Re: [tlug] outsourcing email service

[Micheal Cooper <mcooper@example.com>]

Edmund Edgar wrote:
> 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.
<snip>

> 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...
Thank you. Searching the web results in a lot of marketing hype, so it 
is invaluable to get real testimonials that I know where not cooked up 
by the folks in marketing.
Thank you,
Micheal