Email hosts are either very expensive or completely unreliable so neither option suits us or our smaller clients who don’t have a requirement for an inhouse enterprise solution.
It’s also a lot of fun when Microsoft Exchange encounters a problem or you have an outage at your datacenter and every single client’s emails stop working all at once. Calls and emails flood in, work stops while you deal with a emergency situation and no one expects to pay for a technical issue being resolved.
I also think exchange is also very overpriced, a misuse of time to setup and maintain on the server and far too complicated to make setting up on a local client fun for anyone.
Just some of the reasons why Gmail rocks:
- It’s free
- It supports POP and IMAP which are both quick and easy to setup in email clients
- The built in spam filtering does an amazing job
- You get 7.5 GB of storage
- Emails are grouped together by conversation
- Easily access via webmail or a client
- Built in features in webmail such as out of office replies, signatures and keyboard shortcuts
- Webmail supports accessing multiple accounts in one place
- You can tag emails with labels and use multiple labels for cross referencing
- You can automatically forward mail from your gmail address and keep a copy in your inbox, delete the original mail, archive it or label it
- Offline Mode is available so you can access your mail even when you are not connected to the internet
- Choice of themes for webmail
- Gmail labs provides optional features developed by users. Some are quirky and gimmicky and others are invaluable such as Advanced IMAP controls and canned responses
- Using Google Apps you can point your own domain at your account so you get all the benefits of a Gmail account but with email addresses @yourowndomain.com
- You can then have up to 200 users per domain with umlimited aliases. You can request more if required.
- You can add domain aliases so yourname@ works with multiple domains you own
- You can change the Google logo to your own for a more personal user experience
- If you run out of space you an upgrade your account to 25GB storage for only $50 a year and you get other benefits such as an SLA and 24/7 support
- You only get a 99.9% uptime guarantee with the premier edition but, it’s Google. Downtime is very rare and quickly resolved when it does occur
- New services and features are added regularly and as with everything Google they are normally useful, easy and exceed expectations
- And more…
Why are you still using hosted exchange?!!!??
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