Understanding Email for small business

[xirokx]

Hi there,

My friend has a newly formed business and has a website with his own domain that is currently hosted by a company.

He gets on average 30 emails per day for each of his 3 different email addresses. The emails come through on his laptop and on his mobile phone.

He currently pays a company for "Microsoft Exchange Mailbox which comes with 2x 50gb mailbox" per year

He wants to be in control of his emails and not pay a company to manage this for him due to limited funds.

So needs some advise about:

a) whats the difference between hosting an email account on a local machine compared to Microsoft Exchange Mailbox?

b)Does he need MS Exchange Mailbox? What would be the alternative? i.e. office 365?

c)Can he manage this himself if he just buys hosting from a company? Can you recommend any hosting companies?

d) what would be a typical setup to manage this?

Any help and advice would be appreciated

Thank you

 

[thenewoc]

Firstly you wouldn't want to manage it yourself as a small business due to the complexity of it and keeping it up to date.

The only free option I can think of is using Zoho mail but am not sure what the reliability of this is being that it's free. https://www.zoho.eu/workplace/pricing.html?src=zmail

Other than that you're looking at either Google's newly named 'G Suite' (https://gsuite.google.com/intl/en_uk/pricing.html?tab_activeEl=tabset-companies) or one of the appropriate Microsoft Office 365 Business subscriptions that include a mailbox (https://products.office.com/en-gb/business/compare-office-365-for-business-plans).

Any of the above can use your own domain name, it just comes down to what avenue you want to go down in terms of Office applications, whether you're more familiar with the offering from one already and whether the finer details suit your use case such as things like the size of allowable email attachments vary between these services.

If he already has his own domain name and web site hosted then he will most likely have access to the dns settings for his domain. Any of the above services will tell you what needs to be changed in your dns settings in order to point your MX records to your chosen provider for email. Not sure about all of them but Google also shows you what you need to set up on your dns to help prevent spoofing of mail claiming to have been sent from your domain. These measures include generating a domain key and adding it to your dns record as well as adding whats called an SPF record to the dns too.

Personally I think I would go for the Microsoft offering since you most likely need an Office suite for at least some of the users in the company. Therefore I'd go for a mix of plans if some only need to have email and others need email and office apps. Also if some of your email addresses are generic such as '[email protected]' then you could add these as aliases to one of your accounts. Depending on how you want to structure it you could have one account per person and then if someone acts as the overseer of the generic mail then these could be added as aliases to that users account. Those who also have aliases set up can create filters to organise the incoming mail to separate folders and manually or automatically forward if necessary to someone else to deal with. The use of aliases reduces the number of actual accounts that you need to pay for. In a very small one person type business you'd only need one account and several aliases as you see fit. If you want various people to access the incoming generic emails then you may be better off putting these into a separate account rather than one relating to a real user. You can then delegate access to the generic emails without the delegated user having access to someone else's primary email, calendar etc. It depends how easy you want it to be when replying to emails as the delegated approach means the delegate could more easily reply to a generic email so the response is shown to have come from the generic email rather than the delegates own email address.

 

[nightmare99]

How much is he paying for his current two exchange mailboxes? If its less than a tenner per month I would leave it be as it sounds like he has the best email system already.

 

[AHarvey]

Cpanel email for his web hosting either to thunderbird on his laptop as POP3, or use googlemail to receive the emails and handle them all in one place.

 

[xirokx]

the newoc thank you so much for your detailed reply I really took a lot from it and we will most probably go with the Office365 business account. The alias idea is genuis and I would not have thought of it...appreciate it

Also thank you AHarvey and nightmare99 for taking the time to reply.