Mostly agreed on black lists - they've become mostly useless. Not all of them, there are one or two that are still worth considering but only as part of a weighted decision. Why not Shaw business? Price. Shaw provides exactly the same service but they "let" you run (inbound) servers, for about double the price. Oh, sorry, they do alsounblock port 25 outbound. If you don't need that, then why pay the extra? As to why host locally: control, speed, storage, availability, bandwidth, cost. Many organizations can do away with on-site hosting but not all. If I already have a server in place, why also pay for a VPS? Gmail certainly isn't up to handling massive amounts of spam (~10k/day)... -Adam -Adam John Lange <john@johnlange.ca> wrote:
Black lists are evil period. Nothing more than internet vigilantism.
If this is for business why not use a Shaw business account? Those do not block port 25.
Or a better question, why host mail locally at all?
-- John Lange www.johnlange.ca _______________________________________________ Roundtable mailing list Roundtable@muug.mb.ca http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable
I agree that the Shaw business package is over-priced compared to the residential equivalent. That being said, for a business the cost is relatively small in the grand scheme of things. The business package also comes with static IPs and a somewhat better level of support than residential. As for local hosting, of the six things you list, "control, speed, storage, availability, bandwidth, cost" I would agree with you on only one, "control". For organizations that have a philosophical or legal requirement to maintain complete ownership over their systems, then they have no choice to host their own mail. But for most of the other things you list, the advantage is with the cloud. For example, availability. I'll put Google's up time against any single local hosted server any day. And cost is significantly in the cloud's favor. Whether or not you already own the server, you still have to pay to maintain, backup, provide power, cooling, and pay someone. And in most cases license software as well. For a smaller business those costs calculated on a per/user basis are enormous. And getting back to availability, what happens when it dies? By the time you source new hardware, rebuild and recover you are looking at a significant outage. As for storage, most corporate mail servers do not have 7 Gigs of storage per user and that is what you get for free just as a starting point with Google hosted corporate mail. The switch is completely transparent to the end user. They can continue to use the same email client they always have but as a bonus they can now use an excellent web-based client as well for checking email remotely when they don't have their laptop with them. Again, for large corporations it maybe(?) still makes sense to host locally but for everyone else it's overwhelmingly in favour of the cloud. I'm not saying there aren't situations where self-hosting makes sense but those are increasingly rare. By the way, I didn't understand your point on spam. Google's spam filtering is near perfect. Much better than any of the commercial spam filtering products I've seen which makes sense since Google can aggregate spam reports from thousands of users to "learn" spam. -- John Lange www.johnlange.ca
-----Original Message----- From: roundtable-bounces@muug.mb.ca [mailto:roundtable- bounces@muug.mb.ca] On Behalf Of John Lange
[...] The business package also comes with static IPs and a somewhat better level of support than residential.
I've found residential support to be just barely on the positive side of acceptable. What sort of improvement does business get you?
As for local hosting, of the six things you list, "control, speed, storage, availability, bandwidth, cost" I would agree with you on only one, "control".
Some of these only make sense when you consider it from an internal perspective where you have bandwidth constraints on your internet uplink. If I have a ~100Mb file in a mail folder, I would much rather that be stored locally than have to re-download it every time my IMAP client opens that folder to re-index it. Availability and bandwidth - same issue; if my internet connection goes down, I'd rather not lose all access to my emails (including intra-organizational email capability). Storage really is about control; if I want granular storage policies, I usually can't host mail online.
For organizations that have a philosophical or legal requirement to maintain complete ownership over their systems, then they have no choice to host their own mail.
I've been beating the drum about PIPEDA vs. Gmail (i.e. they're incompatible) for a while now, but no-one cares.
But for most of the other things you list, the advantage is with the cloud. For example, availability. I'll put Google's up time against any single local hosted server any day.
Assuming the server uptime is the dominating factor, not reliability of your internet connection. Otherwise the reverse is true.
And cost is significantly in the cloud's favor. [...] Agreed, up to a point. If I *need* certain features of Microsoft Exchange, for example, then hosting email outside can quickly become prohibitively expensive. Unified Messaging comes to mind.
And getting back to availability, what happens when it dies? By the time you source new hardware, rebuild and recover you are looking at a significant outage.
Agreed.
As for storage, most corporate mail servers do not have 7 Gigs of storage per user and that is what you get for free just as a starting point with Google hosted corporate mail.
True... but I would never put a company on Gmail again because of the way they handle spam (no greylisting).
The switch is completely transparent to the end user. They can continue to use the same email client they always have but as a bonus they can now use an excellent web-based client as well for checking email remotely when they don't have their laptop with them.
I have to disagree here. I've used the Gmail MAPI provider for Outlook, and it isn't quite 100% stable. Tends to lock up during periods of poor internet connectivity, and requires an astonishing amount of bandwidth.
By the way, I didn't understand your point on spam. Google's spam filtering is near perfect. Much better than any of the commercial spam filtering products I've seen which makes sense since Google can aggregate spam reports from thousands of users to "learn" spam.
I used to receive >10k pieces of spam per day. Google would tag about 9900 of them as Spam, along with about 1% of NON-spam emails. Then they provided absolutely no effective way for me to find the non-spam email unless I knew a keyword I could search on. You still can't *sort* in the Gmail interface, which means I couldn't quickly select thousands of messages at a time for permanent deletion: my spam tended to run heavily towards bombing runs where I'd get a few thousand very similar messages sent to different addresses, or sent from the same address but with different subject lines... just being able to sort would have made the situation tolerable. Using greylisting also would have solved the situation. On top of that, Google's outbound mailservers are problematic when sending to servers that use greylisting, because (unless they've changed recently) the specific server delivering the mail is nondeterministic - so the from,to,IP tuple often never gets duplicated within the greylisting timeout period. -Adam
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