What email service does your company use?

March 24, 2008 10:02 AM

What email service does your company use? The small company I work for (10 employees and growing quickly) uses GoDaddy now, primarily for historical reasons, and it's pretty terrible. Any recommendations for enterprise email services?
posted by x41-pbj to computers & internet (11 comments total)

Have you looked into Google Apps? You don't have to use all their services, just sign up for the email. I use it for my small office and it works well.
posted by aGee at 10:06 AM on March 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

We use appriver for hosted exchange and are generally pretty happy.
posted by mrbugsentry at 10:11 AM on March 24, 2008

I would highly recommend Google Apps, I use it to not have a generic email address and it comes with a suite of tools that is just excellent for the price of zero. If you need more than 6GB of space per email account, you can pay a nominal fee and it removes adds as well. It also gives you collaborative features like Google Docs, Calendar, customized start page, and the new Google Sites wiki service.

I previously used Fusemail (fusemail.com) which offered excellent reliability and was reasonably priced. But Google Apps is just so excellent and free, I have to recommend that.
posted by cgomez at 10:16 AM on March 24, 2008

@aGee: We use Google Apps for a lot of work, but want to have something a little more professional than Gmail for emailnig.

@mrbugsentry: thanks for the tip; will look into it.
posted by x41-pbj at 10:17 AM on March 24, 2008

Google Apps for your Domain allows you to register a domain for $10/year (or you can use one you already own) and have Gmail-hosted mail service for that domain. Your email addresses are fully customizable and manageable. Your users can access them through a Gmail interface or (IMAP or POP) client-side software. Your email recipients will never know you are using Google-hosted email, and your users need not either (if they use Outlook or similar). You really should look into it a little further. also, using the "@" sign to address specific users makes some people here go slightly insane, so you may want to avoid it.
posted by Rock Steady at 10:28 AM on March 24, 2008 [1 favorite]

We use Mail Trust http://www.mailtrust.com/ at work. It's been great for us.
posted by mac-way at 10:53 AM on March 24, 2008

more professional than Gmail

What do you mean? Gmail is professional enough for the US Navy.
posted by me & my monkey at 11:07 AM on March 24, 2008

I hadn't looked at the business options at Google Apps, hence my misconception about their professional-ness. The price seems pretty right as well...
posted by x41-pbj at 11:15 AM on March 24, 2008

If you need shared calendaring, mobile sync, and contacts, Zimbra, an open-source exchange-compatible mail server, is pretty nice.

You can get hosted Zimbra accounts from $3/employee per month. We're using 01.com and have been pretty happy with them. That said, we 1) all have phones that are built for exchange syncing, and 2) want to be able to scale to a large number of employees and self-host, so that's what has locked us into an exchange-type server, otherwise I would probably consider google apps.
posted by fishfucker at 1:05 PM on March 24, 2008

It's very, very, very, very easy to get branded email using google apps, meaing @yourdomain.com instead of @gmail.com, in fact--that's what gapps does. Then, you can download messages to outlook or thunderbird or your phone or w/e using POP or IMAP.

It doesn't get much more "professional" than infinite backups, amazing spam filtering, and low/no cost. Seriously.

I've got 4 sites right now all using gapps, and each one has its own branded email.
posted by TomMelee at 7:06 AM on March 25, 2008

We run (and host) Zimbra, it's quite nice. If you don't need Exchange integration or the account management features it offers it's probably overkill though.
posted by Skorgu at 10:08 AM on March 25, 2008