Need some email/colo service -- recommedations?

[cdevers at pobox.com (Chris Devers)]

On Mon, 1 Mar 2004 steve at horne.homelinux.net wrote:

> We are 6 people.  We need
> 
> ISP -- connection to internet.
> Email 
> Storage for offsite backup.  40 gigs would last a long time.
> Maybe space for a web site. 
> 
> Ideally, I'm looking for all this in one package -- an ISP who will
> lease us a relatively small machine, at his site, with eg a 40 G
> drive, who will provide and administer a few email accounts.
> Locally, we'd use a web-based or POP interface (Outlook Express? <gag cough>)

You are early enough in the process not to make that mistake: go with
IMAP, not POP. It lets you keep your folders and (sometimes) configuration
(e.g. address books, etc) on the mail server, so that, for example, people
can check mail from work & home and have the same view of everything
either way.

Even if your employees use, say, Outlook or Eudora at work and Mutt or
Pine at home, it doesn't matter. All the prevalent mail clients today are
able to talk IMAP to mail servers, and for the handful that can't -- I
can't think of one, but there's probably at least one -- most IMAP servers
can also speak POP for mail clients that need it. 

Moreover, a lot of the web mail kits seem to be based around the idea of
putting an HTTP/HTML face on top of an IMAP client. So even web mail is
really just IMAP mail, and if your server doesn't do IMAP, then sometimes
webmail can't work either. 

POP is really crude compared to IMAP. If you have a choice in the matter,
and at this point you still do, POP has very little to offer that IMAP
can't do much better. 

> My goal is to not have to concern myself with this stuff -- 
> that the ISP or co-lo provider manages the system.  I'll have plenty 
> else to do.

If you really want to keep things simple, there's always (say) Yahoo: you
can use Yahoo for webmail & related activities (address, calendars --
basically the things you can sync with a Palm Pilot (also, Yahoo can sync
with Palm Pilots)); with Yahoo/Geocities you get basic web pages, etc.

Then again, your company's data sits on someone else's servers. 

I suggest this half-seriously: going with something like what Yahoo
provides is very easy and ranges from cheap to free, but then you give up
control of your data to some third party, and you can't really know what
they're going to do with it. On the other end of the spectrum, you could
rent space at a co-location facility and install your own server[s]; this
way you get more control & privacy, but have to accept the responsibility
to keep everything running well, and it'll probably be more expensive.

A good compromise might be a company that lets you have a virtual Linux
server on their system. You get to control what goes on with your system,
but they take the responsibility for things like backups, connectivity &
availability, etc. I can't think of one to suggest at the moment, but last
time I looked there were lots of companies providing this kind of service.

You may actually be able to find a mom & pop type service for this...



-- 
Chris Devers