Need help with professional email service provider/plan - best choices?

ioneja · 14 Jul 2011, 05:02 AM

EDIT: For Moderator: I'm not sure if this is the correct/best sub-forum for this post. Please move it if you think it would be more appropriate in another area! Thank you!

Hi -- I've been lurking in these forums for a while and finally opened an account to ask for some help. This place seems to be the best forum on email issues I can find, so hopefully someone can help me out. I'm in a jam, and need to finally figure out my email strategy.

I'm looking for *the best* small business/personal/professional email service provider out there and I need some help figuring out a new email gameplan overall. And I don't mind paying money for the best services.

First, by "small business" I mean really, really small business. This is a family business, so it really only needs a few accounts. I need something way better than "free," I hate ads of any kind intruding on my email, and I'd like the best of class privacy, performance and uptime. I want to feel confident and trust my email provider that their system is safe, reliable, robust, and free from prying eyes... engineered and staffed by experts and people with integrity.

I've tried many different providers out there over the last several years, from small to big providers... such as Google Apps (free), Google Apps for Business, Yahoo (free, paid, and business), FastMail, Rackspace Email Hosting (was Webmail.us I believe), Tuffmail, and many, many others -- most of the "usual suspects" mentioned in this forum by now.

I just recently signed up for a trial of LuxSci as well to see what all the hubbub with them is about.

So far, I feel confident I can eliminate the biggest providers like Google, Yahoo, etc. I'm just not convinced about their real -- TRUE -- respect for privacy and frankly, I feel like Google already "knows" too much about all of us. To be fair, the service itself was very good while I actively used them, and I have to hand it to their developers for creating a lean, effective webmail app, as well as their other "office" apps. Impressive... but again, I just don't feel comfortable with them overall. They creep me out, and I feel like my email with them only exists to drive me to other products/services and to give up more and more of my personal info to them. Even when I browse, they are following me around to random websites with their ad services, and it just feels like "Big Brother."

On the exact opposite end of the spectrum is Tuffmail, which is about as small of an operation as you can get and still be legit -- as I understand it, now that John sold Tuffmail, it's run by one person (maybe two now?). I can't fault his/their performance and reliability, but I need something a little "bigger" and with more humans around in case someone gets deathly ill over there. Otherwise, I'd consider Tuffmail one of my top choices. It was clean, fast, simple, powerful and reliable while I actively used it. But I need more humans behind the magic curtain, unfortunately.

Recently I've tried FastMail, and signed up for one of their top-tier paid accounts, but I've been surprised at the downtime/interruptions. They may seem minor to some of you, but I signed up literally when the recent outages began, and it has eroded my confidence in them. Even my support ticket response times have plummeted. At first (as a newbie), I received support very quickly... now, it's much slower. And as much as I appreciate the detailed descriptions of why they've experienced downtime, the reasons they've given have not given me confidence... and for some reason, the downtime has occurred right at a moment when I needed my email... so count that bad luck. I was especially surprised to find out in this forum that they store passwords in plaintext which just shocked me. I read their explanation somewhere in this forum, but it is not cool with me. So I've been feeling less and less enthusiastic about FastMail, even though the feature set is superb, and the basic service is good (except for the inopportune interruptions I have personally experienced). I just don't want to experience ONE MORE even minor outage and read about how so-and-so was with his family and had to cut his time short with them to telecommute into work, but some router or network wouldn't let him in to some server that had gone bonkers, and how he had to wake up so-and-so to help figure out the problem. They're all good guys, but if the two of them somehow were abducted by aliens, I have NO confidence that Opera could pick up the pieces smoothly. Ergo, my confidence in FastMail has slipped quite a bit lately.

I tried Rackspace's paid email services and it just simply lacks the granular control and depth that something like Tuffmail and Fastmail offer, and I really dislike their webmail client. I tried liking it, but alas, it is a relationship that will never be. The whole webmail client feels like a step back, like they're trying to replace a desktop app experience of yesteryear, with no innovation. I also experienced some very strange spam and delivery issues, although those got worked out eventually (I think). But otherwise, they seemed pretty decent. I wasn't with them long enough to get a feel for real ptime since I just couldn't live with their stale webmail client.

The story goes on and on with other providers -- no need to list them all since I feel the above are the best of the ones I've tried. Lately, I've been demoing LuxSci -- which seems like a perennial favorite around here -- and I was rather blown away by some of the PIM-type features with the WebAides, which are more feature-laden than I expected (I might actually use some of them!)... and I was surprised how much I liked their Workspace/Widget implementation... but I just don't know enough about LuxSci to trust them yet, and what their real-life uptime is... or their real privacy practices in-house. They seem somewhere in between Tuffmail and FastMail, but with far more services and yet in some ways, a less robust design paradigm. The price is definitely higher, but perhaps they are worth it? Not sure yet... I'm not crazy that they don't have a hot mirror of their services if one server or RAID controller goes down... I do understand that I can ask for a mirror of my account itself on another server for an additional fee, but it just smacks of "shared hosting" to me versus powerhouse email provider with full hot duplication going on for all accounts. On the other hand, I've talked with them twice on the phone and I was shocked at how knowledgeable their salespeople are... one of which used to be tech support, and knew the system inside and out... very impressive. So, very mixed feelings about Luxsci so far. Jury still out for me.

Anyway, I'm torn about what to do. I still have accounts at several of these places, and my wholesale migration to FastMail has been put on "pause" -- and I don't have a good email strategy in place to clean all the messy pieces up. I even have old archive email at an ancient Yahoo biz account I should clean out. I have been "in transition" over to Fastmail, but lately I'm feeling more and more uncomfortable with them with each passing month...

I've even considered going back to paid Google Apps just because it worked "well enough" for the time I primarily used it, but El Goog just creeps me out with privacy issues overall, and its integration into the infinite Goog data collection monster. For me, the concept/purpose of Email is inherently in conflict with Goog's seeming business model that is trending more and more to omniscient social media platform.

So Goog is out. Too creepy for my blood.

Tuffmail is out for now, unfortunately. Too small, even though the prior management rocked... John had earned my trust over time, and I just don't feel that way with the new owner yet. Trust must be earned when you're dealing with something this personal. Nothing against the new owner(s), but they still have big shoes to fill.

Fastmail was in, but now makes me more uncomfortable each passing month... I want to like them, but they make me a little nervous now... so it's on the edge of being out for me.

Rackspace email is out, simple as that... Just cannot get along with that webmail happily, and not enough granular control. I've been spoiled by Tuffmail and Fastmail.

Many others I've tried fall short of the above four, so I won't bother listing them.

Luxsci is a real possibility now, but it bugs the hell out of me for some reason that my email is just sitting on a single RAID on a single server, (even though it is backed up every day) and at that price! And I just don't know if they would really be better than Fastmail or Tuffmail at its primary job of pure email.

So what else can I do?

Right now, I'm seriously contemplating a move back to Thunderbird and a tiny little POP or IMAP account at one of the above, and using something like MailStore Home for archiving. With all the recent privacy issues out there -- from Google social omniscience to Dropbox password snafu -- I'm thinking of pulling my email back from the "cloud" and right back into my computer...

Any thoughts or help after reading that long post???

Thanks so much for reading through all that, and for any ideas/thoughts!

William9 · 14 Jul 2011, 02:14 PM

That's quite an essay and a good summary of a journey that others of us have also taken. Because of the outages at FM, I moved to Tuffmail and then to LuxSci. I've had a LuxSci account for several years and have never experienced an outage. I agree that it's customer service is awesome. I've grown to trust its reliability and accessability. I'm not sure about the single raid concern that bugs you. I'm not sure that is an accurate description of the set-up, but if so, is it a real concern? Certainly its performance for me has been stellar since about 2007 when I opened an account.

ioneja · 14 Jul 2011, 10:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by William9

That's quite an essay and a good summary of a journey that others of us have also taken.

Haha! It's one reason why I feel confident posting here and actually getting meaningful help -- I feel like there are more people who have gone through a similar path here and know what they're talking about. This is truly the best, un-hyped email forum I've seen.

Quote:

Originally Posted by William9

Because of the outages at FM, I moved to Tuffmail and then to LuxSci. I've had a LuxSci account for several years and have never experienced an outage. I agree that it's customer service is awesome. I've grown to trust its reliability and accessability. I'm not sure about the single raid concern that bugs you. I'm not sure that is an accurate description of the set-up, but if so, is it a real concern? Certainly its performance for me has been stellar since about 2007 when I opened an account.

Thank you for your comments about LuxSci! When you say you've grown to trust LuxSci, do you store all of your email there with them now? As in, leave it there for years and access via IMAP, or are you downloading your email and managing it locally with something like Outlook or Thunderbird?

As for the set-up -- I'm 99% certain (after research and talking with them) the main points of how their system works is the following, although I could be wrong on some points, and would love a correction from LuxSci or other forum members if they spot an error.

Basically, my current understanding is that LuxSci does have redundant inbound servers that process incoming mail, but then that mail is spooled out to individual servers that hold the various email accounts. They use servers at Rackspace (for their premium service) and recently added servers at Serverbeach (for their non-premium service), if I understood correctly. Both classes of servers run the same software, but the Rackspace system has a better SLA (and probably better hardware, network infrastructure, etc.) and I believe an additional hardware firewall.

Each server uses software and/or hardware RAID. In the case of the Rackspace servers, I believe they get backed up once or twice every day, and they have backups of up to a month, including one or more offsite backups. The Serverbeach offerings don't get the same level of backup policy (but you get much more physical disk space).

The whole LuxSci platform seems to be a very custom platform that has been tweaked, evolved, refined and buttoned down over the last 10+ years. So it's a serious custom layer on top of open source OS (like CentOS) and a few key open source tools (like the IMAP server they use, etc). However, the whole webmail client, WebAides, etc.. -- that's all custom with many years of love and investment, from what I understand.

So, if anyone tries LuxSci seriously, they'll immediately notice how custom the platform is, you can clearly see someone thought about it and refined it for many years, and you have to respect what they have accomplished. It's their baby and they deserve credit for what they have done. Perhaps the only criticism one can have for their serious custom platform is the complexity to a new user. I found myself a little lost at first with all the options, but I appreciate that the options are there. So it's not really a criticism. But some people may find it somewhat overwhelming compared to some other services out there.

Now, here's the part that I have a problem with (at least for now) -- is that each server that houses your email is basically a single island -- a single point of failure. While the inbound email servers are apparently separate and redundant (which then queue mail for the individual email servers which house our accounts), the actual servers that house our email accounts can fail, taking us totally down on that server, with possible loss of email that was on the hard drive(s), etc. There is NO hot, live failover server, from what I understand. We'd just have to wait for the Rackspace tech to get in there and replace a hard drive, server, etc., then the LuxSci guys to get in there remotely and restore the data itself....

So, in that situation, the inbound email servers will sit there receiving and buffering email until your server comes back online. In the event of a total server failure where the whole server gets destroyed/corrupted/etc., then LuxSci will have an offsite backup of your email up to the last time the backup process ran.... so IN THEORY, you can really lose email here in that gap while they reprovision/restore a server... from the initial total system failure to the last time that the email server was backed up. Emails that are in-bound during the outage are still queued in the redundant inbound servers, so that's not a huge issue... but still, there is a coverage gap that other providers don't appear to have.

So that gap bothers me that it's been left out of the engineering design of the whole LuxSci ecosystem. Granted, the possibility is likely extremely low something that extreme will ever happen, but I don't like the idea that there is no hot failover ready to go. My own business backup procedures appear to be more robust than LuxSci's. I have a hot mirror, a local fireproof backup, and an offsite backup at minimum on critical data, sometimes with a fourth copy. LuxSci should at least be on par with my own backup policy...

Now, I do understand that LuxSci offers two possible solutions to my concern. One is with their partner MXLogic/McAfee that has some hard-core archiving and continuity options that might serve to soften some concerns (although not entirely, since even their continuity doesn't cover the gap I mentioned -- although the hard-core archiving technically could cover that).

Second, I read that LuxSci offers the option for a hot mirror failover account that can be configured on a separate server from your main account. That would, technically, be acceptable and plug the hole mentioned above.

So then we come to cost -- I don't know the price for this failover account yet (I'll call or email today and ask them), but I'm sure it's another "extra" to a service cost that is already more expensive than pretty much all the other ones. I'm not saying it's not worth it, but when I look at the infrastructure design, from my understanding of it, it doesn't seem as robust as some of their competitors with the basic, default options chosen on the account.

Contrast LuxSci's server configuration to even Tuffmail (I remember conversations with John several years ago when he owned Tuffmail, being very impressed with its redundancy at the time), and even FastMail. And if you've done homework on Google Apps for Business infrastructure, then you know they have serious chops. But again, they're out of the running due to the creepyness factor.

Granted, LuxSci does have a strong SLA and they do use Rackspace, which is a solid company with their own excellent SLA, but that's an easy excuse for not designing a more hardcore hot mirror of the main email system, top to bottom.

Anyway, it could be I'm looking at that part too seriously, considering that LuxSci's real-world uptime and stability has a great reputation... and if I choose to be really paranoid, they do offer the live mirror per account option, which if it's not too expensive may be worth the extra peace of mind.

Thanks again for the comments!

Any other comments/thoughts much appreciated!

George_B · 14 Jul 2011, 11:45 PM

For most providers, the back-end storage is very problematic.

There are many solutions that have been tried out by many providers but nothing is guaranteed against loss.

Google itself has had many outages, and in the most recent ones people ended up losing data.

Amazon suffered the same fate recently.

As I see it, the best option for the "small" level providers is:

distributed file system storage on "raid 10" type setup with snapshots every x hours.

More than that and costs go way up, without a guarantee for more safety.

Berenburger · 15 Jul 2011, 12:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ioneja

Anyway, it could be I'm looking at that part too seriously, considering that LuxSci's real-world uptime and stability has a great reputation... and if I choose to be really paranoid, they do offer the live mirror per account option, which if it's not too expensive may be worth the extra peace of mind.

Then why not take care for your own backup and redundancy? You've already mentioned MailStore. And a lot of us here forward their mail to a second provider.

ioneja · 15 Jul 2011, 01:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Berenburger

Then why not take care for your own backup and redundancy? You've already mentioned MailStore. And a lot of us here forward their mail to a second provider.

Yes, I think we're on the same page... maybe FastMail could be the backup. Or maybe I just stick with one place and use MailStore. Definitely looking that way.

BTW, I did call LuxSci today and basically, my description above about their system appears to be correct, and as far as the hot mirror approach with them, it boils down to me paying for a simple second account with the current system. So the costs are not exactly double to get the hot mirror today, just basically whatever level of redundancy I want to pay for -- i.e.: I wouldn't need to pay for the WebAides on the second account. They did say they've never had a catastrophic failure like I described, but it's good to know the option is there to prevent even that.

Additionally -- and this could be the big answer to my quest -- I was told that LuxSci may be rolling out or upgrading their infrastructure soon with a redundant hot failover for all premium accounts. The salesperson couldn't give me more details than that (for a variety of reasons, I suppose), and the new feature is still "in process" but *IF* they do actually release that new feature, it would totally cover my concern. And then I think we'd have a clear solution.

So at this point I'm leaning towards migrating to LuxSci (assuming this new hot failover is going to come true in the near future) and will consider FastMail as backup (hell, I already paid for it) and/or maybe use MailStore Home.

Any other thoughts, ideas, recommendations welcome!

**ReuvenNY** · 15 Jul 2011, 02:20 AM

A couple of very quick points:

1. Checkout Polarismail.com
2. No one provider solution has 100% guarantee, even with the most redundancy. Get one of the accounts you like and have them aoutomatically redirect (forward) to another (unrelated) service. So if you main account is out for a while, at least you can read your email in the backup account. It's also good for permanently storing email. It saved me when I deleted email I later needed.

curvefan · 15 Jul 2011, 06:41 AM

Reading this thread caused me to check out LuxSci's site and I couldn't believe their prices.

Wow! How many people can afford to pay$120.00/yr for one user account?

That must be some mighty fine email hosting their offering.

I guess us poor folk will have to stick with the everyday players.

ReuvenNY's suggestion to check out Polarismail was right on the mark. Polarismail offers a fine service at a great price.

Just me opining..............................

ioneja · 15 Jul 2011, 09:41 AM

Thank you, guys, I will add PolarisMail to my list to check out. That is one I somehow missed all these years.

BTW, the $120 per year is indeed steep, but that's for the first account, additional accounts are much more affordable. But yes, it still adds up fast and it sounds like a lot when compared to some of the others.

Taking that a step further, though, it's hard to really compare all these services -- apples to oranges, etc. Each one has different features that set it apart. In the case of LuxSci, I think the biggest "feature" from what I can tell and have heard from people who have been customers for a while, is the service. Indeed, just from a prospective customer point of view, I've talked with them on the phone a few times now, and the level of knowledge and responsiveness has been second to none so far. The only one that ever came close (or surpassed it) was John Capo over at Tuffmail, but he's not there anymore.

So I don't mind paying a little more if that service level holds true as a paying customer. Having a crew of knowledgeable, live human beings on the end of the phone costs money, and has to be passed on to the customers.

Also, that $120 is not really that much more than other business-class providers. In some cases, it's competitive. For example, even Google Apps for Business costs $50 per user per year. So three users with them is $150 per year.

At Luxsci, three users would be $144 per year ($12 per month) for the basics. But of course, the features are totally different, etc.

So it's not THAT far fetched what they are charging. And if you are paying monthly, that really isn't that bad, if those features are worth it to you.

ioneja · 15 Jul 2011, 11:06 AM

Okay, just checked out PolarisMail. I was wrong -- I had briefly checked this service out a while back, but it wasn't the right fit for me based on features and email client at the time. I will give them a call though, just so I can understand how their security and infrastructure really works.

Just as a quick run through, it looks like they are running GroupOffice (http://freshmeat.net/projects/group-office) for their "Enhanced Email" service and Atmail (http://atmail.com/webmail-client/) for their "Basic Email" service. Both of those apps are certainly solid products. I've always been impressed with the smoothness of the Atmail interface, although it's not the right feature set for what I need. GroupOffice looks pretty good... lots of features. Not crazy about the email client in it, but still, a very impressive piece of software.

In both cases, those are third-party apps (one I believe is an open source project and also a commercial project -- not sure which one PolarisMail uses, and the other a commercial product), and even though they are respectable third-party apps, PolarisMail differs considerably from FastMail or LuxSci in that sense, for example, since both FastMail and LuxSci have proprietary client apps with some extremely deep options in some cases.

Personally, I'm more inclined to go with a provider that developed its own email system. Although I can see a good argument to go the other direction too.

I'm not sure on the hosting side how robust their infrastructure is -- they provide some details on the site and link to the Peer 1 datacenter they use. They do say "each server and virtual server is load balanced and dedicated to one service only, with more than one server providing the same service," so I take it that the whole system has full redundancy, but I guess I'll find out when I call. They also guarantee 99.9995% uptime per year. That works out to about 2.5 minutes per year of downtime, if my math is correct. That sounds impressive, but I didn't see what is offered in an SLA if they exceed 2.5 minutes. So there are still a lot of questions.

Even if they have a money-back SLA at 99.9995%, at their prices, how much of a refund would you be entitled to? Certainly, the price of downtime is far greater than any pro-rated refund I could get.

It's worth a phone call to see if a human actually answers.

I'm impressed they even have a phone number listed on their site. So I just called and got voicemail. It is evening there, I didn't leave a message, but I'll try again during business hours tomorrow.

Price-wise, Polarismail is very competitive and they offer a huge amount of space. 25GB for $1 per month. I hate to say it, but that to me is a red flag... maybe a Polarismail person can chime in here. 25GB means they are likely overselling like many shared hosting providers do. It's not unethical to oversell to a certain degree (if you consider that just about every shared hosting provider does it to stay competitive), but I am willing to pay a service provider that can deliver on full capacity if people want to use it. I'm not trying to give them a hard time, but think about the math on that. 10 users = 250GB max, 100 users=2500GB max. When you factor in RAID 10 as George_B (of PolarisMail) mentioned, plus backup costs, plus enterprise drives, plus hot mirrors, plus bandwidth for offsite backups, not to mention service costs, etc., then we're talking prohibitive costs for just 100 users at that price for a small service provider. Obviously, some overselling is expected, but the ratio and cost factors make $1/25GB sound more like marketing hyperbole to me. If people actually took full advantage of that, it would be incredibly expensive to maintain.

Even Google Apps for Business can't match that ratio of storage, and Google knows a thing or two about storage. At $50 per year for 25GB with Google Apps for Business, compared to $12 per year at PolarisMail for the same space, it just raises more questions than answers.

So if we compare PolarisMail to FastMail or Luxsci, just on paper, they really are vastly different beasts. Just the services alone that they offer are so different, that it's just not logical to factor pricing into it...for example, Luxsci has MXLogic's outside email filtering/archiving service as an option, which alone costs more than PolarisMail's entire 25GB account.

This all blows my mind, how many options there are out there. Anyway, I will call PolarisMail tomorrow and see if there's a human available to talk with. They look promising -- perhaps not the right fit for what I need, but still a very value-oriented service with a lot of features for an insanely good price.

shenton · 15 Jul 2011, 02:16 PM

Another one for you to consider is 01.com, though they are changing their name to zMailcloud. They're based in Chicago and have live telephone support. I've never used their telephone support yet as their ticket system seems excellent.

They're a Zimbra provider, so it will all depend on whether you like the Zimbra interface or not.

The Zimbra Calendaring is excellent and it integrates with Outlook as well as a web interface/Zimbra Desktop client.

It's worth a look and I've never had any significant downtime... they have a live up/downtime report that you can check.

Oh, and I've just noticed they still do a free 30 day trial, so that's worth a go!

George_B · 15 Jul 2011, 11:52 PM

The SLA for downtime is one day of free service for every hour of downtime.

I can't recall the last time we were down even for a few minutes, let alone an entire hour.

The maximum amount of credit we can reimburse in extreme conditions can't exceed the client's monthly invoice.

Now as far as storage goes, it's actually not that expensive. Drives have increased in capacity and prices have dropped a lot. Couple this with the fact that not all users use up their entire space allotment and we are always within a safe margin.

As an internal rule, whenever a storage cluster reaches 50% capacity, we add another one.

Technically speaking it's not the amount of space required that's a problem but the IOPS ( input/output operations per second ). Modern mail systems store one file per e-mail message and as you can imagine, this means lots of files for a mail provider. On average the files are very small and this is basically the nightmare scenario for any storage provider: large amounts of small, random lookups on the array. When 5 000 people check their imap account per second, your IOPS go through the roof and that limit will be hit first before storage ever becomes a problem.

To give you an idea, most storage providers (netapp, emc, etc) use a combination of several regular hard drives as their back-end. By regular I mean either SATA, or SAS or even SSD. The IOPS of each drive are as follows:

SATA: 100 iops
SAS: 175 iops
SSD: 5000-8000 iops

You basically have to clump a lot of drives together in order to either achieve many IOPS with SATA/SAS or achieve lots of storage with SSD.

... unless you have a LOT of money. Then you can buy a few of these bad boys:

http://www.fusionio.com/products/iodrive-octal/

5.12 TB of data and 1 180 000 IOPS!

Last I checked, prices started at about 120 000$/unit ... and you still have to buy quite a few of them.

kijinbear · 16 Jul 2011, 12:59 AM

Last time I checked out PolarisMail, they seemed to store all passwords in plain-text, too. Even worse, the domain administrator could see every user's password in the control panel. Sucks for you, if your boss is the domain administrator and your password is MyBossIsADouchebag.

That was a few months ago, before the recent redesign. If anything has changed in the meantime regarding the plain-text password situation, I would consider trying them out again. As with the OP, plain-text passwords and frequent outages are making me nervous about FastMail lately.

It's surprising how many e-mail companies who otherwise seem to have excellent security overlook something as simple and basic as hashing passwords. I wonder if LuxSci or TuffMail is better in that regard?

soromak · 16 Jul 2011, 01:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kijinbear

Last time I checked out PolarisMail, they seemed to store all passwords in plain-text, too. Even worse, the domain administrator could see every user's password in the control panel. Sucks for you, if your boss is the domain administrator and your password is MyBossIsADouchebag.

That was a few months ago, before the recent redesign. If anything has changed in the meantime regarding the plain-text password situation, I would consider trying them out again. As with the OP, plain-text passwords and frequent outages are making me nervous about FastMail lately.

It's surprising how many e-mail companies who otherwise seem to have excellent security overlook something as simple and basic as hashing passwords. I wonder if LuxSci or TuffMail is better in that regard?

I wonder why nobody mentioned about EuMX here....they are similarly priced to Polarimail, but based in Europe....well, their main website is ugly, I know, but they have been rock solid for me for the last few years, reasonably priced and without stupid traffic quotas per minute/hour. So I don't care about their website, since I am paying for e-mail hosting not web design.
And eventhough it is not widely advertised you can also create highly customisable SIEVE filters (they support it through managesive), I can't say any bad word on the quality of their spam filtering system either.
If you need some details on how they store passwords, just drop a line to support (at) eumx.net and ask. They reply for e-mails promptly.

George_B · 16 Jul 2011, 01:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kijinbear

Last time I checked out PolarisMail, they seemed to store all passwords in plain-text, too. Even worse, the domain administrator could see every user's password in the control panel. Sucks for you, if your boss is the domain administrator and your password is MyBossIsADouchebag.

That was a few months ago, before the recent redesign. If anything has changed in the meantime regarding the plain-text password situation, I would consider trying them out again. As with the OP, plain-text passwords and frequent outages are making me nervous about FastMail lately.

It's surprising how many e-mail companies who otherwise seem to have excellent security overlook something as simple and basic as hashing passwords. I wonder if LuxSci or TuffMail is better in that regard?

We actually offer both options.

We started out as offering e-mail service to ISP's with thousands of users and they really need to know the client's password for when they call because they forgot it. I know it doesn't make the best security, but it's how it worked for many of them.

If you don't require this "feature", we can also store your passwords in encrypted format.

14 Jul 2011, 05:02 AM	#1
ioneja Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Jul 2011 Posts: 713	Need help with professional email service provider/plan - best choices? EDIT: For Moderator: I'm not sure if this is the correct/best sub-forum for this post. Please move it if you think it would be more appropriate in another area! Thank you! Hi -- I've been lurking in these forums for a while and finally opened an account to ask for some help. This place seems to be the best forum on email issues I can find, so hopefully someone can help me out. I'm in a jam, and need to finally figure out my email strategy. I'm looking for the best small business/personal/professional email service provider out there and I need some help figuring out a new email gameplan overall. And I don't mind paying money for the best services. First, by "small business" I mean really, really small business. This is a family business, so it really only needs a few accounts. I need something way better than "free," I hate ads of any kind intruding on my email, and I'd like the best of class privacy, performance and uptime. I want to feel confident and trust my email provider that their system is safe, reliable, robust, and free from prying eyes... engineered and staffed by experts and people with integrity. I've tried many different providers out there over the last several years, from small to big providers... such as Google Apps (free), Google Apps for Business, Yahoo (free, paid, and business), FastMail, Rackspace Email Hosting (was Webmail.us I believe), Tuffmail, and many, many others -- most of the "usual suspects" mentioned in this forum by now. I just recently signed up for a trial of LuxSci as well to see what all the hubbub with them is about. So far, I feel confident I can eliminate the biggest providers like Google, Yahoo, etc. I'm just not convinced about their real -- TRUE -- respect for privacy and frankly, I feel like Google already "knows" too much about all of us. To be fair, the service itself was very good while I actively used them, and I have to hand it to their developers for creating a lean, effective webmail app, as well as their other "office" apps. Impressive... but again, I just don't feel comfortable with them overall. They creep me out, and I feel like my email with them only exists to drive me to other products/services and to give up more and more of my personal info to them. Even when I browse, they are following me around to random websites with their ad services, and it just feels like "Big Brother." On the exact opposite end of the spectrum is Tuffmail, which is about as small of an operation as you can get and still be legit -- as I understand it, now that John sold Tuffmail, it's run by one person (maybe two now?). I can't fault his/their performance and reliability, but I need something a little "bigger" and with more humans around in case someone gets deathly ill over there. Otherwise, I'd consider Tuffmail one of my top choices. It was clean, fast, simple, powerful and reliable while I actively used it. But I need more humans behind the magic curtain, unfortunately. Recently I've tried FastMail, and signed up for one of their top-tier paid accounts, but I've been surprised at the downtime/interruptions. They may seem minor to some of you, but I signed up literally when the recent outages began, and it has eroded my confidence in them. Even my support ticket response times have plummeted. At first (as a newbie), I received support very quickly... now, it's much slower. And as much as I appreciate the detailed descriptions of why they've experienced downtime, the reasons they've given have not given me confidence... and for some reason, the downtime has occurred right at a moment when I needed my email... so count that bad luck. I was especially surprised to find out in this forum that they store passwords in plaintext which just shocked me. I read their explanation somewhere in this forum, but it is not cool with me. So I've been feeling less and less enthusiastic about FastMail, even though the feature set is superb, and the basic service is good (except for the inopportune interruptions I have personally experienced). I just don't want to experience ONE MORE even minor outage and read about how so-and-so was with his family and had to cut his time short with them to telecommute into work, but some router or network wouldn't let him in to some server that had gone bonkers, and how he had to wake up so-and-so to help figure out the problem. They're all good guys, but if the two of them somehow were abducted by aliens, I have NO confidence that Opera could pick up the pieces smoothly. Ergo, my confidence in FastMail has slipped quite a bit lately. I tried Rackspace's paid email services and it just simply lacks the granular control and depth that something like Tuffmail and Fastmail offer, and I really dislike their webmail client. I tried liking it, but alas, it is a relationship that will never be. The whole webmail client feels like a step back, like they're trying to replace a desktop app experience of yesteryear, with no innovation. I also experienced some very strange spam and delivery issues, although those got worked out eventually (I think). But otherwise, they seemed pretty decent. I wasn't with them long enough to get a feel for real ptime since I just couldn't live with their stale webmail client. The story goes on and on with other providers -- no need to list them all since I feel the above are the best of the ones I've tried. Lately, I've been demoing LuxSci -- which seems like a perennial favorite around here -- and I was rather blown away by some of the PIM-type features with the WebAides, which are more feature-laden than I expected (I might actually use some of them!)... and I was surprised how much I liked their Workspace/Widget implementation... but I just don't know enough about LuxSci to trust them yet, and what their real-life uptime is... or their real privacy practices in-house. They seem somewhere in between Tuffmail and FastMail, but with far more services and yet in some ways, a less robust design paradigm. The price is definitely higher, but perhaps they are worth it? Not sure yet... I'm not crazy that they don't have a hot mirror of their services if one server or RAID controller goes down... I do understand that I can ask for a mirror of my account itself on another server for an additional fee, but it just smacks of "shared hosting" to me versus powerhouse email provider with full hot duplication going on for all accounts. On the other hand, I've talked with them twice on the phone and I was shocked at how knowledgeable their salespeople are... one of which used to be tech support, and knew the system inside and out... very impressive. So, very mixed feelings about Luxsci so far. Jury still out for me. Anyway, I'm torn about what to do. I still have accounts at several of these places, and my wholesale migration to FastMail has been put on "pause" -- and I don't have a good email strategy in place to clean all the messy pieces up. I even have old archive email at an ancient Yahoo biz account I should clean out. I have been "in transition" over to Fastmail, but lately I'm feeling more and more uncomfortable with them with each passing month... I've even considered going back to paid Google Apps just because it worked "well enough" for the time I primarily used it, but El Goog just creeps me out with privacy issues overall, and its integration into the infinite Goog data collection monster. For me, the concept/purpose of Email is inherently in conflict with Goog's seeming business model that is trending more and more to omniscient social media platform. So Goog is out. Too creepy for my blood. Tuffmail is out for now, unfortunately. Too small, even though the prior management rocked... John had earned my trust over time, and I just don't feel that way with the new owner yet. Trust must be earned when you're dealing with something this personal. Nothing against the new owner(s), but they still have big shoes to fill. Fastmail was in, but now makes me more uncomfortable each passing month... I want to like them, but they make me a little nervous now... so it's on the edge of being out for me. Rackspace email is out, simple as that... Just cannot get along with that webmail happily, and not enough granular control. I've been spoiled by Tuffmail and Fastmail. Many others I've tried fall short of the above four, so I won't bother listing them. Luxsci is a real possibility now, but it bugs the hell out of me for some reason that my email is just sitting on a single RAID on a single server, (even though it is backed up every day) and at that price! And I just don't know if they would really be better than Fastmail or Tuffmail at its primary job of pure email. So what else can I do? Right now, I'm seriously contemplating a move back to Thunderbird and a tiny little POP or IMAP account at one of the above, and using something like MailStore Home for archiving. With all the recent privacy issues out there -- from Google social omniscience to Dropbox password snafu -- I'm thinking of pulling my email back from the "cloud" and right back into my computer... Any thoughts or help after reading that long post??? Thanks so much for reading through all that, and for any ideas/thoughts! Last edited by ioneja : 14 Jul 2011 at 05:11 AM.

15 Jul 2011, 11:06 AM	#10
ioneja Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Jul 2011 Posts: 713	Okay, just checked out PolarisMail. I was wrong -- I had briefly checked this service out a while back, but it wasn't the right fit for me based on features and email client at the time. I will give them a call though, just so I can understand how their security and infrastructure really works. Just as a quick run through, it looks like they are running GroupOffice (http://freshmeat.net/projects/group-office) for their "Enhanced Email" service and Atmail (http://atmail.com/webmail-client/) for their "Basic Email" service. Both of those apps are certainly solid products. I've always been impressed with the smoothness of the Atmail interface, although it's not the right feature set for what I need. GroupOffice looks pretty good... lots of features. Not crazy about the email client in it, but still, a very impressive piece of software. In both cases, those are third-party apps (one I believe is an open source project and also a commercial project -- not sure which one PolarisMail uses, and the other a commercial product), and even though they are respectable third-party apps, PolarisMail differs considerably from FastMail or LuxSci in that sense, for example, since both FastMail and LuxSci have proprietary client apps with some extremely deep options in some cases. Personally, I'm more inclined to go with a provider that developed its own email system. Although I can see a good argument to go the other direction too. I'm not sure on the hosting side how robust their infrastructure is -- they provide some details on the site and link to the Peer 1 datacenter they use. They do say "each server and virtual server is load balanced and dedicated to one service only, with more than one server providing the same service," so I take it that the whole system has full redundancy, but I guess I'll find out when I call. They also guarantee 99.9995% uptime per year. That works out to about 2.5 minutes per year of downtime, if my math is correct. That sounds impressive, but I didn't see what is offered in an SLA if they exceed 2.5 minutes. So there are still a lot of questions. Even if they have a money-back SLA at 99.9995%, at their prices, how much of a refund would you be entitled to? Certainly, the price of downtime is far greater than any pro-rated refund I could get. It's worth a phone call to see if a human actually answers. I'm impressed they even have a phone number listed on their site. So I just called and got voicemail. It is evening there, I didn't leave a message, but I'll try again during business hours tomorrow. Price-wise, Polarismail is very competitive and they offer a huge amount of space. 25GB for $1 per month. I hate to say it, but that to me is a red flag... maybe a Polarismail person can chime in here. 25GB means they are likely overselling like many shared hosting providers do. It's not unethical to oversell to a certain degree (if you consider that just about every shared hosting provider does it to stay competitive), but I am willing to pay a service provider that can deliver on full capacity if people want to use it. I'm not trying to give them a hard time, but think about the math on that. 10 users = 250GB max, 100 users=2500GB max. When you factor in RAID 10 as George_B (of PolarisMail) mentioned, plus backup costs, plus enterprise drives, plus hot mirrors, plus bandwidth for offsite backups, not to mention service costs, etc., then we're talking prohibitive costs for just 100 users at that price for a small service provider. Obviously, some overselling is expected, but the ratio and cost factors make $1/25GB sound more like marketing hyperbole to me. If people actually took full advantage of that, it would be incredibly expensive to maintain. Even Google Apps for Business can't match that ratio of storage, and Google knows a thing or two about storage. At $50 per year for 25GB with Google Apps for Business, compared to $12 per year at PolarisMail for the same space, it just raises more questions than answers. So if we compare PolarisMail to FastMail or Luxsci, just on paper, they really are vastly different beasts. Just the services alone that they offer are so different, that it's just not logical to factor pricing into it...for example, Luxsci has MXLogic's outside email filtering/archiving service as an option, which alone costs more than PolarisMail's entire 25GB account. This all blows my mind, how many options there are out there. Anyway, I will call PolarisMail tomorrow and see if there's a human available to talk with. They look promising -- perhaps not the right fit for what I need, but still a very value-oriented service with a lot of features for an insanely good price. Last edited by ioneja : 15 Jul 2011 at 11:18 AM.

14 Jul 2011, 02:14 PM	#2
William9 The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: San Francisco Posts: 2,281	That's quite an essay and a good summary of a journey that others of us have also taken. Because of the outages at FM, I moved to Tuffmail and then to LuxSci. I've had a LuxSci account for several years and have never experienced an outage. I agree that it's customer service is awesome. I've grown to trust its reliability and accessability. I'm not sure about the single raid concern that bugs you. I'm not sure that is an accurate description of the set-up, but if so, is it a real concern? Certainly its performance for me has been stellar since about 2007 when I opened an account.

14 Jul 2011, 11:45 PM	#4
George_B Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Jan 2008 Posts: 704 Representative of: PolarisMail.com	For most providers, the back-end storage is very problematic. There are many solutions that have been tried out by many providers but nothing is guaranteed against loss. Google itself has had many outages, and in the most recent ones people ended up losing data. Amazon suffered the same fate recently. As I see it, the best option for the "small" level providers is: distributed file system storage on "raid 10" type setup with snapshots every x hours. More than that and costs go way up, without a guarantee for more safety.

15 Jul 2011, 02:20 AM	#7
ReuvenNY Moderator Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: New York Posts: 4,259	A couple of very quick points: 1. Checkout Polarismail.com 2. No one provider solution has 100% guarantee, even with the most redundancy. Get one of the accounts you like and have them aoutomatically redirect (forward) to another (unrelated) service. So if you main account is out for a while, at least you can read your email in the backup account. It's also good for permanently storing email. It saved me when I deleted email I later needed.

15 Jul 2011, 06:41 AM	#8
curvefan Essential Contributor Join Date: Oct 2007 Posts: 498	Reading this thread caused me to check out LuxSci's site and I couldn't believe their prices. Wow! How many people can afford to pay$120.00/yr for one user account? That must be some mighty fine email hosting their offering. I guess us poor folk will have to stick with the everyday players. ReuvenNY's suggestion to check out Polarismail was right on the mark. Polarismail offers a fine service at a great price. Just me opining..............................

15 Jul 2011, 09:41 AM	#9
ioneja Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Jul 2011 Posts: 713	Thank you, guys, I will add PolarisMail to my list to check out. That is one I somehow missed all these years. BTW, the $120 per year is indeed steep, but that's for the first account, additional accounts are much more affordable. But yes, it still adds up fast and it sounds like a lot when compared to some of the others. Taking that a step further, though, it's hard to really compare all these services -- apples to oranges, etc. Each one has different features that set it apart. In the case of LuxSci, I think the biggest "feature" from what I can tell and have heard from people who have been customers for a while, is the service. Indeed, just from a prospective customer point of view, I've talked with them on the phone a few times now, and the level of knowledge and responsiveness has been second to none so far. The only one that ever came close (or surpassed it) was John Capo over at Tuffmail, but he's not there anymore. So I don't mind paying a little more if that service level holds true as a paying customer. Having a crew of knowledgeable, live human beings on the end of the phone costs money, and has to be passed on to the customers. Also, that $120 is not really that much more than other business-class providers. In some cases, it's competitive. For example, even Google Apps for Business costs $50 per user per year. So three users with them is $150 per year. At Luxsci, three users would be $144 per year ($12 per month) for the basics. But of course, the features are totally different, etc. So it's not THAT far fetched what they are charging. And if you are paying monthly, that really isn't that bad, if those features are worth it to you.

15 Jul 2011, 02:16 PM	#11
shenton Essential Contributor Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Wigan, Lancashire! Posts: 379	Another one for you to consider is 01.com, though they are changing their name to zMailcloud. They're based in Chicago and have live telephone support. I've never used their telephone support yet as their ticket system seems excellent. They're a Zimbra provider, so it will all depend on whether you like the Zimbra interface or not. The Zimbra Calendaring is excellent and it integrates with Outlook as well as a web interface/Zimbra Desktop client. It's worth a look and I've never had any significant downtime... they have a live up/downtime report that you can check. Oh, and I've just noticed they still do a free 30 day trial, so that's worth a go!

15 Jul 2011, 11:52 PM	#12
George_B Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Jan 2008 Posts: 704 Representative of: PolarisMail.com	The SLA for downtime is one day of free service for every hour of downtime. I can't recall the last time we were down even for a few minutes, let alone an entire hour. The maximum amount of credit we can reimburse in extreme conditions can't exceed the client's monthly invoice. Now as far as storage goes, it's actually not that expensive. Drives have increased in capacity and prices have dropped a lot. Couple this with the fact that not all users use up their entire space allotment and we are always within a safe margin. As an internal rule, whenever a storage cluster reaches 50% capacity, we add another one. Technically speaking it's not the amount of space required that's a problem but the IOPS ( input/output operations per second ). Modern mail systems store one file per e-mail message and as you can imagine, this means lots of files for a mail provider. On average the files are very small and this is basically the nightmare scenario for any storage provider: large amounts of small, random lookups on the array. When 5 000 people check their imap account per second, your IOPS go through the roof and that limit will be hit first before storage ever becomes a problem. To give you an idea, most storage providers (netapp, emc, etc) use a combination of several regular hard drives as their back-end. By regular I mean either SATA, or SAS or even SSD. The IOPS of each drive are as follows: SATA: 100 iops SAS: 175 iops SSD: 5000-8000 iops You basically have to clump a lot of drives together in order to either achieve many IOPS with SATA/SAS or achieve lots of storage with SSD. ... unless you have a LOT of money. Then you can buy a few of these bad boys: http://www.fusionio.com/products/iodrive-octal/ 5.12 TB of data and 1 180 000 IOPS! Last I checked, prices started at about 120 000$/unit ... and you still have to buy quite a few of them.

16 Jul 2011, 12:59 AM	#13
kijinbear Cornerstone of the Community Join Date: Mar 2011 Location: ~$ Posts: 652	Last time I checked out PolarisMail, they seemed to store all passwords in plain-text, too. Even worse, the domain administrator could see every user's password in the control panel. Sucks for you, if your boss is the domain administrator and your password is MyBossIsADouchebag. That was a few months ago, before the recent redesign. If anything has changed in the meantime regarding the plain-text password situation, I would consider trying them out again. As with the OP, plain-text passwords and frequent outages are making me nervous about FastMail lately. It's surprising how many e-mail companies who otherwise seem to have excellent security overlook something as simple and basic as hashing passwords. I wonder if LuxSci or TuffMail is better in that regard?