I actually lost a customer over my free email. She put her email address all over the internet, got our domain spammed like mad to the point that my spam filter was completely overwhelmed (2000+ spam per account every day, old server anyway), complained about the spam and couldn't be bothered to wait until I built the new email server.
I still run the email server, I don't offer email addresses to my customers anymore. I support about 20ish, looks like only about 5 use it. Very few of them actually keep up with their passwords, and it seems they don't check it that often either. About every 3 to 6 months I'd get a call from most of them about some important message they have to get and they don't have their password. Their email account has 4000+ messages in it (when spam filter was actually working), they hadn't checked it since last time they got me to reset their password. Not fun. ----- Original Message ----- From: Ken Hohhof To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, November 05, 2015 9:13 AM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Roundcube For the typical WISP, I think it’s 3 facts: Fact 1: 10% of customers are morons Fact 2: 10% of customers will get an email account from you Fact 3: they are the same 10% It sounds like Lewis had a lot of business customers with their own domains, that’s maybe a different and possibly more attractive scenario depending on how you structure it and, as he says, how much you charge. People getting their email credentials compromised and used by spammers are a constant problem. And the people constantly getting a new iDevice and calling from the iStore for help. If these people don’t even understand how email works, why do they want to get it on 5 different devices? Can’t they just do like the kids and send text messages? It was easier when we mainly sold dialup and the job mainly consisted of sitting in the office talking to people on the phone. But spending an hour on the phone with a clueless email customer is less fun when your network and techs are mostly out in the field. I compare it to the threads about WISP support, where some here say they don’t get any calls because they don’t have network problems. OK, so last weekend I had a guy whose POE was plugged into a wall outlet controlled by a light switch. Another said “Linksys” was unavailable. One guy bought a new laptop and his WiFi password kept getting rejected – turns out he had answered “Dvorak right handed” to the keyboard question, because he was right handed. None of this had anything to do with network problems! So email support is like that, all the morons sign up for email from you, and you have to support them. Unless you structure things so you don’t support them. Do they call GMail for stupid support issues? The problem might be you probably sell them Internet, so it is hard to enforce a self-serve support policy, they know where you live and will bug you until you help them. Maybe one approach is to outsource all email customer support, to make the cost per customer more visible. Then compare to the revenue per customer. Since unlike the big guys, we aren’t making money from data mining. From: Lewis Bergman Sent: Thursday, November 05, 2015 8:29 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Roundcube How many thousands of users do you have? Running the service is pretty cheap. I built my own sendmail+Dovecot system which was really cheap. Then I got to a place where I didn't want my time tied up with that so we went to Magicmail which was still pretty cheap. Through all of it it was the support that was the big dollar sign. If you set expectations differently maybe yours would be cheaper. All I know is I spent a lot of user tech support time on it. More than anything else by far. Kind of a hidden expense but definitely still there. We had, I think, 8000 users on the system when we sold. Maybe a couple hundred domains. On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 8:11 AM Mike Hammett <[email protected]> wrote: What are people doing that's so expensive? I could have 10x - 50x the number of mailboxes as I have and it wouldn't cost me any more than it does now, other than some disks.... which aren't expensive. I guess I would probably move from the community version to the service provider version, but at that point that's under $0.20/mailbox/month. Not really a major expense. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com Midwest Internet Exchange http://www.midwest-ix.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Lewis Bergman" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, November 5, 2015 8:08:29 AM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Roundcube For me it wasn't about difficulty it was about expense. Email, at least how we did it, was a cost center not a profit center. I kept it until I sold and wish I would have ditched it much sooner. It was by far the biggest tech support PITA. I did learn afterward that the longer someone has an email address the more they are willing to pay to keep it. I have been raising he fee we charge to use those old emails. I am now at $250 a year for a single email and I have people begging me not to cut it off. I am still going to, but I think it is interesting since I used to give it away. I guess what I am saying is that if you do not charge a decent amount for it, why do it? The there is the whole minimum volume to be profitable thing that comes into play. I just would not keep doing something that doesn't make money. If it does, more power to you. On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 7:18 AM Mike Hammett <[email protected]> wrote: There seems to be two camps. One where people are running away form their own e-mail servers and then those that embrace it. I haven't found e-mail to be that difficult to manage. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com Midwest Internet Exchange http://www.midwest-ix.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Chuck Hogg" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, November 5, 2015 6:01:35 AM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Roundcube I hope you are charging handsomely for email. We just quit it for our customer base...and only had 2-3 complaints. Everyone already has an email address. Regards, Chuck On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 3:22 AM, Eric Kuhnke <[email protected]> wrote: Any tips of tricks for success with using Roundcube to provide webmail to individual end users (not a single domain corporate environment)? Server side is postfix + spamassassin + dovecot. I have a successful 'test' setup of roundcube running in a VM doing TLSv1.2 on smtp and imap, logged into several user accounts on test domains on the dovecot server. Wondering if anyone has run into hiccups or weird things when using roundcube in a production environment.
