[Waragainstsleep]

I've been contemplating the best email solutions for small business and I'm a bit stuck.

Here are the options I'm considering:

1: Hosted 3rd party solution eg Google, Office 365 or Kerio hosted;
2: Locally Operated such as built in OS X Server or a local Kerio install;
3: Local install but using POP3 download so there is some redundancy provided by the domain host;

The problem with option one is that you will eventually run out of space. You only have to up the cost, but I'm guessing it requires hitting a wall and then having someone intervene. The other problem is if your data gets lost, its tough s**t. Maybe not likely through hardware failure or theft, but a sync issue might do it.

The problem with 2 is that if your connection goes down, your emails bounce. Doesn't look very good to customers. The other problem is that you are totally responsible for your backups (though you ought to be anyway really)

Three seems to give the best of both worlds in many ways. You get redundancy from the domain host who will catch emails when your line goes down and has their own redundant system in a data centre, but it somehow seems a little old fashioned to me.


Anyone care to weigh in with their thoughts? How do you do it?

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep 

I've been contemplating the best email solutions for small business and I'm a bit stuck.

Here are the options I'm considering:

1: Hosted 3rd party solution eg Google, Office 365 or Kerio hosted;
2: Locally Operated such as built in OS X Server or a local Kerio install;
3: Local install but using POP3 download so there is some redundancy provided by the domain host;

The problem with option one is that you will eventually run out of space. You only have to up the cost, but I'm guessing it requires hitting a wall and then having someone intervene. The other problem is if your data gets lost, its tough s**t. Maybe not likely through hardware failure or theft, but a sync issue might do it.

The problem with 2 is that if your connection goes down, your emails bounce. Doesn't look very good to customers. The other problem is that you are totally responsible for your backups (though you ought to be anyway really)

Three seems to give the best of both worlds in many ways. You get redundancy from the domain host who will catch emails when your line goes down and has their own redundant system in a data centre, but it somehow seems a little old fashioned to me.


Anyone care to weigh in with their thoughts? How do you do it?

What do you mean by option 3? How will they catch your emails?

I think from a desktop support perspective making your primary email driven by a local install is a disaster waiting to happen. The person responsible would need to be on top of catching spam, keeping the server off of black/blocklists, good at understanding their logs to diagnose delivery failure due to temporary local conditions, monitoring the health of the server, the disk space, IMAP server configurations (such as max simultaneous users), once there are enough users a SATA drive is not going to cut it so I/O performance could be an issue, the server would need 24/7 monitoring, backup, redundancy, your machine room where this server is hosted being in a good physical state, etc.

Google and the like provides a crapload of space, and backup options, I think the greatest concern with any of these free hosting providers would be ownership of data and privacy.

The best balance, and one not in your list, I believe would be a third party hosted email service that you'd pay for.

[Waragainstsleep]

Option 3 is having hosted (free) pop mailboxes with an ISP or domain registrar, then downloading them to a more sophisticated server which provides IMAP, EAS or whatever else. If the local server goes offline, the mail piles up in the POP boxes until the server gets back online to download the latest batch.

I offered gmail and office365 as examples but it does say 3rd party hosted. Who would you choose to host a small business email domain? If you mean a hosted service like gmail etc but provided by a smaller vendor, how does that help the ownership privacy issue? If you mean put your own server into a hosted environment, you still have to pay someone to look after it in terms of spam, blacklists, disk space etc.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep 

Option 3 is having hosted (free) pop mailboxes with an ISP or domain registrar, then downloading them to a more sophisticated server which provides IMAP, EAS or whatever else. If the local server goes offline, the mail piles up in the POP boxes until the server gets back online to download the latest batch.

But if your local server is offline, it's not like mail sent to it will disappear into the abyss. Not unless it is offline for a week or however long it takes the sending SMTP servers to finally give up on delivery re-attempts.

I offered gmail and office365 as examples but it does say 3rd party hosted. Who would you choose to host a small business email domain? If you mean a hosted service like gmail etc but provided by a smaller vendor, how does that help the ownership privacy issue? If you mean put your own server into a hosted environment, you still have to pay someone to look after it in terms of spam, blacklists, disk space etc.

I meant a 3rd party vendor such as a Fastmail that makes their money selling you email service, rather than makes their money through advertising to you like Google/Hotmail/Yahoo does. Any service that is "free" is not, when it comes to business at least. I used to think that paying Google the $5/month (or $10 with their vault) for business accounts meant that there would be no data mining of your accounts, but I'm not so sure if this is true.

[subego]

My apologies if this is a dopey question, but can't you use some form of versioning backup (which I imagine you want to do anyway) on each employee's computer, and then if there's a sync blowout, retrieve everything from the version before the blowout?

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by subego 

My apologies if this is a dopey question, but can't you use some form of versioning backup (which I imagine you want to do anyway) on each employee's computer, and then if there's a sync blowout, retrieve everything from the version before the blowout?

AFAIK the only system you can do that with is Time Machine + OS X Mail. There may be others, but this will definitely not work as expected in all circumstances because anything you recover locally would be blown away during the next IMAP sync. To do this properly you actually have to send the message back to the server via IMAP, you can't just put the files back in place locally. i.e. AFAIK IMAP sync is one way, not multidirectional.

[subego]

Putting aside the Time Machine bit for a moment, don't most mail clients have import abilities?

[subego]

As for Time Machine, a quick Google seems to indicate built-in backup on Windows does versioning since Vista.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by subego 

Putting aside the Time Machine bit for a moment, don't most mail clients have import abilities?

For POP accounts, yes. If you could import IMAP mail what would that buy you though? The second you sync with the server your local stuff would be replaced. The only way this would work is if the mail client import option somehow knew enough to upload mail to the server.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by subego 

As for Time Machine, a quick Google seems to indicate built-in backup on Windows does versioning since Vista.

What would that buy you in the case of IMAP?

[subego]

On both, I'm not quite up to speed on the intricacies of various email clients. Can't some be configured to keep a local cache? My phone keeps one.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep 

I've been contemplating the best email solutions for small business and I'm a bit stuck.

Here are the options I'm considering:

1: Hosted 3rd party solution eg Google, Office 365 or Kerio hosted;
2: Locally Operated such as built in OS X Server or a local Kerio install;
3: Local install but using POP3 download so there is some redundancy provided by the domain host;

The problem with option one is that you will eventually run out of space. You only have to up the cost, but I'm guessing it requires hitting a wall and then having someone intervene. The other problem is if your data gets lost, its tough s**t. Maybe not likely through hardware failure or theft, but a sync issue might do it.

#1 is the way to go.

Space isn't a big problem unless you have unusually high storage demands. With the standard licensing and competitiveness in the field, the limits are quite high and often pooled. We use Intermedia for hosted Exchange, and they give us 25GB/user, pooled. So we have 900GB available, and only use about 50GB of it (largest user after 8 years is 200,000 emails using 10GB). I think O365 is also 25GB/user, but non-pooled.

You have a complete copy of your mail locally for single message recovery from your local backups. Most hosted Exchange services also offer server side backups for complete mailbox recovery. And of course the provider has backups in case of SAN failure.

Originally Posted by besson3c 

To do this properly you actually have to send the message back to the server via IMAP, you can't just put the files back in place locally. i.e. AFAIK IMAP sync is one way, not multidirectional.

IMAP sync is absolutely bidirectional, otherwise you'd never be able to sort messages locally into folders.

[Waragainstsleep]

I don't worry too much that a provider such as gmail or O365 would lose data due to a failure, but a sync fault could wipe out messages with little chance for recourse. I'm used to putting in Kerio Connect servers and they automatically archive every message that goes through for retrieval if you need it.

In terms of backup its either use a hosted solution and backup all (in this case three) Macs via TM or use the onsite server and back that up with TM or a script or whatever.
The other thing in this particular case is that an onsite server will be noticeably quicker to sync calendars etc 90% of the time because the Macs in question are iMacs and won't be going anywhere.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by subego 

On both, I'm not quite up to speed on the intricacies of various email clients. Can't some be configured to keep a local cache? My phone keeps one.

Most, if not all IMAP clients keep a local cache. That doesn't help though unless the sync is bidirectional.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by mduell 

IMAP sync is absolutely bidirectional, otherwise you'd never be able to sort messages locally into folders.

I'm pretty sure when you sort messages locally your client will send a corresponding IMAP move command to the server.

If IMAP sync was bidirectional, there would need to be some standard way of signaling the server that a change has been made locally. A client that sends corresponding IMAP commands to update the server mail store with what exists locally is fine, that will work, but if you just yank the cache out and replace it with differing files, the client still needs something that will make it aware that there was a change to send the corresponding IMAP command to update the server copy. It can't just poll the local disk constantly looking for random changes, that would be insanely inefficient.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep 

I don't worry too much that a provider such as gmail or O365 would lose data due to a failure, but a sync fault could wipe out messages with little chance for recourse. I'm used to putting in Kerio Connect servers and they automatically archive every message that goes through for retrieval if you need it.

Most mail stores have some sort of index that is used to determine the sync state. It is possible that this index can become corrupt (that is why some client and server IMAP implementations allow you to rebuild the index), but corrupt indexes can occur for reasons that have nothing to do with syncing, and you will not escape these possibilities by hosting your own email.

In short, I don't think this should be a factor here in your decision making.

In terms of backup its either use a hosted solution and backup all (in this case three) Macs via TM or use the onsite server and back that up with TM or a script or whatever.
The other thing in this particular case is that an onsite server will be noticeably quicker to sync calendars etc 90% of the time because the Macs in question are iMacs and won't be going anywhere.

Several hosted mail offerings provide their own backup too, Google Vault is one example of this. Your own secondary backup using Time Machine can't hurt either if the Macs are using OS X Mail.

[besson3c]

In short, what mduell said, #1 is your way to go.

[abbaZaba]

is the mac server a definite hardware feature? I do not know if this is good practice, but if the mac server is a definite, you could use option #1 and have all the users accounts loaded up in Mail so it accesses those IMAP boxes simultaneously, and back that up with time machine. that way, you've got the accounts on the server Mail backup, then the individual iMac backups over the LAN in their sparsebundles.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by abbaZaba 

is the mac server a definite hardware feature? I do not know if this is good practice, but if the mac server is a definite, you could use option #1 and have all the users accounts loaded up in Mail so it accesses those IMAP boxes simultaneously, and back that up with time machine. that way, you've got the accounts on the server Mail backup, then the individual iMac backups over the LAN in their sparsebundles.

Time Machine is a great local IMAP backup solution if the clients in use are OS X Mail. Not so much if this isn't the case.

[Phileas]

I know that this might not be applicable to you, but in our company it's policy to keep a clean, empty inbox. Every evening, I end up with a to-do list where required actions are recorded. Everything else gets archived or deleted.

Far too many people use email as some sort of filing system, it's just not build for that purpose.

As far are solutions are concerned, we use gmail for domains. I know I've ranted against google services before, but this is a paid solution I don't see going away anytime soon. And if it does, because all inboxes are clean, it doesn't really matter.

Even if you aren't willing to make a similar policy mandatory, option #1 seems to be making the most sense.

[Waragainstsleep]

The Mac server is already in place. There would be a great deal of work to implement a clean inbox policy because there are years worth of emails (albeit only 1Gb or so each) but there are jobs that last for years that must be quickly and easily searched for and found. Their filing system for actual files is not so great and they seem oddly reluctant to do anything about it.

[Waragainstsleep]

Am I right in thinking gmail is IMAP rather than EAS these days?

Are people happy with the way that gmail and O365 play with Apple Mail and iOS? I've had issues with both and the other problem with hosted solutions like those is that I have no access to the server logs so I can't trace missing messages or obscure problems which do still seem to occur. Some of the support guys are pretty good at 365 but they are still mostly working from scripts. Can you actually call Google for help if you need it?

[mduell]

I'm not happy with the way Apple Mail.app works with gmail (IMAP) or O365 (EWS), so I don't use Mail.app.

Google has phone support for their paid services, including google apps for business.

[subego]

Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep 

Can you actually call Google for help if you need it?

[Waragainstsleep]

Originally Posted by subego 

I have made many calls for customers over the years. I speak to BT, Demon, Talktalk, Sky, Apple, Microsoft and countless others. I have never spoken to Google on the phone. Last time I tried, it wasn't an option. Not one I could find at least. Wasn't that long ago. Getting hold of human being at Amazon or eBay is easier in my experience. Actually it might have been Paypal rather than eBay.

[Phileas]

Google, surprisingly I know, actually has ok support for their business offerings. One of our clients had a problem with mail some time back, one phone call sorted it all out. I was amazed myself.