The e-mail configuration on my server is the most complicated set-up we have on the box, and it’s also one of the most resource intensive (bayesian spam filtering). A big load of e-mails being accessed by one of our users over IMAP recently brought the box to a crawl. I’m looking at moving to a more powerful server, but reconfiguring the e-mail set-up is the biggest hurdle to making such a move. Because of this, I’m considering outsourcing e-mail entirely.
I’ve had a FastMail account that I’ve used for SMTP access since January 2003 and it’s been pretty reliable. $70 for 2 years of their Enhanced account certainly seems reasonable (~$.10/day). I’d need to spend another $8 to upload my current ~1GB of mail to their servers – I’m OK with that too. The only concern I have is not being able to back up the mail directly from the server to my own backup system (though I could have everything sucked down locally and back that up with my little system).
Does anyone else have recommendations for services they’ve tried and liked (must have IMAP, that takes Yahoo Mail and Gmail off the list)? Or perhaps services they’ve tried and would recommend staying away from?
I’ve used everyone.net for years and they’re really good. They’re never down. IMAP/POP, etc. It’s $180ish for the 5 user business plan, but there are personal plans too for about $30/year.
Looks fine, except for the storage space – 25MB for an IMAP account? I’m over 1GB… their largest account seems to be 1GB w/ a $20/month price tag.
Honestly, nothing is going to be as good as rolling your own setup. It can’t be *that* difficult to move your email system over.
Which spam filtering system are you using? I have a nice dspam setup going here that works great (99.9% accuracy with 0 FP 🙂
I’d like to be able to use the current server to run a few more sites as well – taking e-mail off the box means we don’t have to buy another box to do this.
I used to use Everyone.net to offer free email one a domain that I own (it was an add-supported service that they don’t offer anymore). Even the upgraded accounts got hit by an unbelievable amount of spam. The best hosted email I’ve ever come across is to one you’re already using — Fastmail have been around for long enough that you can have some faith that they aren’t about to up and disappear, and their pricing is fair.
But you might have a talk to the guys at Textdrive — I gather they’re planning to roll out email-only accounts (I’m pretty sure that was the plan, from what I was seeing on their forum).
Alex,
I did the same search over a year ago, and ended up on Fastmail. I’ve got some complaints with Fastmail, but overall the service works, and is reliable.
Get a hosting provider. $5-7 a month then you wont have to worry about anything and you can configure it all you want.
You could also go with a host that will provide you with Exchange, if that floats your boat.
Otherwise you could forward all your mail through gmail to sort out your spam. That’s what I do.
A $5-7/month hosting provider won’t give me 1GB+ space for my e-mail or an IMAP account. Besides, $5-7/month is a lot more expensive than $70/2 years.
?? All the hosts that I’ve seen make you use the storage they give you for your email. So if you get a host plan, say the $4 plan here, then you will have 5 gigs of space. But then you run into not having Baysian if the provider doen’t include it and more importanty, like you said, it’s more expensive.
Good luck.
I’ve been using Luxsci.com for years. They have the best features and customer service of any IMAP provider I’ve found. I’m not crazy about the webmail interface, but I rarely use that. They have a folder with backups of your last 100 e-mails. They have excellent SPAM protection. They provide alternative SMTP ports for when SMTP is blocked. They are secure. And they’ve been consistently reliable. (Note: The link above is an affiliate URL. If you sign up I get a discount on my subscription. I would appreciate your using this URL if you decide to sign up.)
Everything looks generally ok there, but the price is more than 3x the cost of the FastMail account (and only has half the disk space).
I personally am willing to pay more for reliable backups and quality customer service, etc.. One of the reasons I host my mail seperately is for such reliability. You can also lower the price by cutomizing the package. For instance, I don’t pay for POP since I only use IMAP.
Do you have reason to believe FastMail doesn’t have reliable backups or quality customer service?
I’ve never heard anything bad about Fastmail. Its been a while sice I did my own comparsion of the various features each offered and decided on Luxsci, it is possible that Fastmail is more competitive now than they were at the time. At this point I’m just nervous about switching to anything else. On the other hand, it is also now possible to use Gmail as a backup by having a copy of every message forwarded to a Gmail account.
OK. I’m looking at the feature list for Luxsci and Fastmail and a couple of things stand out for me about Luxsci:
* They provide secure SMTP which you can access via its own port, so it will never be blocked by whatever ISP you are using. Fastmail doesn’t offer this.
* They do daily and weekly backups. No statement about this on Fastmail. In addition, Luxsci has a folder with backups of your last 100 e-mails.
* Fastmail says “Enhanced subscribers’ requests are placed in a priority queue and are normally answered in under 12 hours.” At Luxsci most questions are responded to much quicker than that, often instantly in my experience, although I didn’t see a stement to this effect on their site.
Finally, I also like Luxsci’s Service Level Agreement. In the many years I’ve been with them, only once has this even been an issue – a couple of hours of down time one month a year or two ago, for which i received credit.
Like I said, it may be that FastMail is a good deal for the money, and might be great in combination with Gmail, but I think Luxsci guarantees a higher level of reliability for those who are concerned about such things.
FastMail offers any port access as well.
I’ve never had to ask questions of an e-mail provider, but I guess that would be a decision point.
Merlin Mann says Fastmail’s been crapping out since Thursday. Just FYI.
That’s no good. 🙁
Have you read this thread on Lifehacker?
Through it I found this post on the Fastmail blog about why they ran into trouble. Seems reasonable.
[…] I’ve threatened to do it in the past, but yesterday I finally took the plunge and signed up for an “Enhanced” account (for 5 years) at FastMail. Hopefully this is the last time I have to think about e-mail for the next 4 years, 364 days. […]
[…] I decided to go with FastMail in part because they have been reliable as my SMTP gateway since 2003. This was a good decision. […]