Hosted email

There are many hosted email solutions, from those offered by web-hosts to services nurtured by dedicated email providers. They give you email using your website’s own domain name, message storage, a web email interface, and important stuff like email access via your favourite Mac or PC email software. Some are good, others are OK. Few really stand out.

Or at least, that’s what Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google would like you to think. The big three global tech companies are offering hosted email solutions for professionals and small businesses. These services build on technologies developed for their free consumer email services, with a bit more on top.

So, let’s explore the big three’s hosted email services to see what you get…

Microsoft Office Live Small Business / Microsoft Online Services
Office Live Small Business - first year free
Microsoft Online Services - price TBC

In early 2009 Microsoft will launch an integrated collection of business services in the UK called Microsoft Online Services. Until then, you can get 100 email accounts hosted through Microsoft Office Live Small Business Email, free for the first year.

In addition to custom-domain email hosting, Microsoft Office Live Small Business offers website hosting and other online business productivity services such as email marketing and project/document management tools. The service provides basic email functionality, such as cross-platform web email, and supports email, contact and calendar management through Microsoft Outlook.

But the fun really starts next year, with the arrival of Exchange Online, a big part of the upcoming Microsoft Online Services. It’s a fully hosted communications solution based on Microsoft’s world-leading Exchange system, providing email with 99.9% scheduled uptime and technical support. As you’d expect from Exchange, there’s also advanced business features such as built-in continuity and disaster recovery, mobile email and push, and various advanced sync features.

It’s hard to say if and how Office Live Small Business will transform into Microsoft Online Services. For now, the former is a competitive offering at its price (free). In 2009, Microsoft’s hosted email service should get really interesting. One to watch.

Yahoo! Business Email
Around £20 per year for 1 account, £5 per month for 10

Yahoo doesn’t offer hosted email for free, but its paid for options are competitively priced and decently-featured.

Email protection and security is in focus with Yahoo! Mail. Built-in Norton Antivirus protection is standard, and Yahoo! has developed its own technologies - SpamGuard and DomainKeys - to help fight spam. The email front-end has seen extensive re-development in recent years, offering similar functionality to desktop email clients. Yahoo! is also strong on support, with 24-hour access via email and phone.

One big drawback of Yahoo!’s email service is a lack of IMAP email support (supporting only POP). You can download emails using an email client on the PC or Mac, but IMAP is often preferred as a way of keeping messages in sync between client software and server.

Google Mail
Standard edition: free for up to 200 user accounts. Premier edition: £25 per account.

Google’s standard edition offers custom-domain hosted email for free. After a few tweaks to your domain settings you and up to 199 other users can access email via web/mobile interfaces, or via your chosen email client on Mac or PC.

Google puts great effort into policing its email network for spammers and in technologies for filtering spam. As a result the built-in spam filtering is on a par with - if not better than - many paid-for solutions.

Web-integration with other online ‘cloud’ services such as contacts, calendars, Google Documents and Spreadsheets makes the ‘Google Apps’ package a comprehensive offering. And recently, Google began integrating third-party online services too, such as integration with the customer relationship management software Salesforce.

The downside: Like any free service, guaranteed uptime and dedicated technical support are lacking. That’s where the premium edition kicks in.

For £25 per user account, the premier edition makes up for the standard’s shortcomings. It offers a service level agreement with a 99.9% uptime guarantee (though this appears to be only for the email web-interface), online support, and phone support for critical issues.

The premier edition also offers advanced email services from Postini, a specialist email firm Google recently acquired. The ‘policy management’ service offers administrative control over filtering and blocking messages, and configurable spam and virus filters. ‘Message recovery’ lets administrators recover messages deleted in the past 90 days (extendable to 1-10 years for an extra cost).

The verdict

The big three’s email services are feature rich, to be sure. But email is about more than just features. The integrity, reliability and security of such services is crucial to ensure maximum email uptime, reliable and timely receipt and delivery of emails, protection against viruses and malware, and effective email backup and archiving. And with all that, comes the need for support when things go wrong.

Premium, paid-for services are bridging the gap more and more, providing reliable infrastructures, service level agreements, and dedicated support. Google’s acquisition of email security, administration and archive company Postini, and Microsoft’s moves towards Exchange Online, are particularly interesting developments to watch with respect to future advances in reliability and integrity.

An IT manager might wait a while before ditching the internal mail server to outsource email to hosted providers. But for individuals and small businesses, these services are worth a look. In time they’ll improve, and thanks to the increased market competition, other hosted email services should improve too.