I am starting a small business. It will have about 3-4 employees in the beginning with their own 3-4 iMacs. What's a good solution for e-mail? I was thinking our e-mail will be hosted somewhere and we'll just pull it to the desktops via POP using Thunderbird. That's good?
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What's a good small business e-mail solution?
- Thread starter stanny
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I gotta pay $50 a year for each user? I need some really basic e-mail here for the desktop users, nothing advanced really. Is the IMAP stuff really worth it in this case? They won't even be using the Google calendar, docs, groups, sites, videos that come together with this premium service.
EDIT: Actually think about it, I might be able to use some sort of calendar for everyone. For example, I want to send out a meeting request to everyone. And they can accept it and it sits in their desktop calendar. When it's 15 minutes before, it will pop up a reminder. What desktop software is good to go with that Google calendar service? I've used Outlook before, which was an all-in one e-mail plus calendar. But can't justify buying copies for all desktops in this case.
EDIT: Actually think about it, I might be able to use some sort of calendar for everyone. For example, I want to send out a meeting request to everyone. And they can accept it and it sits in their desktop calendar. When it's 15 minutes before, it will pop up a reminder. What desktop software is good to go with that Google calendar service? I've used Outlook before, which was an all-in one e-mail plus calendar. But can't justify buying copies for all desktops in this case.
The company I work for has a website and @website.com email addresses. It costs them about $30/year and it's not bad... granted you don't want to see the spam after a 3 week medical leave, but it's not all that bad, especially for the price.
If you want your own domain name for your email you're going to have to pay. If you're happy with a generic domain name (gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc) then you can do that for free.
For 3-4 employees $50 a user will be cheaper (and much less hassle) than running your own email server.
As for calendar software, they could all use gcal online, or if they are mac users it will work nicely with ical, on the windows side, I know Mozilla has a free calendar application but I don't know if it plays nice with gcal.
I suspect this might be too expensive for you but I would start right off with OSX Server running on either a Mac Mini or a second had 24" iMac.
Both can be bought for a relatively small investment and as Server systems go and you will have to go some to out grow the system. Put it this way if you have to beef up the power along the road in the next 4 or 5 years, your startup company will be doing extraordinary well!
There's no additonal mailbox licensing or other licensing costs to worry about.
You will have calendaring, website services, podcasting, streaming and all sorts of other stuff ready to go should you so desire/require in the furture.
Its a breeze to set-up.
I retired three Windows Servers 2 years ago with a single iMac 24" 2.8Ghz running OSX server. Spam is at an all time low compared to when I was running Exchange and of-course from a licensing point of view, its a no brainer.
Both can be bought for a relatively small investment and as Server systems go and you will have to go some to out grow the system. Put it this way if you have to beef up the power along the road in the next 4 or 5 years, your startup company will be doing extraordinary well!
There's no additonal mailbox licensing or other licensing costs to worry about.
You will have calendaring, website services, podcasting, streaming and all sorts of other stuff ready to go should you so desire/require in the furture.
Its a breeze to set-up.
I retired three Windows Servers 2 years ago with a single iMac 24" 2.8Ghz running OSX server. Spam is at an all time low compared to when I was running Exchange and of-course from a licensing point of view, its a no brainer.
Normally the ISP you are using for your web site hosting will include a certain number of email accounts that you could use. If not, I've used Yahoo for their paid accounts (no ad's) and it's $19 per user per year.
I haven't looked at low cost CalDAV services for shared calendaring, but you might want to think about the new Mac Mini Server ($999) which would give you unlimited email accounts (IMAP and POP), plus a central calendar server and a range of other useful tools for a small business.
Happy with my email solution
I am a small business owner with about 6 Office personnel. Some years back I saw a Super Bowl commercial of Go Daddy.com I checked them out and it was the best thing I could have done. I got my own business domain name and all the Email accounts (and more) that I need for my business. I paid about $70 for the rights to my domain name for 5 years (maybe 10 years) and a small amount for the Email service. All my employees have their own email address as "user name@my domain name.com. Definitely the best solution for my needs. I strongly recommend their services
Good luck
I am a small business owner with about 6 Office personnel. Some years back I saw a Super Bowl commercial of Go Daddy.com I checked them out and it was the best thing I could have done. I got my own business domain name and all the Email accounts (and more) that I need for my business. I paid about $70 for the rights to my domain name for 5 years (maybe 10 years) and a small amount for the Email service. All my employees have their own email address as "user name@my domain name.com. Definitely the best solution for my needs. I strongly recommend their services
Good luck
Yep, check with either your ISP or your hosting company. For example Comcast lets you have 5 e-mail addresses even just for the Home service.
Godaddy also allows you (free I believe) email forwarding from "your" domain to an email account (i.e., gmail). You can set up gmail so that the reply to is you@yourdomain.com, so it will look almost like your own email. Then use IMAP on Mail.app. You don't have to pay google for this.
GoDaddy email forwarding isn't free, but there is one other free option on GoDaddy. You can, for example, configure "accountname@mydomain.com" to CC: "mydomain@gmail.com" although your replies will show to be from gmail.com. It's not a perfect solution, but it's free.
I own a small business with 6 email addresses and a domain. http://www.bizland.com hosts our email and web site, as well as manages our domain name. It's 7.95/month and you get something like 25-50 email addresses. Very good uptime and easy to use. If you want a nice exchange-like hosting...look at 01.com (Zimbra).