If most of your email customers are businesses, I would guess that is
certainly the case (or they have an 'IT guy' running around that can
help Mary who can't get into her email this morning.) Doubly so if
you're outsourcing tier 1, as I would hope most of the simple issues get
solved at that level.
I started off my career doing technical support for a large ISP, and I
think Ken downplays his stories based on my experiences. Although, maybe
things are easier nowadays. I can still remember trying to walk an old
lady through downloading Netscape via command line FTP so we could get
something or other working because her IE was busted. I would rather do
that 100 times over than do email support over the phone. Trying to
remember where every menu was for every obscure email client people were
using, hearing over and over again 'I don't see a 'Tools' button, wait,
am I supposed to be in Outlook and not Solitaire?'
On 11/5/2015 10:19 AM, Mike Hammett wrote:
Texting is so 2000 - 2005. ;-)
I simply don't have that many calls about e-mail support. Maybe it's
because most of my boxes are businesses and it's more controlled.
Maybe it's because I've implemented different files on my servers so
different programs and devices auto-configure (short of e-mail and
password).
*shrugs*
All of my first tier of support is outsourced. Not that big of an issue.
Ken, I've often thought based upon your stories of your customers that
I have the smarter customers in our area. ;-)
-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From: *"Ken Hohhof" <[email protected]>
*To: *[email protected]
*Sent: *Thursday, November 5, 2015 9:13:41 AM
*Subject: *Re: [AFMUG] Roundcube
For the typical WISP, I think it’s 3 facts:
Fact 1: 10% of customers are morons
Fact 2: 10% of customers will get an email account from you
Fact 3: they are the same 10%
It sounds like Lewis had a lot of business customers with their own
domains, that’s maybe a different and possibly more attractive
scenario depending on how you structure it and, as he says, how much
you charge.
People getting their email credentials compromised and used by
spammers are a constant problem. And the people constantly getting a
new iDevice and calling from the iStore for help. If these people
don’t even understand how email works, why do they want to get it on 5
different devices? Can’t they just do like the kids and send text
messages?
It was easier when we mainly sold dialup and the job mainly consisted
of sitting in the office talking to people on the phone. But spending
an hour on the phone with a clueless email customer is less fun when
your network and techs are mostly out in the field.
I compare it to the threads about WISP support, where some here say
they don’t get any calls because they don’t have network problems.
OK, so last weekend I had a guy whose POE was plugged into a wall
outlet controlled by a light switch. Another said “Linksys” was
unavailable. One guy bought a new laptop and his WiFi password kept
getting rejected – turns out he had answered “Dvorak right handed” to
the keyboard question, because he was right handed. None of this had
anything to do with network problems!
So email support is like that, all the morons sign up for email from
you, and you have to support them. Unless you structure things so you
don’t support them. Do they call GMail for stupid support issues? The
problem might be you probably sell them Internet, so it is hard to
enforce a self-serve support policy, they know where you live and will
bug you until you help them.
Maybe one approach is to outsource all email customer support, to make
the cost per customer more visible. Then compare to the revenue per
customer. Since unlike the big guys, we aren’t making money from data
mining.
*From:* Lewis Bergman <mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent:* Thursday, November 05, 2015 8:29 AM
*To:* [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
*Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] Roundcube
How many thousands of users do you have? Running the service is pretty
cheap. I built my own sendmail+Dovecot system which was really cheap.
Then I got to a place where I didn't want my time tied up with that so
we went to Magicmail which was still pretty cheap. Through all of it
it was the support that was the big dollar sign. If you set
expectations differently maybe yours would be cheaper. All I know is I
spent a lot of user tech support time on it. More than anything else
by far. Kind of a hidden expense but definitely still there. We had, I
think, 8000 users on the system when we sold. Maybe a couple hundred
domains.
On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 8:11 AM Mike Hammett <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
What are people doing that's so expensive? I could have 10x - 50x
the number of mailboxes as I have and it wouldn't cost me any more
than it does now, other than some disks.... which aren't expensive.
I guess I would probably move from the community version to the
service provider version, but at that point that's under
$0.20/mailbox/month. Not really a major expense.
-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com
<https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL><https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb><https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions><https://twitter.com/ICSIL>
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From: *"Lewis Bergman" <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
*To: *[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent: *Thursday, November 5, 2015 8:08:29 AM
*Subject: *Re: [AFMUG] Roundcube
For me it wasn't about difficulty it was about expense. Email, at
least how we did it, was a cost center not a profit center. I kept
it until I sold and wish I would have ditched it much sooner. It
was by far the biggest tech support PITA.
I did learn afterward that the longer someone has an email address
the more they are willing to pay to keep it. I have been raising
he fee we charge to use those old emails. I am now at $250 a year
for a single email and I have people begging me not to cut it off.
I am still going to, but I think it is interesting since I used to
give it away.
I guess what I am saying is that if you do not charge a decent
amount for it, why do it? The there is the whole minimum volume to
be profitable thing that comes into play. I just would not keep
doing something that doesn't make money. If it does, more power to
you.
On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 7:18 AM Mike Hammett <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
There seems to be two camps. One where people are running away
form their own e-mail servers and then those that embrace it.
I haven't found e-mail to be that difficult to manage.
-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com
<https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL><https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb><https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions><https://twitter.com/ICSIL>
Midwest Internet Exchange
http://www.midwest-ix.com
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From: *"Chuck Hogg" <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
*To: *[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent: *Thursday, November 5, 2015 6:01:35 AM
*Subject: *Re: [AFMUG] Roundcube
I hope you are charging handsomely for email. We just quit it
for our customer base...and only had 2-3 complaints. Everyone
already has an email address.
Regards,
Chuck
On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 3:22 AM, Eric Kuhnke
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Any tips of tricks for success with using Roundcube to
provide webmail to individual end users (not a single
domain corporate environment)?
Server side is postfix + spamassassin + dovecot.
I have a successful 'test' setup of roundcube running in a
VM doing TLSv1.2 on smtp and imap, logged into several
user accounts on test domains on the dovecot server.
Wondering if anyone has run into hiccups or weird things
when using roundcube in a production environment.
--
Simon Westlake
Skype: Simon_Sonar
Email: [email protected]
Phone: (702) 447-1247
---------------------------
Sonar Software Inc
The next generation of ISP billing and OSS
https://sonar.software
