Seeking an email outsourcing service

[fivemack]

The company I work for would like to stop devoting local admin effort to its email.

There are perhaps a dozen of us, we also have half a dozen mailing lists which we'd like to see archived. We'd like authenticated webmail access.

I think what we want is a service which will run an IMAP server for us, and provide webmail access and mailing-list service. A significantly worse alternative would be a coloced Linux-box with RAID disc and with a minion to sort out backup tapes and to swap out discs when they fail, since we'd still have to manage it, and if the computer itself failed we'd have to go to the bother of setting up another one (with newer hardware, hence newer kernel, software faff, backup faff ...)

Googling on 'email outsourcing' finds me organizations happy to work with corporations who want as few as ten thousand accounts.

Another question: how practical is it to use securID or similar one-time passwords in a ten-person company? Will EDS deign to listen to a request for ten securIDs?

Comments

[diffrentcolours]

The well-known of this parish Black Cat Networks provide a reasonable-looking e-mail hosting service?

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

Google will do corporate webmail for an entire domain (currently in beta, but a client reports no issues)... hey, what are you doing with that pitchfork? https://www.google.com/a/Home

The smaller ISPs like Black Cat do email hosting, though I have no reports (good or bad) about them and don't know how well their bandwidth limits will fit - nevertheless might be worth a look.

AIUI to use securID you need to have (and hence feed and water) a radius server for the kit to work with, and have all your internal systems rely on that for authentication. Again, it boils down to whether you want to expend local admin effort or join the big-league outsourcers...

[fanf]

Have a look at the table halfway down http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/imap/isps/
(excessively huge page)

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Any modern web hosting account will handle what you want, I think. Mine at dreamhost.com does, it's handling email for dd-b.net and demesne.com and aacfi.com and dragaera.info, including mailing lists and such. Pop, imap, and webmail access. I forget if I have *no* limit on mailboxes, or if it's just so high I can't see it from here (many many thousands). They don't have to be also handling the DNS or web service for real. I don't think they even have to *think* they are.

I'd also check what pobox.com will do; I know several people handling an individual email account there, and they say they do corporate stuff, but I'm not sure whether you might fall in a middle ground that wasn't well-served.