Which Email Service to Choose?

Bob · March 25, 2015, 02:25:45 PM

Thanks for understanding my Vent.

Should have clarified on the Jeff meaning Jeff G. Glad you found a solution Jeff Z. You're right most small business don't host so cloud based hosting is good option just not happy with Microsoft's service. Pardon me but seems half ass, they act before they think something through then react. Maybe they should control the spam coming off their servers so my own Spam service doesn't flag them just one example of what I mean. Experience is like IE. Exactly why I use Firefox. It does work for the most part just frustrating and annoying when something happens. Wait mail stopped why. Oh MS Server was reported as a spam source and blocked, or like Monday, users calling me my mail wont send. Oh MS says sorry our service is degraded and technicians are working on it. Not to mention time investigating clients, I cant get my emails to go through or I'm not getting your emails or something missing.

Oh and more.. Sometimes when you drag and drop, attaches wrong email. I've seen it so if you trust it, good chance one day you go back, you'll find a surprise. Again not always and not users error as it's been demonstrated in front of my eyes me watching, when done, it's wrong email. Would not recommend the product.. Also recommend TAM users have a plan in 2 yrs or you may have a surprise coming.. Not saying more. I think conference tells you plenty already. Think Vision users.

Lynne Desrochers · March 25, 2015, 03:08:55 PM

Quote from: Bob on March 25, 2015, 02:25:45 PM
Thanks for understanding my Vent.
Oh and more.. Sometimes when you drag and drop, attaches wrong email. I've seen it so if you trust it, good chance one day you go back, you'll find a surprise. Again not always and not users error as it's been demonstrated in front of my eyes me watching, when done, it's wrong email. Would not recommend the product.. Also recommend TAM users have a plan in 2 yrs or you may have a surprise coming.. Not saying more. I think conference tells you plenty already. Think Vision users.

Hey Bob, how can the drag and drop be due to the exchange server? At the point that it's in your inbox, isn't that then an outlook issue?
Just curious....

Bob · March 25, 2015, 03:13:25 PM

Make valid point Lynne but this started with move to 365. Seen it demonstrated several times. Before the move didn't do this per staff. Don't have answer but since move to 365, emails being dragged dropped sometimes end up being totally different email. I don't think a TAM bug since we had 2013 before 365 and didn't notice anything. I would spot check attached emails if using 365 to ensure they are the correct emails being attached.

Billy Welsh · March 25, 2015, 03:38:08 PM

Downright scary if you ask me. I am sure M$ has pitched that product to some BIG companies (not that Bob's is small, mind you) and sold it with low price, cost savings, etc.

I feel like an Einstein for letting you guys sell me on AppRiver all those years ago!

Jeff Zylstra · March 25, 2015, 04:44:09 PM

Quote from: Lynne Desrochers on March 25, 2015, 03:08:55 PM
Quote from: Bob on March 25, 2015, 02:25:45 PM
Thanks for understanding my Vent.
Oh and more.. Sometimes when you drag and drop, attaches wrong email. I've seen it so if you trust it, good chance one day you go back, you'll find a surprise. Again not always and not users error as it's been demonstrated in front of my eyes me watching, when done, it's wrong email. Would not recommend the product.. Also recommend TAM users have a plan in 2 yrs or you may have a surprise coming.. Not saying more. I think conference tells you plenty already. Think Vision users.
Hey Bob, how can the drag and drop be due to the exchange server? At the point that it's in your inbox, isn't that then an outlook issue?
Just curious....

I'm not sure that is totally correct. With Exchange, I think that the data resides on the server and it just sends something less than a full set of data. Kind of like looking at a web email. I could see this happening on webmail pretty easily. A lame explanation, but I'm sure one of our resident professionals will be along shortly to set us straight.

With POP based email, you have a PST file that includes full data, but I do know that Exchange uses the OST file which doesn't contain as much data, and is not as prone to data loss. That's the extent of my knowledge on Exchange.

Mark · March 25, 2015, 04:45:39 PM

Depends if you cache or not. I personally don't cache in Outlook.

Billy Welsh · March 25, 2015, 04:59:36 PM

M$ caches, that is cashes in, on Outlook.

Sorry, could not resist.

I recall the cache settings causing a lot of grief with large data files. I don' recall if I had to turn it on or off, but if the user was having issues with Outlook and had a large data set, that was the setting that had to be changed to help address the problems.

Quote from: Mark on March 25, 2015, 04:45:39 PM
Depends if you cache or not. I personally don't cache in Outlook.

Bob · March 25, 2015, 05:22:40 PM

You've given me something to consider. I'll check if they are cached and turn off see if that changes things. +1 to you three for the idea.

Mark · March 26, 2015, 09:03:51 AM

Quote from: Bob on March 25, 2015, 05:22:40 PM
You've given me something to consider. I'll check if they are cached and turn off see if that changes things. +1 to you three for the idea.

I know turning it off made admin of it all a lot easier (less issues) but with the Exchange server being in a remote location, I guess we'll find out of there is any performance impact by NOT caching. Put your 50Mb pipe to the test!

Jeff Golas · March 26, 2015, 11:41:33 AM

Not my choice...we're in a (developing) rural area here...over the past couple years we've had several power failures, MANY telecom failures (installing fiber now), hurricane Sandy knocked us offline for a solid 7 days, and the way the building is wired and designed, a generator would easily cost us into 6 figures. In addition, we're growing and changing by leaps and bounds so unless we grow the IT dept (I tried and currently have an intern I'd hire in a heartbeat if I could), no way I can keep up.

Trust me I'd LOVE to run all our own stuff, but if you truely sit down and add it all up, a lot of the software developers have made it a lot more complicated and expensive (I've been trying to license one server for a week now) to run anything on-prem, and while there are a long-term cost savings there, what we really need is an infrastructure that can evolve as fast as the business, and I just can't do that even if I was a genius, there's just not enough time in a day.

If office365 and others suck that bad (not disagreeing with anyone)...then we'll deal with that, but considering the amount of people generally happy with it, I'm willing to give it a shot. I'm not saying its perfect, and none of them are, but keeping Exchange in-house was more or less off the table for me, and all the other 365 products are a great fit for us so I'm attempting to kill many birds with one stone.

As far as downtime...its not about etrn services like Messagelabs or MX queuing things up - its about people continuing to do business. We do a ton of international business so an outage here or even a disaster here likely doesn't affect a partner or a client in Germany or Canada.

Quote from: Mark on March 25, 2015, 11:04:46 AM
Quote from: Jeff Golas on March 19, 2015, 02:06:21 PM
BUT the tradeoff is never having to touch Exchange, and having a much more resilient platform over an old server in a rack in a rural neighborhood with no capability to host a generator short of 6 figures - no brainer to me.

Personally, I'll take this tradeoff over a hosted server any day. In fact, I don't see it as a trade-off at all! In my environment, MX Logic will hold me emails when my server is down, so senders don't even know, and no issues occur. I'm not going to preach that in-house is better than hosted for everyone or anyone. But, it is better for me.