Need to chose email hosting

DMS General
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This could probably get quite complex but I mostly need a short answer. I have a URL hosted at GoDaddy. I have updated the nameserver to reflect the web hosting at flywheel WordPress hosting. They don’t do email. GoDaddy is pretty expensive for email. So now I need to choose a hosting option for email. It’s my wife’s small company. Probably just a few email boxes. We might at some point do some email campaigns if we ever get a customer base for this business but nothing huge, I imagine.

So being economical is great but not to the point of being either unreliable, hard to use or configure or having to put up with ads. Yep, we don’t want any ads or data mining on our email content.

I have seen some pretty cool email tracking companies but I think that might just be a sort of add-on but I’m not sure. Some cool email tracking would be awesome.

Thanks, friends!

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I’ve been really happy with Zoho mail (http://mail.zoho.com). Shame that they discontinued their free service…

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not that much of a shame. They went of line for almost a month not that long ago.

https://twitter.com/nehemiahman/status/921378260583362560

I’d say stick with gmail for your domain and set it up for under your own domain.

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by the way as a side note, gmail does support smtp forwarding, pop3 and imap so one can use any email client and that does mean any client even ones that tie into wordpress as plugins.

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+1 for the google business stuff. Works wonders.

As for email campaigns, best use a service meant for the purpose like Constant Contact or similar. They tend to break the reputation of email senders when not done correctly.

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If $8.25/month does not seem unreasonable then I would recommend Office 365 for small businesses. I have used it myself for 3 years now and the amount of functionality included is pretty impressive. For example so is full Office suites included for 5 devices. There is also a version with only office online for $5/month. One should not sign up to O365 through GoDaddy though because you will get a very limited admin tool. As I am sure you can imagine Office 365 have almost no downtime. It is not a bulk email solution though.

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I have Office 365 also, for the cost and being able to put it on 5 devices makes it about $20 per device.

I agree, have them installed on the machines not elsewhere. I go up to my sister’s a lot on OK. Just bought her a Dell 24" All-in-One Touch screen (love it). I installed one of my 365 licenses on that computer, and set me up as one of the profiles and her as the Administer. Her work laptop uses Office so now she can work on the larger screen. I probably won’t have to drag my laptop along or just leave it in the car just in case I need something from it.

I use Outlook, but not IT savvy enough to set-up Exchange so I can use features on it - got use to it when working. May learn how to do that someday.

The web hosting company I’ve been using for about 15 years was bought by company - what I like best about the old company: Great Live Support, from the US service center. Haven’t had to use new company so can’t say about new company. Don’t expect it to be as good - they never seem to be.

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I’ll cast another vote for FastMail. I settled on them for personal email after searching the options a few months back. I’ve been happy so far.

Besides supporting regular mail clients, they also have a reasonable web interface and an app – if you need that sort of thing. It is a paid service, reasonable cost, no advertisements.

Just one thing: check their terms of service carefully when it comes to email campaigns. Worst case, you may have to go to Constant Contact or some service like that for the mail campaigns, depending on the size, of course.

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This might not be practical these days. About 15 yrs ago I set up my own email server on my own hardware. I don’t think anyone buys their own servers these days but I suppose one could own a virtual machine somewhere and load an email server. One would probably get hacked, though. Even back then I noticed that my machine was sending or relaying thousands of emails per day and it took me a long time to realize that I had left something open to allow that.

The cool thing about having your own server, besides unlimited accounts is, however, that you can play with all sorts of configurations and such. And I also recall being able to access the mail database through other apps like IIS.

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If you’re really considering going the whole way with your own mail server, you might consider Zimbra. That gets you everything: the mail transport agent (MTA – provides the SMTP service), IMAP and POP services, a nice web interface for users, a web interface for configuration and various other optional goodies such as spam and virus interception.

Zimbra has a paid option as well, but it is not necessary for any of the basic items I just mentioned. The open source “community” edition has it all.

There are several disadvantages to this route, though:

  1. You will get an IP address from your ISP. Pray that it has a good reputation among the many self-appointed black lists out there! If it doesn’t, anticipate a few months of pain as you slowly convince them one-by-one that the IP address is under new, responsible ownership. Or, worse, you sit on the phone with the various administrators of systems for intended recipients (possibly customers) who for some incomprehensible reason decided not to take mail from your server.
  2. You are solely responsible for security updates, and as you already mentioned this is important. You’ll want to make sure a firewall is in place and working, security updates are installed frequently (at least monthly) and some form of intrusion detection is running.
  3. You are solely responsible for backups and redundancy if you decide you need it – and you get the call when the service goes down for whatever reason.

I added all that up and decided the $100 or so I pay FastMail each year for two accounts is probably worth it to me.

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When I worked for a web hosting company, we outsourced our email because our clients needed rock-solid business-class email. I chose Rackspace Email (which was another name back then). I still use them for my domains. $2 a month each.

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+1 for O365 or Google Mail for business. You simply can’t create the level of redundancy that these two provide. There are always cheaper options, however that doesn’t mean you’re not trading something for them.

If you roll your own mail server which I have done several times using sendmail, exchange and various other mail servers on a myriad of OS platforms, Solaris, Linux, Windows, etc. The tradeoff here is the amount of time you will spend managing the installation, backing it up, etc. If done correctly, it’s a lot of fiddling with this and that such as backups, configuration changes when something doesn’t work, upgrades to newer versions, etc. If you enjoy these things, by all means, set your own server up. If you go this route, you can get it done for free except for hosting the server.

If you go with a free service, then ads or your email will be the product the company is looking for. I have a couple domains that use zohomail and it does just fine with basic tasks. It is no more difficult to setup than any other mail service where you create DNS records and point mail to their servers.

If you go with O365 or Google Mail for business, you will pay per user, but you get a ton of features that you may or may not want. If you or your entity is a Windows/Office shop, then O365 makes quite a bit of sense. If you tend to use other OS, then Google might make a bit more sense.

As others have said, I wouldn’t try to include batch mail services in your mail platform. It’s just not a service they tend to provide, and you can end up in a bit of hot water if you send out too many emails or they think you’re spamming from their servers. Use a dedicated service that will follow all/most of the rules for unsubscribe links, return email, etc.

Overall the old adage works… Cheap, Fast, Quality - Choose 2

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