Selecting the Right E-mail Provider
In just a few short years, e-mail has become essential to businesses of all sizes. Today, nearly everyone in an organization uses e-mail to communicate with each other, customers, partners and suppliers. Business leaders, in fact, now consider e-mail their number-one productivity application. Therefore, it’s vital you select the right e-mail provider for your business. Here are some basic questions you should have answered when choosing an email provider:
- How long has the e-mail service provider been in business? Is it well-established and financially stable? Who are its customers? What do references have to say about the service?
- What features does the e-mail service provider support beyond basic send, receive, reply and forward? Does it support personalized domain names, spellcheckers, the ability to create folders, attachment sizes sufficient for your applications, instant messaging and so on?
- What kinds of security does it offer? Does it offer options like message encryption (the higher the bit-rate the better), spam filtering, support for secure sockets layer (SSL), blocking e-mail from specific senders and so on?
- What is the provider’s pricing structure? Flat-rate or usage-based? How many mailboxes and how much storage per mailbox is included in the fee? (Business class storage per mailbox typically runs from 30MB to 100MB.) Can storage be increased?
- How are backups and restores handled? What kind of service level agreement is offered to ensure e-mail reliability and availability? How is it monitored?
- Can e-mail be accessed remotely? Can you use standard programs such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora or Netscape?
- Is live customer support available? What are the hours of operation?
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