have experience, good or bad, to share regarding
> mailtrust.com
> (ne้ Webmail.us)?

Webmail.us generally has generally had a good reputation among users
who frequent emaildiscussions.com, which is where I heard about them
first. I signed up a client with them a year or two ago, and I haven't
heard any complaints.

Nik Friedman TeBockhorst wrote:

> In fact, I really don't know why ANY companies host their own email
> unless their user base is so huge that it's monumentally cheaper to
> handle it in-house.

Small companies with specific needs. The folks I work with like being able to mail around that 100 mb file at times.

And having an IMAP filing system, putting the mail server outside the office would create huge expenses for fast links.

David Ross

On Jan 27, 2008 10:17 PM, David Ross <drdavidrossconsultant.com> wrote:
> Small companies with specific needs. The folks I work with like being able to mail around that 100 mb file at times.

Yikes! That's ANOTHER reason to host it externally! Seems like a wild
mis-use of email, and a massive increase of IT work to transfer and
back up those mail stores.

Haven't your users ever heard of file servers?

If those emails are only shipping around internally, you'd probably
save money and maintenance by having a file server set up. If they're
going in/out, you may as well be hosted, because you'd need the big
pipes regardless.

Plus that disk space has to be insane. If people are regularly sending
around huge files, those files get duplicated (if not triplicated+ if
there's multiple CCs on that file) all over the place. A hundred gig
file going to five recipients becomes half a gig! And even beyond disk
use, there's versioning issues... It's an I.T. nightmare!

I totally get that some groups do have special needs, such as internal
systems that integrate directly with email (e.g. Exchange, CRM, bug
tracking or support systems), but in some cases you're better off
guiding better computing practices.

--Nik

I've used MailTrust for a couple of years now for a small client. Never had any problems with them.

I also use Tuffmail.com who have been equally reliable and very personal and responsive when I've had questions. Their admin interface is somewhat less polished but it gives you all kinds of granular control over things (especially spam filtering) if you like getting into the detail.

I have also been using the free version Google Apps for a few months and had no problems with that at all. No experience with the quality of the support if you need it, but it does seem to represent excellent value.

mark.