Re: [tlug] outsourcing email service

["Edmund Edgar" <lists@example.com>]

I outsourced my company's e-mail services about 18 months ago. - we use a company in the US called Excedent. (Their site is at http://www.webmail.us). They do 50 1GB mailboxes for $100 per month. 

It makes sense for us because I'm the only person here who can maintain the server (we're a test prep school with about 50 employees), so if I fall under a bus or get on a plane and something breaks down it could be a long time before I could fix it. 

I think I'd still want to do it even if we had a spare engineer - partly because, as you say, there should be economies of scale - and partly because the e-mail environment is always changing as the war against spammers escalates, so your setup potentially requires regular tweaking to stop spam and make sure your own stuff doesn't get marked as spam. That means I can't do what I'd really want to do with the system: Set it up, test it, make sure it works, and then don't touch it for the next few years except for security updates.

At the time I talked to a bunch of Japanese providers (and posted on this list asking for leads), none of whom seemed to be offering what I wanted: a solid, well-maintained service with big mailboxes at a reasonable price. I'd rather have a service with someone who can answer the phone in Japanese, but you can't win 'em all... If anyone knows of a good Japanese provider, let me know as I might like to switch.

Excedent have a very good webmail service as well, but unfortunately it doesn't support Japanese so we can't use it. Experimentally, I've found that I can run the Japanese-patched version of Squirrelmail successfully having it connect to their IMAP servers. This is the kind of thing I don't mind running myself (on an external rental server) as it's less mission-critical and doesn't need to store any data to speak of.

We have had 2 outages (both unplanned) in 18 months, each between 3 and 6 hours and  caused by screw-ups at the provider. Although I think they're getting better... This is worse than the couple of years before when I ran the thing in-house on a cheap Dell server, which only went down for preannounced power outages, kernel updates and a very quick server migration, but I think that was more by luck than judgement...