Best Email Hosting

(Since Dave gets to have his own blog offering wisdom on the best products, I'll just have to post my usual drivel here.)

I have been a customer of the email hosting provider FastMail for years. At first I used their $15 / lifetime account as a dedicated backup account. I have generally liked managing my own email server, and applied the skills gained in doing that to my day job. Spam was even fun -- watching the endless cat and mouse game of measures and counter-measures has been both amusing and instructive.

For a variety of reasons I recently decided to stop playing the game and move our email service from my own zachary.com host to FastMail. Like gmail and the others, they offer a nice web interface, huge amounts of storage, great spam filtering and so on. I signed up for a custom-designed, multi-user, hosted domain family account.

Unlike gmail they are not free. So why pay? First, it's not that much. Second, email is their core business -- all of their focus is on providing a feature rich, reliable, speedy email service. If Google needs a bit more engineering attention on their Adsense product, I'm sure that they wouldn't hesitate to pull resources from their other "products."

Finally, Google knows enough about me -- they don't need to have my entire email archive on their servers too. I think spreading my digital footprint around rather than keeping it all in one place seems like a good thing.

Comments

[Email Hosting]

I totally agree that a hosted email service can remove a lot of headaches... I remember how my company was in big trouble the day that our internal email server went down. Now we're hosting our email with Rackspace and they give us peace if mind with their 24/7/365 service.

[David Creemer]

I'll leave the comment above on the page, even though it's a not-so-thinly veiled advertisement for Rackspace. Perhaps if people find this page through a search they will see that some companies would rather spend your customer fees on shitty advertising than on delivering a quality service.