Hans-Christian Andersen
hans.andersen at phulse.com
Thu Jan 17 21:57:47 CST 2013
If you want something free or low cost, perhaps Zimbra might be of interest to you. It's a collaboration server and they have a free open source version. You get email, chat, calendar, contacts, shared document storage, etc. You have to host it on a server, but it's really quite easy to install and maintain and has a web admin interface for managing your accounts and email services. The cost would be as much as it costs for you to host a server (in your office or some VPS out there). We've been using it at my company for 5+ years. It's quite stable and reliable to use for businesses. It has a web-based interface for checking your mail and contact management and calendar, etc etc so you can access your emails where ever you like or on the go. But, you can, of course, also just connect Outlook, your phone or whatever other email client application via IMAP. http://www.zimbra.com/products/zimbra-open-source.html It's great. The only downside I can think of is that it's not very good for sending high volumes of email, like if you do mass volume mail marketing (but then you would probably be better off having a dedicated server with a highly tuned postfix daemon for that) . But for normal, every day use, it works like a charm and I haven't see any other open source alternatives that quite has the same level of polish, range of productivity features and easy of installation/maintenance. Also, if it's important, for a fee, you can also get a MS Exchange adaptor that lets Outlook connect to it as if it was an Exchange server and do all that extra integration stuff that you can do with an Exchange server. But it costs money, because it is proprietary Microsoft technology and you have to pay them a license fee for that. - Hans On 2013-01-17, at 9:20 AM, Mark Breen <marklbreen at gmail.com> wrote: > Hello All, > > Since Sept 2006 I have been using Google Apps for company based email for > my clients. > > As you may know, as of Dec 6th 2012, google no longer offer this service > for free. It must now be paid for at a rate of US$50 Per user per year. > For a small company 5 - 10 employees, this is not expensive, but over 5 > years, it still amounts to 1250 - 2500. > > In my opinion, it is still good value for what you get, but I wonder what > you use if you want to have company based *cloud *email for free. > > Any recommendations ? > > Mark > _______________________________________________ > dba-Tech mailing list > dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com > http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech > Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com