September 01, 2004

Why Have An E-Mail Server?

You have to wonder why anyone, especially in the small business market, goes to the trouble of having their own e-mail server.

By John Dickinson

Messaging Pipeline

Sometimes I wonder, why do people bother maintaining their own mail server? Mostly I think about small companies, especially young ones struggling to get going in their businesses because a mail server is an added expense that they may not need.

It's not the hardware, that's cheap enough these days that you can build almost any kind of server hardware technology for a song and sixpence. And the software, while expensive, isn't the real cost. That comes in the installation and maintenance you have to go through in order to have your own e-mail server.

Microsoft Exchange and IBM/Lotus Domino are known consumers of human technology resources. Getting them running in the first place is enough of a black art to have created a whole class of technologists who know about, and work on nothing but one of these two products.

Other products may be easier to set up and maintain, but that doesn't prevent them from crashing and needing upgrades in order to maintain their security. Many small businesses use outside technical consultants, but that doesn't make the whole exercise cost any less, doesn't prevent them from crashing, and often causes major delays in getting problems fixed while a business waits for the consultant to get done with another client, or return from vacation.

I was thinking about this recently as I explored Yahoo! Mail. Of the free web-based e-mail services, it's easily the best because the product offering includes all the PDA functions most mail client users have come to expect. You can even synchronize it with a desktop client to make offline use possible.

I thought about it more when I reviewed Bloomba Professional. It's really a good product, includes everything Outlook users have, and only requires an ISP relationship. And, it does the groupware things that Exchange users expect to have done for them, so why would a small business want to run Exchange if they can just use Bloomba? For that matter, why would even a large business run Exchange if their users could just log on to Yahoo! Mail?

Beats me. Maybe you'll and tell me what you think about it.


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