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Have you ever sat down and spent a huge amount of time getting an email campaign planned, designed and ready to send to lots of hungry prospects? Of course you have. If you are in business of any sort, then email, no matter how humble, has become a critical part of the customer and prospect communication programme. Let’s face it. It is reasonably priced when compared to even the cheapest snail mail alternative, and when well designed it can be as effective as conventional mail – sometimes more so. If, like me, you have made a big investment in time to craft a communication that presents your offer in the best light, then you really want to know when it has been received by the prospect list, and when the favourable responses will start arriving. Mail service failure That’s all very obvious and nice and simple you might say. Yes I totally agree with you, or at least I did until three days ago when I discovered that my ISP used outsourced elements for their email system and the whole service was wrecked because some distant mail server had crashed irreparably, and the back up and restore was going to take a day. Apparently a third party mail system supplier had got it wrong. Or at least that was the lame excuse on the recorded message left on the customer support line. (You couldn’t actually speak to anyone because they were so overwhelmed with angry and concerned customer calls!). Ok, I suppose these things happen. In any event I had no choice but to wait for a day to get any email. However, the waiting turned into three days, with further intermittent mail service and irregular and very annoying service downtime. Many of my clients were complaining that I had not responded to their urgent enquiries, and a whole lot more grief besides, which I really did not deserve as I could not see any of their emails. I’m an Idiot OK, I admit it. I am an idiot. I now know full well that I should not have relied on what I thought was a mainstream hosting provider to handle my email. It was a big, big mistake. It cost me lots of business. It wasted hours of my time, and I am totally fed up. And I was particularly fed up when I discovered that you can rent an Outlook Exchange mailbox from Rackspace Hosting for just £9 a month. It has all the benefits of Outlook Exchange including shared calendars, out of office, a sizable mailbox and more importantly, the Rackspace 100% uptime guarantee and 24/7/365 Fanatical Support, which features knowledgeable people that you can actually talk to after a few rings of the helpline. Each Exchange mailbox comes complete with a free copy of Microsoft Outlook 07 or Entourage 08, along with full set up information. And there’s a very flexible contract – no tying you down for years on end. And of course, no software or backups or patching to think about – it’s all done for you. It’s rugged, rapid and reliable And here’s the big one. Every mailbox has multiple backups of all mailbox data for disaster recovery (every 30 minutes) to ensure that in the unlikely case of total wipe out, everything is safely backed up; in fact Rackspace’s Hosted Microsoft Exchange system allows you to recover 30 days of deleted data immediately. If you can find an ISP to do that then I will glide serenely around the room on the back of my pink flying pig. In all honesty there are some drawbacks; your mailbox size is limited to 2GB per user – but that’s still a lot of email! And if necessary you can add in extra storage in 1 GB increments for a reasonable premium. There is a 1GB public folder included with every system. The other issue is that you can’t send attachments larger than 50Mb, though I think my clients would not thank me for such sizeable communications! And if it’s essential to send more than 50Mb then there are lots of FREE large file transfer systems available on the internet. The weakest link I keep asking myself. Why did I put up with a stupid third party mail system with no flexibility or control and plenty of in-service failure and downtime? It was because I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know that a well known ISP farmed out its email, and I equally didn’t know that the weakest link of a single component failure could have such a dramatic impact on my business mail service, and cause such rampant strife with my clients. Calm and serenity with guaranteed uptime It’s funny. When you have experienced the calm and serenity of Rackspace service and support, and reaped the joy of 100% network uptime, you do wonder why, for the sake of a few dollars, you didn’t sign up for a Rackspace’s Email Hosting account many years ago? I keep wondering about that mailer and what might have been had I been using a hosted Exchange mailbox. Ah well, dream on. Read more on Hosted Microsoft Exchange and Email Hosting on Rackspace website.
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