Email Hosting Discussions

Do you have questions about your company's email and want guidance in selecting and/or maintaining an email solution for your business? If so, you may want to consider hiring an email consultant to analyze your company's email requirements and recommend email services.

What is email consulting, and what sets it apart from services offered by general information technology (IT) consultants? Email consulting focuses specifically on email including email servers and software, email hosting, email outsourcing and email marketing. This article will look at common issues email consultants address and touch on the solutions you may want to consider for your business.

One of the most fundamental issues email consultants address is how to host your company's email. Specifically, do you host your email in-house or outsource it to an email hosting provider? An email consultant will guide you through the pros and cons of each direction and help you make the best decision for your organization.

In recent years, outsourced solutions have gained popularity, especially with small businesses. However, there are compelling reasons, for medium and large sized businesses in particular, to maintain in-house email servers. It is even possible to outsource portions of the in-house operation, namely the antivirus and spam filtering to third party providers and still keep your email servers on site.

Trying to decide between POP3, IMAP or Exchange? If you're expecting feature rich components like calendar sharing, global address list and seamless synchronizations between desktop and mobile devices, Microsoft Exchange is the way to go.

On the other hand, if you're on a budget and still want advanced functionalities, your email consultant may be able to recommend IMAP and POP3 configurations with third party plug-ins that emulate Exchange-like features.

Do you need archiving? From basic BCC archiving to HIPAA compliant email archiving, email consultants can help you find the right archiving service for your business and meet any compliance requirements for data retention and discovery. Most hosted solutions have built-in archiving services available at an additional cost per mailbox. There are also third party archiving firms that specialize in off site archiving.

You may also have questions about email marketing, newsletters, automatic notifications, alerts and other high volume applications. Your email consultant can help you identify what types of messages can be sent using your regular email accounts and when to use a separate service for bulk email. You will also want to understand how to properly implement CAN-SPAM compliant email for your bulk messages.

It is important to understand that most email hosting companies and ISPs have limits on how many outbound messages can be sent at one time. In addition, meeting deliverability expectations often requires using specialzed SMTP services optimized for high volume outbound sending.

Depending on your monthly volume of bulk messages, you may be able to host your own application in house. You may want to combine your in-house solution with a third party SMTP service for improved deliverability rates. For example, a bulk email hosting plan will let you send high volume email using your in-house application or a third party newsletter application like Interspire's Email Marketer. There are also 100% outsourced solutions available from companies like MailChimp and ConstantContact. If you are on a tight budget, MailChimp offers a free but limited bulk email plan for getting started.

There is no one size fits all solution for email. The role of your email consultant is to identify the type of solutions that will work for your group and develop a plan of action that meets both your budget and communication requirements.

Greatmail LLC provides email consulting services for both internal hosting clients and outside customers. Let us know how we can help you navigate the email marketplace.

Labels: bulk_email_hosting, email_consulting, email_hosting, email_marketing, exchange_hosting

You've recently moved your email to an email hosting provider. The incoming spam is finally under control and your users have all transitioned to the new server without issue. Then you get the call from your new email provider. A recent message you tried to send to 350 recipients was blocked.

Like it or not, some of your outbound email may be considered bulk. It's a necessary measure to keep email flowing between servers. In short, sending bulk mail and regular email on the same IP addresses is a bad idea as it can slow down the deliverability of your regular email correspondence.

So how do you deal with sending bulk mail? It depends on a few factors: 1) Volume, 2) Frequency, and 3) Message Type. Volume is simply the number of messages you send typically on a monthly level. What is the frequency for your bulk emailings? Daily, weekly, monthly?

Lastly, what kind of messages are you sending? Are you relaying newsletters or automatic email notifications? Are your messages solicited or unsolicited? In either case, do your messages include opt-in and opt-out functionality and do they adhere to the guidelines of the CAN-SPAM Act?

Closely related to message type is the issue of messsage generation. Are your messages generated automatically by an application server? On the other hand, are your mailings portable and can they be facilitated through an email marketing provider like Constant Contact?

Email marketing companies provide turnkey bulk email management services. Pricing is generally based on either the number of recipients who actually receive your messages or the total number of messages relayed monthly. Depending on the size of your address list, a turnkey solution may provide a practical, cost-effective solution for sending out newsletter type lists.

However, if you're substantially invested in your own custom email application and database, you may be better off looking at a bulk email hosting service. As opposed to a turnkey provider, a bulk email host will provide hosting for mailboxes specifically designed to send/receive bulk messages and let you use your existing system to maintain your lists and messages.

For small distributions, entry level pricing for reliable bulk email hosting may be substantially higher than that of the turnkey providers. However, having both the flexibility to work with your existing system and the scalability to significantly grow your list outweighs the premium pricing for many clients.

Greatmail provides a range of email hosting services for both regular and bulk type messages. Please feel free to contact us for more information.

Labels: bulk_email, bulk_email_hosting, can-spam, dedicated_email_servers, email_marketing, smtp_hosting