What are some super awesome and reliable Canadian email hosting companies.

May 7, 2008 11:54 AM

What are some super awesome and reliable Canadian email hosting companies.

A friends company is looking for a company to do email hosting for them. She doesn't want to use Google Apps for your domain, and she doesn't want to use an American company -- like Dreamhost for example. Can anyone recommend a Canadian company that does this? Preferably one that you or your company uses already. (She can google for Canadian email hosts as well as the next girl.)

posted by chunking express to computers & internet (7 comments total)

It depends on what exactly is the issue with using an American company. Most Canadian hosts will have some or all of their email servers located in the USA. Would that be a problem?
posted by winston at 12:05 PM on May 7

I used blacksun.ca for years -- they were okay, but very expensive compared to their American counterparts.
posted by Shepherd at 12:21 PM on May 7

I think they're looking for a company who'd be storing data in Canada. I think Canada has better privacy laws than the US, which is probably why they are looking for a Canadian company.
posted by chunking express at 12:29 PM on May 7

For Winston: Canadian organizations who store their users/employees data in the USA are exposing that data to the monitoring done by the US government.

While liability has not yet been tested in court, but it's widely presumed that if done without permission, this would make the business/agency liable for violating the privacy rights of the individual users, which could be a very expensive and actionable offense.

Worse, trickle-down issues could involve unrelated users who e-mailed those "Canadian" accounts and then had their own data stored in the USA and thus exposed to the same privacy risk, if it can be shown they had a reasonable reason to expect privacy. Again, untested in court so far.

This is the biggest reason why Google Apps has not been widely adopted by businesses in Canada. Google will not (yet) commit to meeting the Canadian privacy requirements to which ISPs in Canada must adhere.
posted by rokusan at 1:05 PM on May 7 [1 favorite]

Talk to Fanclub Media. Their servers are here.
posted by loiseau at 2:15 PM on May 7

I used myhosting.com some years ago. I seem to remember that I was happy with them. I think their servers are in Toronto.
posted by tetranz at 1:54 PM on May 8

rokusan has hit the nail on the head - even if the original poster simply wanted to support a local company and be billed in $CAD, these are extremely valid concerns.

I've seen many large Enterprise companies in Canada refuse to use services they already pay for (LiveMeeting, Groove Relay, MapPoint/VirtualEath, OfficeLive) because the servers & storage are not guaranteed to be in Canada. Heck - I've seen companies/government agencies refuse to send debug memory dumps outside of their own province (as different provinces may have stronger/weaker privacy laws) for remote debugging.

A hastle yes, but yet another reason I love being Canadian ;-)
posted by jkaczor at 3:01 AM on May 9