On Tue, 2003-02-18 at 09:51, Elliot Noss wrote: > I cannot comment on your service directly "domainwhiz" as you have always > chosen to maintain a high degree of anonymity
Yes, on public discussion lists I feel I must. > but I can tell you that > relatively few service providers (<10%) offer an email solution with > webmail, anti-virus, good anti-spam, IMAP, etc.. Those that do better be > maintaining a large base of mailboxes that they are selling (not bundling) > for which they are getting paid or they are expending resources > inefficiently. I think it is a myth that such services are beyond the small shop. There are numerous solutions out there for offering webmail, and any serious provider is using some form of virus scanning and spam identification tools. IMAP solutions are out there as well. Using Postfix for SMTP and Courier for IMAP/POP, with a database back end, Spam Assassin for spam identification, and amavis for antivirus, it can all be done with open source tools, and provide a very simple means to integrate it into any control panel application. Our business clients can manage all of their company's email services via a web based interface because of this setup (all using open source tools, except the web interface which was built in-house). They can create accounts as needed, delete accounts, change account details, decide which (all,none, or individually) accounts can be accessed via webmail, etc. And as an end user, I'd much rather deal with a company who is not outsourcing a service that has such direct and immediate interaction with the end user. As Bill pointed out, without managing your own facilities, if a customer has a problem, you have to depend on someone else, and on the thoroughness of their initial investigation into a claimed problem, and bring that back to your customer. No offense intended here at all, but I can say that with out OpenSRS domain accounts, I've had to go back to support more than twice on a few occasions because the first and even second conclusion reached by support on a reported problem was not in fact the problem. With a domain name, that is ok, because rarely does it effect the operation of the domain name, because domains are a much mroe static service than email. But with email, this is a MUCH more dynamic service. If a user is not getting email from a particular contact, I can do a quick log search and identify ANYTHING in our systems that might have caused it, or tell the customer definitively that email from that contact never touched our systems. I can't do that with your outsourced solution. As to the infrastructure.... When you can get server colocation with 500gigs of transfer for ~$100/mo (or 1 Megabit burstable to 100 Megabit for roughly the same), providing redundancy isn't that hard to do either. So even if the actual server where they retrieve their email from goes down for whatever reason (or the colocation facility where that server is housed goes offline), other fallback hosts at other facilities continue to receive and queue email for future delivery. And the database configurations are backed up to these same backup servers regularly, so that in the event of a protracted downtime, we can quickly, and virtually painlessly, bring up a customer's service on another server. Now, I deal almost exclusively with businesses with 50-300 users, and not really with non-business "consumer" email services. But when my customers (thankfully very rarely) call because something is not working, I damn well better be able to provide them an answer, and quickly! I can't do that unless I operate the facilities. None of this was that hard to setup for someone with the base technical knowledge (I'm no genius in this field, even if I try to portray that I am through my manner). That is why I say that your service would probably be more appealing to those who are more along the lines of "marketing organizations." That doesn't mean I don't think your service will be successful. I think there are a lot of very successful marketing companies out there, reselling dialup internet and DSL as "Virtual ISPs", reselling web hosting services as "Virtual Web Hosts", reseller domain registrations without providing their own DNS services, etc. I think this companies have a place. My point in my comments was that I highly doubt that those here who DO operate their own facilities will see much value add in reselling your outsourced email solution, assuming that they are knowledgeable admins or have one on staff. But there are a plethora of resellers who run what I call "marketing organization" companies who will be quite happy to. These companies have their place. The only thing I (slightly) bemoan is that now Tucows is making all of these companies a step closer to being competitive with us, by enabling those without the technical competence to do it themselves to still be able to offer similar services. I don't come down on Tucows for doing that, it makes business sense, since I am sure a huge number of their resellers are not facilities based internet service providers. I'm sure this service, and similar ones, are much in demand by those resellers. My question is, will Tucows be offering wholesale web hosting services to those resellers as well? To be direct, that is the possibility that bothers me the most. A step in this direction could put a lot of negative pressure on facilities based web hosting providers, including our company, because Tucows can match our innovation ability, and that means so can the thousands of "marketing organizations" who then be reselling off them. There goes our differentiation. And that's when I'd have to view Tucows as a serious competitor, and no longer as a partner. And of course, it would be smart for Tucows to take that step. I know if I were you, Elliot, I'd probably make the decision to do that. The facilities based providers who are now partners, and would then be competitors, most likely represent a very very small percentage of the revenue such a service would generate. But that's all off somewhere on the horizon. For now, I can be content, because I don't consider the email service to be too serious a competitive service. But I know I must keep a wary eye toward the double bovine corporation's future plans. *smile* -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
