Ive moved a lot of my clients to linux in the past years for various reasons but in the past two days Ive found myself stuck with the email question.
This post in the email forum is the start of my question:
If you are a single person, small business, five or 10 people – and you have a lot of email that comes in daily, need access to that email while out of the office, and your cal & contacts, maybe a few files – reading that post, #2 starting - you quickly realize the problem of moving off gmail or exchange quickly spirals.
For example: sitting yesterday talking to a company that really wants to make the move I found myself looking at my phone and thinking - I check five email accounts, have a lot of email coming in - all are domain specific - and just pondering based on that link #2 above - four of the five are pretty darn important:
- Encryption? -
- Privacy? -
- Storage? - very
- Ease of use? - yes
- User experience / Interface? - mostly
Each of these is important on someones scale but every business I talk with starts with Storage, Ease of Use (for them to implement or daily, etc), and then their Users on the road (Interface - access to email in a easy and consistent way) and then we move into Privacy and maybe Encryption.
Each of these businesses did their own research before calling me - figuring out pricing, ease of setup ,etc and they each found cost and complexity (for various reasons) rising above what they can handle.
Since they are open to making the change they came up with this on their own but with issues:
They could get a host for their domain, pull email to their own onsite storage and then use nextcloud or something for access. Spam worries, security of email, onsite storage - etc.
Most forums Im in are sharply divided between individuals and big business. I find for myself and many of my clients we have the needs well above the individual and clearly well below the big business. What I see often posted is, if you are in business then its a expected that you just swallow the cost of doing business of paying for email - which has gotten more expensive in All ways - but why so many businesses when to Gmail. There are tens of thousands of businesses dont fit the std mold that want to change.
Options include: self host, 2nd’ary self hosting, paying for it at the drastically reduced space requirement, etc.
Interested to hear what others think on this going forward.