Quest For The Perfect (Paid) Email Hosting Service

[petergh]

*** Update 11 September 2012: Edits for brevity, updated opinions on existing providers trialled, added new providers trialled ***

Hello all,

Inspired by ioneja in this thread, I'm going to lay out my minimum requirements in an email hosting service, followed by a short list of pro/cons I've found with the providers I've tried trialled to date.

I hope that I'll find the perfect email service hosting service for me, and that others will walk away enlightened and enabled to make an informed decision on their own choice of email hosting service.

I'm looking for an email hosting service well-suited for meeting the email needs of a family of four, i.e., I'm not looking for "enterprise-grade" offerings. Things like reliability, uptime, and technically competent support are very important to me. Things I find it difficult to deal with include rejections based on the grounds of company policies, 1st-line supporters, and promises of unlimited storage/bandwidth/whatever. I like to deal with the techies directly.

Since I'm in Europe, providers with servers on this continent will be preferred, all other things being equal.

Requirements:

• Preferably 500+ MB disk space per user/mailbox
• 1 GB bandwidth per month
• IMAP access (an absolute must)
• A decent webmail interface (custom, open source, or proprietary, doesn't matter)

Extra points given for:

• Responsive and technically knowledgeable support
• Good, thorough online documentation
• Aesthetically pleasing website/webmail interface (first impressions last unless I have a positive preconception about the company the first time I visit their site)
• Webmail accessible without using mouse at all (like Gmail)

There are probably other factors as well, but those are the most important ones. I usually use Thunderbird, so features (I like to tinker), speed, and good support are the most important factors aside from reliability, of course.



Service providers I've trialled so far:

• Gmail
  • Pros
    • Excellent, keyboard-accessible web interface.
    • Excellent uptime record
  • Cons
    • No human support unless you pay $50 per user. Paid support is not worth paying for (I've had several tickets handled by them in a less than satisfactory manner)
    • Slow, quirky, non-standard IMAP access
    • Their privacy policy
• Fastmail
  • Pros
    • Run by a bunch of genuinely good guys originally, with deep technical insight
    • Fast, RFC-compliant IMAP
    • Excellent uptime record, even in the face of recent glitches
  • Cons
    • Purchased by Opera last year, which means they're now part of a big company
    • Support is... not the best in my experience
• Hotmail/Outlook.com
  • Pros
    • Webmail interface very accessible with keyboard shortcuts, even in non-IE browsers
  • Cons
    • Only accessible with an MUA that speaks ActiveSync (Outlook or Windows Live Mail)
    • Absolutely no human support
• PolarisMail
  • Pros
    • Friendly, competent support from George_B
    • Enhanced accounts support ActiveSync + CalDAV for calendar synchronisation
    • Offers a variety of webmail interfaces: RoundCube, AtMail, SquirrelMail, GroupOffice (enhanced only)
    • Being actively developed
  • Cons
    • Webmail interfaces and configuration interfaces can be very confusing at first
    • Documentation is lacking
• Rackspace
  • Pros
    • Proprietary webmail interface almost as slick as Gmail, but has less features.
    • Mobile Sync
    • Webmail interface includes built-in calendar and notes
    • Human support available 24/7 by email and phone. Used to be fast, but lately have taken many hours to respond; sometimes no response until asked for a status update several days later. Very unlike previous experiences.
  • Cons
    • Supporters' technical knowledge varies wildly; sometimes you get an excellent answer, sometimes a completely useless one
    • Bound by corportate policies, no exceptions to anything
    • Minimum purchase is 5 accounts ($10)
• Rollernet
  • Pros
    • Friendly and technically competent support from the owner (SethM here on the forums)
    • Rollernet has built and operates their own data center; if something's broken they'll know how to fix it ASAP
    • Advanced account manager that lets you adjust almost everything under the sun
    • Lets you inspect the incoming/outgoing message log (very handy when someone asks you what happened to a certain message)
    • Under active development, and their blog is updated frequently
  • Cons
    • A bit slow for me (Rollernet is in Nevada, U.S.A.)
• Tuffmail
  • Pros
    • A very reliable provider historically
    • Advanced account manager that lets you adjust almost everything under the sun (but not incoming/outgoing mail logs like Rollernet)
  • Cons
    • No adctive development for years, literally, and the website looks exactly like it did in 2005 or so. Derek still answers support requests, though, so it's still alive and kicking despite appearances
• LuxSci
  • Pros
    • Uptime record on par with Tuffmail, if not better, at least according to posts here on the forum
    • Very fast and technically knowledgeable support personnel. I've interacted with more than a few support people in the last couple of months, but LuxSci takes the cake overall. In the words of ioneja: "Ridiculously professional."
  • Cons
    • Their web interface has become a wee bit prettier with the latest design improvements, but to my eyes it's still the ugliest proprietary webmail interface I know
• Redpin
  • Pros
    • In business since 2002
    • The owner, Mike, an systems admin with 10+ years of experience, is very quick to fix issues at most hours of the day, very accomodating to feature requests, and is available via email as well as phone
    • The server I'm on is in Dusseldorf, Germany, and so IMAP is very fast (ping times < 28 ms)
  • Cons
    • Disk space is expensive; comes with 200 MB for $3/month, which many will probably find insufficient
• EUMX
  • Pros
    • Friendly and fast human support from Rolf and Tamas
    • Cheap: $16/yr for one account, volume discounts available
    • Blazingly fast IMAP access from here (the server is in Hungary, I believe)
    • Excellent uptime, according to posts on this forum
    • SSH/SFTP access to one's account, making for easily scripted backups
  • Cons
    • Stale website like Tuffmail
    • Ugly web site with truly weird elements on it, e.g., a public photo gallery?!
    • Forum is available, but closed for signups and will be replaced with a CMS shortly, supposedly
• NEW! Nethosted.co.uk
  • Pros
    • Extremely fast IMAP from here (they're in the UK)
    • cPanel makes it easy to adjust many settings pertaining to email, including SPF and DKIM which are also supported
    • True 24x7 support by Andrew, Darryl, and Bret. These guys are there for you, literally every minute of the day, every day of the year. You get helpful replies from one of them within a matter of minutes no matter when you need help. Outstanding.
  • Cons
    • Not a specialised mail service provider, but primarily a webhosting company. They do provide a very good email service for a webhosting company, but it's still not their primary service, and it shows
    • Expensive, unless you cough up enough money to buy a 2-year subscription
    • Only their top-level email plan allows more than one domain (a major drawback to me)

A note on pros/cons: These are just the things I remember off the top of my head from trying out the service. By no means are they to be construed as a definite list of the good and bad things in a service provider. Also, do feel to disagree with my pros and cons and discuss them below.

So with all these pros and cons, where does that leave me? Basically, what I'm looking for is for someone to give me the name of a reasonably priced email hosting service that has excellent reliability, a fast webmail interface that can be navigated without lifting my hands from the keyboard, has lightning fast IMAP access, and real human support 24x7 via email and phone. Oh, the monthly cost should be $10 or less.

Any suggestions?

My updates:
Here, here, here, here, here, here (LuxSci webmail font tweak), here (most recent impressions of LuxSci), and here.

[William9]

You have covered the waterfront very well. There is no perfect service. Pick one that comes the closest to meeting your needs. With the exception of Gmail, I think email clients like Thunderbird using IMAP are better than webmail. That being said, I think the new LuxSci web interface is really nice. It's especially great when it comes to the account control panel. One good thing about LuxSci is that it is vibrant and continually being improved. I agree with you regarding Tuffmail. Has anything changed on the front page except for the copyright notice in the footer? By the way, Tuffmail did have about one hour outage in February for some users -- very unusual for Tuffmail.

[ioneja]

Wow! What a great opening post! This will become a wonderful resource for people and is a great example of why I've come to really appreciate this superb forum. Your thread is far better than my overly verbose saga in my endless thread (which you referenced above) about very similar issues!

If you've read my own journey in that and other threads, you know I've tested most of these (and/or even subscribed to several of them), and currently use a combination of LuxSci and FastMail. I spread out several domains between the two and it's been working pretty well so far.

If LuxSci had more granular, user-specific spam controls (I was not a fan of their premium spam filter, although other people like it), and maybe even more polish to their interface (the recent interface refresh was a good step forward), I'd probably be 100% LuxSci right now. The biggest selling points of LuxSci for me have been stellar uptime and as you quoted me, "ridiculously professional" tech support. The best I've ever experienced. They were so good, they even inspired me to be better with my own clients.

LuxSci has tons of collaboration tools with their WebAides (which is a big plus for me) and really put a powerful package together. I've been impressed, and am still impressed. The design of their web interface is personal preference, and I can understand your issue with it.

FastMail is one of those I want to love, and I do really like the FM team... but they just keep giving me pause. My subscription with FM is about to expire and due to their spotty record recently, and after I finally dove in and tested the FM beta (which to be frank, I don't like), I decided to do one more test of another service that eluded me: Office 365.

But before I go into Office 365, you didn't mention if ads were a negative for you. GMail obviously has ads, but the paid Google Apps for Business (which works just great as a family system too) has no ads, so that $50 per year per user is very reasonable in my book. However, the biggest drawback of Google is... well, Google. You know what I mean. If that doesn't bug you, then frankly, Google Apps for Business (or in your case, family), is really excellent. The quirky IMAP is minor compared to all that you get. I had paid accounts with them for a while before I got too creeped out by Google itself.

Moving on from that, I'd have to agree with most of your other assessments. You have basically listed the best providers on the market! In some ways, you can't go that far wrong with any of them, and you could just drill down into the specific features/needs you have and roll the dice. Or, you could do what I did and pick two.

Your specific needs are different than mine, but you might as well put Office 365 on there as well... the "P1" plan is probably closer to what you described... the "Enterprise (E)" plans are overkill for your listed needs.

The O365 P1 plan for $6 per user per month includes some great features, well worth checking out, and lines up competitively with Google Apps for Business (although we could talk for hours about their differences). The Office 365 webmail client, calendar, contacts, and tasks are all quite good, more powerful and better designed than I anticipated, and even look pretty too. They're very well integrated and work/sync well with iOS devices too (if that matters). On top of that you get a SharePoint site (although SharePoint under P1 plans are not currently running under https, so that may not be desirable for you), and web versions of Office applications (which are more like "Office Lite" but are still pretty cool).

One downside of the P1 plan is that support is handled on the forums... you don't get a phone number. I don't know how well the support with P1 is, although my one experience with Enterprise support so far was very good.

Since O365 is such a complex offering with tons of ways to evaluate it, I'd humbly suggest you sign up for a trial P1 account and see for yourself. I'm still evaluating the Enterprise account, but I've moved from a free trial right into a paid account -- that should say something about how well my trial went. However, the learning curve for the administrative portion is very annoying... it was confusing at first... but now that I've got my mind wrapped around the basics, O365 is looking pretty dang good.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to following this thread and wish you the best on your own search for the perfect provider! You've got one hell of a great start, and I'm sure you'll find something that will fit your needs! Good luck!

[petergh]

Some updates on my first post (I couldn't update my first post due to forum post size restrictions):

FastMail.FM:

• Pros
  • The owners and developers are active on these forums, though not to the same extent as in previous years (some of you will remember the prolific postings from Jeremy Howard). Look for Jeremy Howard, robmueller, brong, neilj, and rjlov on these forums.
• Cons
  • Personal experience as well as previous posts on these forums shows that response times from support can vary greatly, and personally I've once tried not getting a response at all before I contacted Rob directly a week after submitting my request. A recent interaction with support was quite positive, though.

Hotmail:

• Pros
  • I like many of their themes ("skins")

Polarismail:

• Pros
  • George, the owner, is active on these forums

Rollernet:

• Pros
  • Seth, the owner, is active on these forums (look for SethM)

LuxSci:

• Pros
  • Very responsive and technically knowledgeable support personnel. In the words of ioneja: "Ridiculously professional". From my personal interactions with LuxSci support, they also maintain a personal approach to their customers, unlike Rackspace supporters, which come across as more "corporate-like".
• Cons
  • Their web interface has become a wee bit prettier with the latest design improvements, but to my eyes it's still the ugliest proprietary webmail interface I know. It works fine, but so does Squirrelmail. I appreciate elegant software. Luxsci is efficient (keyboard shortcuts) but not the prettiest of the bunch, sadly. (By the way, did you see their new home page?).
  • The web interface is slow compared to most other web interfaces I know. It seems they've tried to solve this problem by having a preview mode which is on by default, so that only the first few lines of a message is displayed. To me, this seems like curing the symptoms instead of eliminating the root cause. Also, I don't understand why, given the obviously copious amount of technical knowledge within the company, that they can't fix a seemingly simple thing like optimization of DB access (which I'm guessing is the root cause).

[petergh]

ioneja: Thanks for your comments and input. I've actually had trial account with Office 365 back in December, but it just rubbed me the wrong way in certain respects. I've never been fond of Outlook on the desktop, and your troubles with coming to grips with the administration interface doesn't exactly make me want to give it another try. I forget if I said this in one of my previous posts already, but I prefer to stay with smaller companies like LuxSci, Redpin, Tuffmail, etc., because I feel I get a better treatment than with the likes of Google, Rackspace, Microsoft, etc. It's completely subjective and very much a personal preference, though.

These days, I have my domain hosted with LuxSci, and with the recent design improvements in their webmail interface, I have less to complain about aesthetics-wise. It's still slow to load messages (though previews show up almost instantly), but I do very much like the interactions I have with support as well as all the knobs and buttons they've got for the times I feel like playing around.

William9: You make a very valid point in noting that they're more vibrant than most of the competiton from comparably sized companies. That's another thing I really like about LuxSci. I get the gut feeling there's actually someone there behind the scenes, working on keeping the servers in top shape and developing new features for the customers. If only they would fix the dreaded slowness in their webmail interface and get rid of message previews, I think I'd cancel (almost) all my other trial accounts...

I also concur with your opinion that an IMAP client like Thunderbird is much better than most if not all webmail interfaces, but the thing is that a provider like LuxSci offers much more than than email, e.g., calendar, notes, and all their other webaides. These are not accessible through Thunderbird, so I'd prefer to use the webmail interface when I have to log in to LuxSci's web interface anyway.

Keep comments and suggestions coming, I really appreciate them.

Peter

[ioneja]

Originally Posted by petergh

It's completely subjective and very much a personal preference, though.

Ahhh, you know so much more than I did when I was looking. I totally understand your points re: personal preferences.

I think William9 said it best: "There is no perfect service. Pick one that comes the closest to meeting your needs."

There are downsides to each of the services, and it makes for a tough choice. But fortunately, you've put together a top-class list to choose from. If I had it my way, I'd love a fusion of LuxSci, FastMail, Tuffmail, Office 365 and Google Apps for Business all rolled into one, without any of the downsides. Why can't some service provider make something like that?

Re: Luxsci's interface slowness, I think it may also be partly related to what server you're on. I might be lucky in that sense since my server hasn't seemed too slow. But I do see what you mean -- it is indeed a bit slower than some other providers when I get to a large mailbox, so that's a good point.

Please keep us posted. I'm still investigating Office 365 and I do like it so far. The collaborative part of it stands out to me, but of course it has drawbacks too.

[George_B]

Thank you for including us in there.

If you let us know which options you need added we can always have them added in, and quite fast too.

For example we recently added an option to send monthly PDF reports with all the sent messages in the past 30 days. We also overhauled the Incoming Rules section to add more features such as delivery flags, rules priority, etc.

http://wiki.polarismail.com/display/...Incoming+Rules

The main idea is that we're active on developing this and always trying to improve our service.

We're not trying to be the next Tuffmail since most of our clients don't need/want that kind of granular controls, but to offer functionality combined with ease of use.

[kijinbear]

+1 for PolarisMail. I've been trying them out lately, and so far I'm satisfied. Also, at $12/yr for a 25GB basic account, they're even cheaper than EuMX.

But I do get the impression that unlike some of the other providers listed here, PolarisMail seems to be heavily reseller- (or business customers-) oriented. Those resellers, in turn, are clearly expected to have clients who don't need a lot of customization. So individual clients have rather limited options. Beware, if you're the kind of person who needs custom sieve scripts.

Like the OP, I'm also slightly annoyed by the fragmentation of the control interface. There's the admin panel, the webmail, and then a separate control panel for individual e-mail accounts (which is also accessible by clicking "Admin" in the webmail, but please somebody fix that full-screen pop-up!) This is clearly optimized for resellers, so it can be a bit of a hassle to navigate if you just have 1 e-mail account with them. But on the plus side, the separation of admin functionality into its own control panel might be good for security. If anybody steals my e-mail password, they still won't have my admin password.

Speaking of passwords, right now I'm trying to figure out where the recovery e-mail address for the admin account might be stored. Well, I could just ask @George_B if I ever need to change that. But it would be convenient if billing matters, like updating the admin's contact info or changing the number of e-mail accounts, could be automatically handled in the admin panel. Systems optimized for B2B aren't always well-suited to B2C situations.

[petergh]

I second most of what kijnbear said regarding Polarismail.

My immediate attraction to PM was based on a positive impression of George from these forums, but when I signed up for a trial account, I was met by a (in my view) number of heterogenous systems put together that I found difficult to navigate personally. One specific example: Go to https://polarismail--net.emailarray.com/demo.php (the Enhanced Email demo account) and try to log out. Try as I might, I couldn't find any way to log out, even though I tried for several minutes. It's a small thing I'm sure I could ask George about, but the point is that this was part of my first impression of the PM webmail interface.

I know that many email hosting services use one system for the administration panel, another (possibly several) for webmail clients, so this in itself is not unique to PM, but the appearance of the particular systems employed by PM didn't appeal to me.

I don't want to put anyone off PM, because I'm sure they provide a really good service for those who don't care about aesthetics or just plain like the appearance of the interfaces, I'm just saying I'm not one of those people. Different people, different strokes.

Peter

[petergh]

I forgot one provider in my first post:

Cotse.net:

• Pros
  • Privacy-oriented service. I quite like that these days where I'm beginning to worry about the amount information I'm handing over to Google through my use of Gmail, etc.
  • According to themselves, they have "(...) the most flexible and advanced e-mail system you'll find anywhere", and they're certainly right in that they have a LOT of knobs and buttons to turn and push
• Cons
  • One-man operation (I think). In my book this is a bad thing, because if something goes wrong, there not may be anyone around to get the wheels going again
  • Webmail is a heavily customised version of SquirrelMail. This customisation has not made it any prettier, to my mind. Quite the contrary, in fact.

One unique fact about Cotse.net is that they do not keep backups of customer data. They're very upfront about this, and they say it's because of their attention to customers' privacy; they don't want to risk having any copies of customer data floating around on backup tapes somewhere if someone should come knocking. In the words of the owner (I think it was): "They can't subpoena what isn't there." Some people will love this, others will probably hate it, but it's something that's nice to know before you sign up with this service.

[William9]

I find the speed of LuxSci's web interface to be good and the "look and feel" of the latest upgrade attractive -- and it's loaded with functionality.
In contrast to some others who have expressed an opinion here, I really think that the Gmail web interface is great. It's the only email service for which i actually prefer the web over a local client.

[George_B]

Originally Posted by petergh

I second most of what kijnbear said regarding Polarismail.

My immediate attraction to PM was based on a positive impression of George from these forums, but when I signed up for a trial account, I was met by a (in my view) number of heterogenous systems put together that I found difficult to navigate personally. One specific example: Go to https://polarismail--net.emailarray.com/demo.php (the Enhanced Email demo account) and try to log out. Try as I might, I couldn't find any way to log out, even though I tried for several minutes. It's a small thing I'm sure I could ask George about, but the point is that this was part of my first impression of the PM webmail interface.

I know that many email hosting services use one system for the administration panel, another (possibly several) for webmail clients, so this in itself is not unique to PM, but the appearance of the particular systems employed by PM didn't appeal to me.

I don't want to put anyone off PM, because I'm sure they provide a really good service for those who don't care about aesthetics or just plain like the appearance of the interfaces, I'm just saying I'm not one of those people. Different people, different strokes.

Peter

The make up of our Control Panels is as follows:

Reseller Panel: they can add multiple admins and assign them a fixed set of users, domains and storage space

Admin Panel: they can add domains, users, aliases, lists

User Panel: they can modify their password, vacation message, incoming rules, etc

It is indeed not ideal for the administration of individual e-mail accounts, as we are geared more towards companies with multiple mailboxes and resellers, but it still remains very manageable.

The demo button does indeed not have a 'Logout' button. It's not actually possible to enter the interface without logging in ( and therefore having a Logout button ) and we made some hacks in order to allow the one-click-demo option.

If you login normally though:

http://office.polarismail.net
user: demo
password: demo

You will have the Logout button.

Cheerio

[xmailer]

Originally Posted by George_B

Thank you for including us in there.

If you let us know which options you need added we can always have them added in, and quite fast too.

For example we recently added an option to send monthly PDF reports with all the sent messages in the past 30 days. We also overhauled the Incoming Rules section to add more features such as delivery flags, rules priority, etc.

http://wiki.polarismail.com/display/...Incoming+Rules

The main idea is that we're active on developing this and always trying to improve our service.

We're not trying to be the next Tuffmail since most of our clients don't need/want that kind of granular controls, but to offer functionality combined with ease of use.

While, as a somewhat more "casual" email user (or email "hobbyist"?), I don't really have much of substance to add to the main topic of this thread, I just want to say "in passing" that I appreciate the improvement of Polarismail's filtering rules, only noticing recently that they now allow for selectively forwarding messages while keeping a copy in my Polarismail inbox, an option which I recall discussing was lacking in my email correspondence with you some time ago (and which, to the best of my knowledge, is an important (to me) option still unavailable with the Zoho service, although that service isn't one of those under discussion in this thread).

[Berenburger]

Originally Posted by petergh

Keep comments and suggestions coming, I really appreciate them.

Because of this I'm revitalizing my old Pobox account.
In the basic Pobox is an email forwarding service. You create a pobox.com address (or your own domain) and forwards it's email, after a spam check (configurable), to one ore more forwarding adresses. This way you can easily switch (webmail) providers to your heart contents, without losing your email address all the time. Beside features as filters, etc. you can also opt for a mailstore account. It offers pop, imap and webmail access; Roundcube and Atmail 6 (beta). I use it as an archive. Archive directories can automatically separated by time (month or days).

[Berenburger]

Originally Posted by ioneja

Please keep us posted. I'm still investigating Office 365 and I do like it so far. The collaborative part of it stands out to me, but of course it has drawbacks too.

How does Office 365 relate with the online services of Windows Live? With Live I have also contacts, calendar, syncing, etc. and even Office web apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote) within Skydrive. I.o.w.: do I (you) need really Office 365?