What do you use for YOUR business email?

YeOldeStonecat said:
For 20 years...we've been supporting SMBs...so we've lived and breathed what we service.
Microsoft Exchange Server! In house!

We may soon take advantage of the free licenses you get as an O365 partner...and migrate to Office 365 E3.
But for now, we're still on Exchange.

Exchange has soooo many features that it seems >90% of people never know about ,let alone utilize. So...if you actually USE it...you may learn more about it, and that in turn may lead to educating clients about it....showing them how to use it, leading to more sales for you.

Sadly, most people just use Exchange like any other POP e-mail...just...basic e-mail.
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I really do miss those days to be honest. SBS was a HUGE money maker for us! Sadly, most businesses around here have went with a cloud based solution. We still have a few on in house Exchange. We were worried to say the least when this transition started happening but we've got our process down to where we still make good money supporting the cloud versions. The trick is to seamlessly roll your solutions out to include the cloud services. Our experience has been that the total revenue has shrank a little bit for clients that got rid of SBS and went with a cloud solution, but.... profit has went up quite a bit as support for those under contract went down considerably, if that makes sense. I think the glory years for us was the SBS 2003 era.
 
ComputerPro said:
I really do miss those days to be honest. SBS was a HUGE money maker for us! Sadly, most businesses around here have went with a cloud based solution. We still have a few on in house Exchange. We were worried to say the least when this transition started happening but we've got our process down to where we still make good money supporting the cloud versions. The trick is to seamlessly roll your solutions out to include the cloud services. Our experience has been that the total revenue has shrank a little bit for clients that got rid of SBS and went with a cloud solution, but.... profit has went up quite a bit as support for those under contract went down considerably, if that makes sense. I think the glory years for us was the SBS 2003 era.
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I totally agree with you, and you may have seen a couple of posts of mine around here, years ago, when O365 came out, and SBS got sunsetting.
SBS installs, and ongoing support, was our bread 'n butter. Typical SBS installs for fat setup fees like 5 or 7 or more grand! Take a small business still in a workgroup with residential e-mail, convert them to an SBS based network, with cool features. Ongoing monthly support. And then SBS migrations to newer SBS for near the same money.

When I learned SBS was sunsetted, I dreaded what to do. And early on with the minimal margins you made on O365 resales...yuck. Luckily Microsoft listened to all the techs screaming about this and brought out the CSP program to at least give us some decent margins on reselling O365. Took away some of the pain of loss of SBS work.
 
I haven't used O365, but I've found Google Apps to be very light on the admin side. Lots of settings are not available for administers to set, only users can set them. So some of the time spend administrating might instead now be training users.

You get a lot of bang for your buck with Google Apps though. There are a lot of apps available. With Hangouts, we don't even need any separate video conferencing subscriptions, and soon they will be providing call in numbers too. Team Drive is coming out soon too, which is much needed.

My biggest disappointment was with the collaborative inbox. It's just a type of Google group and doesn't have the ability we would want for a collaborative inbox.

There are also tons of add-ons available for the apps. And there is even Google Apps Script for you to create whatever functionality you need.

But now it's actually called G Suite instead of Google Apps...so that's kind of lame
 
Krynn72 said:
Right now I'm just using the email services from HostGator that came with my website, but am looking for a webhost independent service to use. I'm not familiar at all with this process and am wondering what others do for your email. I want something thats a bit futureproof in case I change webhosts, employ someone who then needs an addy, etc.
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Email is included with my webhosting, and I use the regular free Gmail to send and receive email under my own domain name(s). Doesn't cost me anything. If I were to change webhosts, it would only require some simple tweaking of the Gmail settings (perhaps not even that since email settings are pretty standard).

I use the Gmail settings "Check mail from other accounts", "Send mail as", and "Reply to same address message was sent to" to send and receive messages from multiple domains in my freebie Gmail inbox without hassle. Everything is consolidated and invisible to the folks I communicate with.
 
We currently have everything setup through rackspace.com using our own domain. The main email is support@mosesys.com - we can also resell this to our customers not a who lot of profit margin but there is the support that goes along with the setups/modifications of accounts. We charge $2 per month for a webmail account and $10 per month for a Full Blown Exchange. All emails have 256 Bit encryption coming and going as well as spam and antivirus filtering.
 
I use O365 E3 provided by Silver Small and Midmarket Cloud Solutions competency. Lots, lots, lots of other software entitlements from MS for that as well. I used to do Action Pack but this covers all that licensing and more. I agree that you should actively use what you're peddling if you can. I do that for the most part- Server 2012R2, O365, online backup, etc. Typically you can get some NFR stuff through your vendors for cheap or often free.
 
Another Action Pack Office 365 business here.
Have used Office 365 for about 3 years now ourselves, and before that had onprem Exchange servers, starting from SBS2003, so we know it pretty well by now.
We do also have a few clients that use Google Apps but we always push for Office 365 first.
Have never had anyone switch, or want to switch, from Office365 to Google Apps, but had a few come the other way and they say O365 is much better than Google.
 
Google Apps for Business, free account that I signed up for years ago and am grandfathered. Does not have advanced (paid) features like activesync though. I've been on the fence for several months about switching over to O365 E3 free licenses through my Action Pack subscription. Really like the integration of Google Docs on my Android phone. May just have to bite the bullet: use the Microsoft apps on my smartphone and gain 2-way sync from smartphone to PC using Exchange feature of O365.
 
I pretty much just use my aol account, but I also have a forwarder setup there that kicks all incoming messages to my @facebook.com email address. I do that because I really enjoy working out of the Facebook Messenger interface. When people get confused about receiving mail from tenyardfight17367773726577@facebook.com I just ask them to whitelist it and add me as a contact in their mail client. If that's too much trouble I setup a mail filter rule in AOL just for that client that routes only their emails to my Squirrel mail webmail client that I have attached to my Hostpapa hosting account.

Works pretty well for me.

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk
 
E3 Office 365 Via Action Pack here- Having done 40-50 Office 365 Migrations i love Office 365. Being the main email my clients use it helps being on the same platform.
 
I use gmail, I have a knownhost vps and I turn off all the antispam features and forward my email to gmail and when I reply I use smtp information for my knownhost vps to send the email using my domain. I do this simply because as far as I know gmail simply has the best spam filters. I also like the large amount of storage I have on gmail.
 
LordIntruder said:
Well, email is email and not office.
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Disagree...huge differences between what I'll call "residential class" e-mail...and "business class" e-mail.
Once you get into business class e-mail, you start talking about many features relating to collaboration within the company (public folders and resources, access/delegation to other users mailboxes, how contacts and calednars tie in, reservation rooms, just to barely scratch the surface), and mail flow from outside the company (distribution groups, forwarding rules, transport rules, contacts..just to scratch the surface). And setting up custom secure connections between a company and other companies (TLS connectors for example). Centrally managing address books.

Those are just the tip of the iceberg of many more features we can type up a dozen pages about.
And then there are things like retention policies, and granular restoration of items, Sending encrypted e-mail with native support from the server. Controlling globally wide signatures on all users e-mail for the professional look for the company.

I could go on for hours and hours...but to say "e-mail is email"....and add to that "not office"....in a business environment, they definitely are one.
For people that support residentials...yeah, GMail and AOL and ISP hosted POP...sure...for home users..that's fine. But the needs on so many levels...aren't there for residential.
 
Didn't we talk about OUR business? If we talk about our customer's business you may be right if somone needs dinosaurs to shine more than to be. If we talk about email, the solution named by me for my company fits all we need
 
LordIntruder said:
Didn't we talk about OUR business? If we talk about our customer's business you may be right if somone needs dinosaurs to shine more than to be. If we talk about email, the solution named by me for my company fits all we need
Click to expand...

Yep, the OP is about what do each us use for our email. As mentioned I've used Axigen, self hosted. Personally I prefer to DIY, even though it may not be the most efficient.

If I have a customer who is interested in self-hosting email I'll certain mention Axigen. But since most of mine are Apple users, if they want self-hosted, I'll setup an OS X server. That email system, Postfix, works very well and is easy to manage.

Otherwise it's O365 or Google.
 
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