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

[petergh]

They're a Rackspace reseller, but other than that I have no experience with them.

[randian]

Originally Posted by me0000

Suggest that you replace McAfee asav with Messagelabs; it is so much better, please try it, don't just take my word for it.

I can't compare filtering quality, but I think the McAfee service LuxSci uses for its premium filtering has a terrible interface and some bizarre features/restrictions. It reminds me of a 1990s-era Microsoft product.

IIRC Polarismail uses Barracuda and Fastmail still uses SpamAssassin.

[me0000]

Originally Posted by randian

I can't compare filtering quality, but I think the McAfee service LuxSci uses for its premium filtering has a terrible interface and some bizarre features/restrictions. It reminds me of a 1990s-era Microsoft product.

IIRC Polarismail uses Barracuda and Fastmail still uses SpamAssassin.

I do not rate either barracuda or spamassassin esp when I am paying for it.
I agree as regards McAfee.

I can speak for Messagelabs, having used McAfee, Spamassassin, Postini as was, and some others whose names escape me right now.

I have had no issues with Messagelabs. In one year only 2 pieces of spam made it to my inbox, which normally gets hammered with spam.

I have heard good things about websense.

[kangas]

FYI - LuxSci's "Basic" filtering, which comes included with all users, does also use SpamAssassin and ClamAV. That works pretty well for most folks.

While McAfee (now Intel's) user interface leaves a little to be desired, we have found that it is very flexible for most uses and does a very good job overall. McAfee's support is also generally very responsive to any actual issues we bring up to them.

If course, many other premium-filtering systems also do a good job.

[Walker102]

Ioneja, Outstanding and excellent thread from my point of view.
Many thanks for your hard work in sharing your insights!

[ioneja]

Originally Posted by Walker102

Ioneja, Outstanding and excellent thread from my point of view.
Many thanks for your hard work in sharing your insights!

Glad to share my point of view, and I appreciate the many others here! As I may have mentioned in this thread (or another one), this forum really is the best resource that I have found on these issues, with some incredibly well-informed people (not to mention a bunch of representatives from many excellent email services, including owners/developers), for which I'm grateful they take the time to share their opinions/knowledge/etc... I've learned a lot from this forum, and hope it sticks around for a long time to come!

[tobh]

Great overview by Ioneja.

I have an account at MyKolab, and I can recommend them. They were criticized for downtimes and some imperfections in their service, and surely they have some way to go ahead. But I find them very likeable as a company. Good and responsive customer service. I use them for the widely known privacy reasons. Their system is based on the open-source Kolab groupware which was originally developed for the BSI, the German Federal Institute for Information Security.

I mainly use Fastmail. It's almost feature complete and the web interface is second to none. Webmail is the way to go, in my opinion.

I also checked out LuxSci. They may be great from a technical point of view, but their web interface disqualified them for me.

I should add that spam is not a big problem for me. I have nothing valuable to say in that respect.

Greetings
Tobias

[William9]

This is comment is a little tangential but still pertinent to the topic of business/ professional email services:
I think it's interesting to look back at the posts when Fastmail introduced a new interface a couple of years ago. There was much grumbling and criticism and I believe hundreds of posts about how feature poor it was. Now, users report liking it. What has changed?

[Walker102]

Ioneja - do you happen to have any insight on how users manage spam on specialist email services?

I was looking for info re: a post on this forum:
http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=68424

Thanks...

[ioneja]

Originally Posted by William9

This is comment is a little tangential but still pertinent to the topic of business/ professional email services:
I think it's interesting to look back at the posts when Fastmail introduced a new interface a couple of years ago. There was much grumbling and criticism and I believe hundreds of posts about how feature poor it was. Now, users report liking it. What has changed?

They just kept on improving it. Subtle changes here and there, slowly but surely refining it, adding/fixing minor things from that first very rough beta. The preferences also have been greatly improved since the early builds and beta. Case in point -- they have recently released their Calendar beta, which keeps getting better too... perhaps in the next couple of months that will be released as a standard feature, which will nicely round out the basic feature set.

Also, I think people are getting used to it.

The best thing about what they are doing, IMO, is their commitment to new development and engagement of the community. This new interface still has a ways to go, but their steady improvements have given a lot of people enough confidence to make the new interface their primary.

[ioneja]

Originally Posted by Walker102

Ioneja - do you happen to have any insight on how users manage spam on specialist email services?

I was looking for info re: a post on this forum:
http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=68424

Thanks...

Comments about spam management and performance are littered all over this thread, and many other threads in this forum. Please consider this thread in particular a very long work-in-progress.

In a nutshell, though, I can briefly comment on the major sevices I've recently mentioned. This may or may not address your query, and this is from my recent memory... forgive me if I've forgotten something important.

LuxSci - has two spam options, Basic (SpamAssassin/ClamAV) and Premium (McAfee/Intel). The basic filter doesn't have a per-user custom Bayesian filter database, something I've asked them to add before, but its defaults are decent enough for most people. Users can control spam threshold, white/black lists, but not much else. However, the McAfee option has tons of features, many of which are cryptic on a throwback, ugly interface, but it allows a lot more granular control on both per-mailbox and general admin levels with comprehensive reporting.

FastMail - has one main SpamAssassin-based system that has per-user controls plus (drumroll please) a custom per-user Bayesian filter database, so each user can train their own mailboxes. I wish LuxSci would add this, since it can really help. I don't know why per-user training isn't more common these days... but FastMail does it, so I consider it one of the better implementations of SpamAssassin, for what it's worth.

Google Apps for Business -- I won't go into details, lots of data elsewhere, but I will say that Google has, in my view, one of the best, simple spam filters on the market out of the box. Love 'em or hate 'em, Google has spam under control for most users. And then there's the whole Postini thing, but I never experimented with that... someone else please comment on that.

Microsoft Office365 for Business (Enterprise) -- Again, a lot has been written about this elsewhere (and I wrote about my personal experience earlier in this thread), but this one has good admin controls, but not as great individual per-user controls, last time I checked. The performance of Microsoft's spam filtering is also pretty overrated in my experience. I had a lot of frustration with them initially, including some silently discarded messages. My second attempt with them was better, but I consider their performance a full step down from Google. Still, it's good enough for most users.

Runbox - Can't recall on this one, so maybe someone can jump in and clarify... but if I recall properly this does use SpamAssassin as well, but does NOT have per-user controllable Bayesian filter database. So it's a step down from FastMail. Please correct if I'm mistaken!

Rackspace - Don't recall, someone else will have to fill in this one.

MyKolab - Not sure yet, will be testing soon.

Others -- feel free to post what you find out in this thread -- spam management is a crucial business feature and totally relevant to the main topic of this thread. I'd love to know people's opinions about other spam performance too.

I tend to use just whatever the service offers out of the box. None of the ones I've tested have been particularly bad in my recollection, except my first stab at Office365 for Business, which was initially terrible. My second attempt was much better. I worked with their tech support, but we never definitively figured out the problem the first time.

Hope that helps a bit.

EDIT: BTW - I should in all fairness mention Tuffmail, which, as of the last time I used them (which was a while ago, so maybe this doesn't apply any more) had so many granular controls for spam, I was blown away the first time I saw it. At least back in the John Capo days, I never saw more detailed control of spam in any small provider like that.

[soromak]

Originally Posted by ioneja

Comments about spam management and performance are littered all over this thread, and many other threads in this forum. Please consider this thread in particular a very long work-in-progress.

In a nutshell, though, I can briefly comment on the major sevices I've recently mentioned. This may or may not address your query, and this is from my recent memory... forgive me if I've forgotten something important.

LuxSci - has two spam options, Basic (SpamAssassin/ClamAV) and Premium (McAfee/Intel). The basic filter doesn't have a per-user custom Bayesian filter database, something I've asked them to add before, but its defaults are decent enough for most people. Users can control spam threshold, white/black lists, but not much else. However, the McAfee option has tons of features, many of which are cryptic on a throwback, ugly interface, but it allows a lot more granular control on both per-mailbox and general admin levels with comprehensive reporting.

FastMail - has one main SpamAssassin-based system that has per-user controls plus (drumroll please) a custom per-user Bayesian filter database, so each user can train their own mailboxes. I wish LuxSci would add this, since it can really help. I don't know why per-user training isn't more common these days... but FastMail does it, so I consider it one of the better implementations of SpamAssassin, for what it's worth.

Google Apps for Business -- I won't go into details, lots of data elsewhere, but I will say that Google has, in my view, one of the best, simple spam filters on the market out of the box. Love 'em or hate 'em, Google has spam under control for most users. And then there's the whole Postini thing, but I never experimented with that... someone else please comment on that.

Microsoft Office365 for Business (Enterprise) -- Again, a lot has been written about this elsewhere (and I wrote about my personal experience earlier in this thread), but this one has good admin controls, but not as great individual per-user controls, last time I checked. The performance of Microsoft's spam filtering is also pretty overrated in my experience. I had a lot of frustration with them initially, including some silently discarded messages. My second attempt with them was better, but I consider their performance a full step down from Google. Still, it's good enough for most users.

Runbox - Can't recall on this one, so maybe someone can jump in and clarify... but if I recall properly this does use SpamAssassin as well, but does NOT have per-user controllable Bayesian filter database. So it's a step down from FastMail. Please correct if I'm mistaken!

Rackspace - Don't recall, someone else will have to fill in this one.

MyKolab - Not sure yet, will be testing soon.

Others -- feel free to post what you find out in this thread -- spam management is a crucial business feature and totally relevant to the main topic of this thread. I'd love to know people's opinions about other spam performance too.

I tend to use just whatever the service offers out of the box. None of the ones I've tested have been particularly bad in my recollection, except my first stab at Office365 for Business, which was initially terrible. My second attempt was much better. I worked with their tech support, but we never definitively figured out the problem the first time.

Hope that helps a bit.

EDIT: BTW - I should in all fairness mention Tuffmail, which, as of the last time I used them (which was a while ago, so maybe this doesn't apply any more) had so many granular controls for spam, I was blown away the first time I saw it. At least back in the John Capo days, I never saw more detailed control of spam in any small provider like that.

EuMX - uses a combination of SpamAssassin and DSPAM, both are per-user trainable. After some time spent with training them I can only recall less than 5 messages that slipped through the filters during last year. The only pain is that you train both of them in a different way, by moving to special folder for SA and by sending to a special e-mail address for DSPAM.

[ioneja]

So, I finally got around to researching MyKolab as a serious competitor for my needs. I read every review out there I could find, asked them some questions via email for clarification, and even watched a short little presentation by Georg Greve, the CEO, at FOSDEM where he describes the background of MyKolab.

Bottom line is that they show a lot of promise, and I look forward to see how they evolve and develop in the future. My very brief interactions with them via email were professional, and I think they sincerely care about privacy and want to provide a great service. However, for now, I will not be signing up with them. Here are the reasons:

First, and most importantly to me as I now see it: They are simply too new at this for me to feel totally comfortable with them yet. Perhaps in a year or two, after they have finished going through the initial growing pains, I will come back and see how they are doing and reevaluate the situation.

Keep in mind that while Kolab Systems — the parent company — has been around for a while (since 2010 I believe), and they do have a good reputation from what I can read so far, their actual hosting service is VERY new, essentially coming out of beta right during the Snowden revelations last year, and frankly, they haven’t yet proven (to me, personally) that they can handle a public-facing, paid consumer/business email/collaboration *hosting* service with the privacy claims they make.

I believe they mean the words they say, and I’m not calling into question their honesty at all, but real trust of the kind they are selling needs to have a track record in my book, and as they say, they are the first to offer the specific stack they are offering in this way, and they are just at the beginning of this side of their business.

They may counter my point of view on this with their prior experience developing and consulting and supporting large Kolab installations, etc., but that is different than running a consumer hosting service with thousands of international clients and the type of public attention and *scrutiny* they now have. They haven’t proven (yet) that they can meet that demand in rough times, scale efficiently, reliably, and scale with customer service too, to meet those different types of demands in this specific business model, which is a different model than what Kolab Systems originally started with, from my understanding. I mean no disrespect by that. I believe they CAN do it, they just haven't earned MY personal trust yet.

Their paid hosting service at MyKolab.com is less than a year old, excluding their beta period, which was running on just one server! While their IT team may have many years of experience in some areas, running what is essentially a secure hosting platform requires a very specific set of skills and experience, in my view. They may do very well at it, but for the level of claims they make, I also want to see a track record.

So for that general reason alone -- their "newness" at this business model -- I don’t feel enough confidence in them YET. At some point in the future, after they have gone through this first growth period and survived many serious attacks and security challenges, some downtime, perhaps legal challenges, unrealized bugs, endless customer requests, employee issues, and see how they handle all that, etc., I’ll just wait on the sidelines and see if they measure up to their promises. Which I sincerely hope they do. I want them to succeed.

Many of their competitors have a long and sometimes ugly history they have overcome, and those competitors have earned their current reputations with cold hard sweat… and MyKolab is positioning themselves at the top of the heap already, without the years of track record in this side of their business. They may or may not be up to the challenge. I hope they are.

BTW, that reason is enough for me not to sign up with MyKolab for now, but there are numerous OTHER small issues I discovered/realized, which would also influence me to WAIT and SEE what happens with them.

For example:

1 - Foremost among those things that are missing from MyKolab includes 2FA — this is a surprising omission from a company that places itself at the top of the security mountain. I know they are working on two-factor, but this should have been part of their launch… this alone leads me to believe they launched prematurely.

2 - Additionally, they still don’t support little things like DKIM signing, which surprises me, since even their own source they link to shows a 34.8% global DKIM deployment. That’s a large enough number for them to care about DKIM more and implement it now. In the US, 45.4% sites support DKIM. I’m surprised they don’t support little things like that right out of the gate. Yes, it is a relatively small thing, but still, many of their competitors already do this, why don’t they? It bugs me that their justification for not implementing it yet is that "only" 34.8% of the world supports it. Well, 34.8% of the world is enough.

3 - Also, some other small, but important ease-of-use things haven’t been dealt with yet, such as easy, automated alias and domain management… right now, you have ask support for each additional domain to be added, and they charge you for adding extra domains. You also have to ask support for each email alias you want, although those are free, that still takes support to deal with them, when it could and should be totally automated. If I need a simple alias set up quickly, I don't want to send in a support ticket and wait for a response on something as simple as that.

4 - Spam — where to begin? Their spam filtering system, from what I have read, is currently relatively simple. I understand they are working on it, but they don’t even have per-user Bayesian trainable spam filters yet. A huge deal? No. But still, it feels their service is "incomplete" at this point on the little things. Little things add up.

5 - International law and surveillance in general. I’m still learning a lot about the different legal issues in different jurisdictions, so I am definitely not an expert on this issue. But the more I read about Swiss law (and the laws of other jurisdictions), I’m not totally convinced my email is actually that much MORE safe in Switzerland than some other jurisdictions. Sure, it is clearly better than the US — the US is terrible right now as we all know — but as an American, I’m not convinced yet that Swiss law would actually protect my email that much better in practice (not theory), given where I have to connect from just to access MyKolab. That's the key. See, consider that Switzerland is a landlocked country and my connection has to go through some countries with lousy respect for my privacy, I’m not convinced that alone doesn’t in fact INCREASE my footprint to surveillance in *my own* country right now — this isn’t MyKolab’s fault of course — especially given that a lot of these laws are tied to citizenship of the person(s) being monitored. So on top of that, to really protect myself, I'd be wise to connect to MyKolab via a VPN, and in fact, Kolab Systems could be offering a sister VPN service as well… like their competitor Neomailbox does. Just something to ponder and do more research about.

6 - Then, all this research makes me realize that my privacy is only as strong as my weakest link. This is also not MyKolab's fault in this respect, but consider that I use Windows and Mac computers and my portable devices are standard iOS and/or Android devices, and frankly, I'm already exposed to some degree due to those things. I'd have to change my devices and OSes as well to really gain the best confidence. Again, not MyKolab's fault, but let's be honest here folks. MyKolab isn't going to help as much as you may think if you're connecting via email on your iPhone and everyone you know is using GMail, for example. Also, anyone remember what was in iOS patch 7.06? Pretty scary how easily it would have been to do a man-in-the-middle attack. So in the end, if we use typical devices and communicate in the typical ways to the typical people with typical accounts, we're pretty much screwed anyway.

The list goes on, but to bring this back to MyKolab, I feel that personally, MyKolab has not rolled out a service that is as polished as it should be in my opinion, and there are real, legal issues that are not really resolved in my mind (again, not MyKolab’s fault), not to mention I have to reconsider my whole device chain (again, not MyKolab's fault).

I applaud them for using 100% open source software, and the work they do with open source developers, etc… those are great things. I applaud them for offering the service to begin with, and I hope they have success. But to me, they have not yet offered enough proof and a track record they can *maintain* a world-class private email and collaboration-hosting service, at least for now.

These are my thoughts only, and I recognize other people will have totally different opinions. And anyone who looks at MyKolab or similar services, needs to look at the whole picture and draw their conclusions, of course, for their unique, specific situations. I believe time will tell on something like this, and like I said, I do wish them the best and look forward to how they evolve in 1-2 years. I hope they live up to their promises! We need companies like that to succeed.

If anyone uses MyKolab, or magically finds this post in a few months/years, I’d love to find out how your experience goes!

[randian]

If you want to talk DKIM, most providers won't sign emails with your DKIM keys, and if they do you have to use their owned-domain key. LuxSci, for example, does this. If you look closely all your domains sign using the same key, which happens to be the same as the luxsci.net key. Pobox.com signs with their key, but won't sign with yours even if it's the same as theirs.

Fastmail is the only provider I've seen that signs with distinct keys for every customer domain. All is not golden, however, since Fastmail doesn't obey DKIM policy on incoming emails. If your published policy says "discard unsigned or incorrectly signed emails" Fastmail will not do so. At best that nonconforming email will be sent to your spam folder.

[soromak]

Originally Posted by randian

If you want to talk DKIM, most providers won't sign emails with your DKIM keys, and if they do you have to use their owned-domain key. LuxSci, for example, does this. If you look closely all your domains sign using the same key, which happens to be the same as the luxsci.net key. Pobox.com signs with their key, but won't sign with yours even if it's the same as theirs.

Fastmail is the only provider I've seen that signs with distinct keys for every customer domain. All is not golden, however, since Fastmail doesn't obey DKIM policy on incoming emails. If your published policy says "discard unsigned or incorrectly signed emails" Fastmail will not do so. At best that nonconforming email will be sent to your spam folder.

If you ask EuMX support they can set up DKIM signing for your custom domain, too. As most of the things with EuMX it is not an automated process, though.