Looking for an Email Hosting Service

Hosting
1

Our company has 3 websites and we have a total of 16 email addresses spread among the 3 domains. We recently moved all 3 websites to a new dedicated hosting service which is doing a great job for us and at a great price. The issue is we are unable to host our email there so we are looking for an email hosting service.

Our email addresses are used on a variety of devices such as iPhone’s, iPad’s, Android tablets, Linux PC’s using Thunderbird, and Mac computers using Thunderbird. For this reason we definitely want to avoid POP email and would like to use IMAP email.

One solution we’ve come across is Microsoft’s Live service. It seems you can host multiple domains and many email addresses there and the price is free. It seems to not support IMAP and is mainly POP. It seems it possibly supports Exchange but I don’t know much about it. I believe Android and iOS support Exchange but it appears Thunderbird doesn’t support it and we’d prefer to stay with Thunderbird on both our Mac and Linux computers. Does anyone know if any of Microsoft’s services such as Live support IMAP?

I’m interested in looking at other services. I know Google used to have a free service with Google Apps but it’s no longer available. We handle a relatively large volume of email between the 16 email addresses and it’s very important to have good email use for our company so we want to find a service that can handle this load and also it’s important that it’s reliable. Obviously a free service is nice but we’re also willing to find a service that has a reasonable monthly cost. Also, we’re located in the U.S. so would like a U.S. Based service.

Thanks in advance for your help,

Mark

2

Google Apps is pretty cheap (basically $50 per year per user) so is worth considering. It works really well for this sort of thing and is very reliable in my experience.

3

As you are looking at Microsoft based services then Microsoft itself provides hosted exchange services on a per user monthly basis which you could consider. They even have Office 365 which incorporates the same. Price wise I think Microsoft seems to have best pricing overall. There are other leading hosting service providers like Rackspace and Godaddy which I can recall off hand that provide hosted exchange services. Its a good policy to keep hosting and email on independent providers if you are looking at safety and continuity in communications.

4

Mark,

Do you need an US company or just server in USA?

Thanks.

5

I have been using NameCheap for email hosting and have really liked it, it’s super cheap also. As other have said Google Apps is also a great option.

6

I would caution folks against using a domain registrar as a host or email provider. Hosing and email isn’t their primary business, and in general, it tends to suffer a bit. I’d recommend only registering domains with a domain registrar and look for hosting with an actual hosting provider.

7

There is a commercial addon for thunderbird called ExQuilla that handles exchange server accounts - you’d need to check that Live domain email is compatible