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

What is email hosting? Do I need email hosting? Can't I get email through my web host? If you're considering outsourcing your email to an email hosting specialist, these are just a few of many questions you're probably asking yourself right now.

Email hosting, in the literal sense, is hosting for email. Generally, email hosting or hosted email is a managed service meaning many or all aspects of the email including security, antivirus protection, spam filtering, archiving, backups and maintenance are handled by the email hosting company.

Why do you need an email hosting company? Outsourcing your email to an email hosting specialist results in an improved level of service and reliability. In most cases, businesses make the decision to outsource their email after either running an in house server or using a web hosting provider's email service. In both scenarios, compromised service and lack of dependability are compelling reasons to look for an email host. If managing an in house email server were easy or if the web hosts could offer truly dependable email, you probably wouldn't be looking for email hosting in the first place.

What do you look for in an email hosting provider? If you're already looking for email hosting, then chances are good that reliability and dependability are at the very top of your list of requirements. You're also probably in need of improved spam control. You also may have experienced the inability to consistently send mail as a result of poorly guarded IPs and subsequent blacklisting. Similarly, you may be missing incoming mail, which often results from inferior or overly aggressive spam filtering. While there are many additional features to consider, clients continually cite service reliability, security and performance as the most critical items.

So how do you search through the myriad of email hosting providers and find an email hosting company that offers truly dependable and high availability email? First and foremost, look for companies who have partnered with solid technology providers. There are key players in network redundancy, server infrastructure, email security and spam control. Each component is crucial to deliver high availability email. Find a company who has developed lasting relationships with their providers. Ultimately, those partnerships are what stand behind your email.

Be leery of any provider offering unlimited email accounts and/or storage, especially at extremely discounted prices. Fully redundant networking and clustered servers are essential components in enterprise class email, and these technologies don't come cheap! Anyone offering unlimited mailboxes for $10 a month is not offering high availability email.

Next, take the 100% uptime guarantee for what it is -- a marketing tactic. Read the terms and conditions closely, and you'll see that the 100% uptime guarantee is really just an elaborate refund or service credit policy. Look instead for 100% human responsiveness. Uptime guarantees are meaningless when you can't reach your account manager. Find a provider who will give you a real account manager with real phone numbers.

Finally, try to get feedback on the company's email service from active clients. A reputable email hosting company will not hesitate to provide references. Ask for some references in your field or area of business. Find out firsthand from existing clients how the service holds up and if the support is reliable.

If you're replacing an in house server, outsourced email hosting savings can be substantial. On the other hand, if you've had free email through a web host and are now looking for improved email, you might be experiencing sticker shock. Can your business justify spending a few dollars per user each month? As email increases in popularity, its role as a communication tool in your business should validate the cost. In the end, it may be a small price to pay in exchange for dependable email service.

Labels: email_hosting, host_email, hosted_email