To determine what email service you need, we have to ask a few questions. After thinking about and answering the following questions, we can discuss the options more easily.
- Do you want a permanent email address?
- The only way to guarantee a permanent email address is to own an internet domain and pay the annual fee. This is usually a nominal $35.00 per year or less, but does need to be considered.
- Most free accounts like Google, AOL, or Yahoo will give you an email address owned by the provider. These cannot be considered a permanent address unless you think the provider is permanent. They are not!
- Most free providers can integrate with an external account to give additional features but to have a permanent address you will still need to own a domain and have the domain email hosted.
- Is email privacy an issue?
- In other words, do you mind if your provider reads your email and uses the information for their own benefit?
- Email is not a form of secure communication and should never be used when security is an issue. But giving your provider permission to read and use it is another story.
- Do you want to access the mail from multiple devices?
- In many cases, email needs to be accessed from multiple computers and or mobile devices.
- If you need multiple device access, do you want contacts and calendar synchronized on all devices?
- I use an email client on my computer, webmail client when on another computer, and my smart phone when not close to a computer. I want to get appointment reminders, email, and contacts no matter how I access. This requires a messaging host like Microsoft Exchange.
- There are ways to get this functionality with some other providers but again, if it is a free account, you don’t have any say or control of how this is done.
- Is paying a monthly fee per mailbox unacceptable?
- Some of our customers simply refuse to pay for a service if there is a way to do it for free. In this case, the free providers can supply a solution at the expense of some features, ease of use, or permanence.
- Do you desire a high level of email hosting and client support and reliability?
- If your business requires constant email service availability, you should answer yes.
- If you use email occasionally for non critical purposes, you might say no.
- Do you need several email addresses with different feature requirements?
- Some of our customers need a couple of addresses with full functionality, and several with basic. For example, a parts counter might have it’s own email address but never need calendaring or multi device access.
- I this case, you are probably better off with a hybrid approach. Depending on the other requirements, you could have all email address go to a free or low cost host, and use a premium service for the users that need more features.
Once you answered the questions above, TranSoft Labs can design a solution for you. Please let us know your answers and we will provide custom options and a quote for you. Here are a few of the most popular solutions: TranSoft Labs offers all the Email hosting options needed to satisfy our customers. We cannot cover them all here but will describe some of the most popular options.
Standard Email Hosting
Our most popular option. It provides a basic permanent email functionality. We include it in any web hosting service so the cost is transparent. We only charge for setup and support at standard hourly rates. It includes the following features:
- Up to 1 GB of email storage.
- POP3, IMAP, and SMTP access.
- Webmail access.
- Can be integrated into popular services like Outlook.com and Gmail for more advanced features.
- Compatibility with many Email clients and web services.
Outlook.com
Outlook.com provides a premium email experience with a low cost. We can setup and manage an Outlook.com account for you. This email option gives you the following options:
- Option 1 Cost is $1.00 per month with no setup charge.
- Rich full featured web interface.
- Free Word, Excel, and Power Point Web Apps.
- Synced across multiple PC, Macs, tablets and smart phones.
- Contacts synced across all devices.
- Contact photos, tweets, and recent Facebook updates.
- Calendar synced on all devices.
- Shared calendars and contact lists.
- 50 GB of email storage.
- 7 GB of SkyDrive storage for files and sharing. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/skydrive/compare.
- More… http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-com/compare/
- Option 2 Cost $2.00 per month with no setup charge.
- All features of Option 1
- Add free web interface.
Premium Email Hosting.
Hosted exchange email gives you a much more advanced set of capabilities but will require a subscription. Some of the features included are:
- 50 GB of storage on the server.
- Server hosted email is stored on the server and always synchronized across multiple devices like home and work PCs, web interface, mobile devices like phones and tablets, etc.
- Integrated Tasks, Contacts and Calendars including shared lists for your staff and associates.
- Server side rules for various functions such as Out of Office Replies.
- Reminders for important events.
- Deep integration with Microsoft Outlook so all features can be controlled from a single client.
- Web client has all the functionality of any desktop client for full access anywhere to your email, contacts, and calendar.
- And many more.
Outlook.com or Gmail.com
It is possible to gain many of the features of Hosted Exchange for free. We must stress that this only saves you money if you take over the management of these 3rd party services. We will provide instructions for setting them up and can in some cases provide an initial setup but cannot provide ongoing support without charging you more than the premium service above. The advantage is that they have more features than our standard email with no additional cost. The disadvantage is that we loose a certain amount of management capability. Primarily we cannot help you get access to the account if you change your password or loose access to your account. If you can accept responsibility for your Outlook.com or Gmail.com account, this may be a low cost solution to more features than our standard email accounts. Both of these give you most of the features of our Hosted Exchange email without the monthly mailbox cost. The big disadvantage is that our ability to provide ongoing support is limited. This is because the accounts are personal accounts and not business accounts, meaning that the user is given the responsibility for maintaining access and setup once the initial setup is done. We also have to charge a setup fee if we set it up. You can of course set the accounts up yourself but that makes it impossible for us to provide any support. If you answered no to the first 2 questions, the best solution for the money is going to be one of the free services. There are many to choose from but the two we like are Google and Outlook.com. Neither is a real business solution because there is no means of management. All email addresses are individual accounts and have to be managed individually. Each account will have it’s own username, password, security questions, and profile settings. There is no way for a single manager to reset passwords or adjust spam and virus settings. Free email accounts are a good fit if you do not thing that you need a permanent email address. Free accounts have to be paid for and if you are not doing it directly, you have no control of it’s financial stability. Also you may be financing it indirectly and if you don’t know how, it may be costing you more than you think. Email is something most if not all businesses need. There are so many options that we cannot cover them all but we will talk about some of them. The first section will cover low cost or free solutions. The disadvantage to free solutions, is they have to get paid for somehow or they will go away. You have no control of how they are paid for or when they go away. This is fine if you have a limited number of email contacts and you can expect that they can update their records if you have to change your address.