On 2022-03-02 at 10:40:05 UTC-0500 (Wed, 2 Mar 2022 08:40:05 -0700)
Anne Mitchell via mailop <amitch...@isipp.com>
is rumored to have said:
All,
For some reason we have recently had a spate of small businesses
coming to us asking us for our recommendations for a service to host
their regular one-to-one business communications. Google and MS seem
to have the business email hosting thing locked up tight, but surely
there must be email providers out there that are friendlier,
Sure.
easier to set up,
Well, maybe...
and maybe even with some decent support
Absolutely.
(or is that a pipe dream?)
I am just guessing that you also need it to be price and
feature-competitive with 2 of the world's largest tech behemoths too?
That is the big challenge.
I cannot in good conscience recommend either of the mailbox hosters that
I work for (or any of their non-behemoth competitors) broadly for small
businesses. That's not just because I'm a terrible marketer/salesman:
neither one is chasing new mailbox business independent of other
services.
MS and Google are likely to be more satisfying for less money, for
reasons that no non-behemoth can beat, mostly because they've been able
to throw development resources at their services for years in order to
minimize human support load and drive down costs. Real coders cost more
than real tech support, but a good coder can replace a support tech with
code that doesn't need health insurance... (Sometimes.) MS365 with
hosted Exchange or GApps/GMail are absolutely good enough for most small
businesses, many of whom would be unable to discern the ways a smaller
provider might be "better," particularly when providing just email.
In pet feed terms: It's no accident that Dog Chow outsells Farmer's Dog.
The customers are reasonably satisfied with a cheap commodity, partly
because they don't have any way to know what "better" options exist and
may not care about their positive differentiators.
If a small business (say less than 10 people, hosts their website at
their registrar's free hosting service, or Square or Wix) were to come
to you and ask you from where they should send their one-to-one
regular business correspondence email, who would you recommend?
The more pedestrian their needs, the more likely I would be to point
them at MS. That horrifies me, but it is true. MS has one thing that no
one else on the net can offer: rock-solid deliverability to MS-hosted
domains. To *responsibly* recommend another provider I'd need to know
that their other priorities (spam control, white-glove support,
customized mail routing, 3rd-party integration, whatever) beat
deliverability, price, and ease-of-use.
--
Bill Cole
b...@scconsult.com or billc...@apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Not Currently Available For Hire
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