Recommendation for Good Email Service

jabbamonkey

New Email
My sister (who is very non-technical) is looking for a good email solution.

Right now she has a few small websites for her business. Each site has it's own email. Each email is hosted by a different webhost and she hates their online email systems (i.e. Squirrel Mail). She also really dislikes Outlook for some reason.

She is looking for a program, or service that will pull in all of her email accounts into one area - So she only needs to login once, to one area. I use Microsoft Inbox and thought that was a good solution... but she wants to keep things "online" in case she is traveling, and doesnt have access to her computer (with Inbox installed). I know you can "keep a copy of emails on the server" when you download to Inbox, but there are two issue with that ... 1) She would still need to login to separate web accounts when she is on the road 2) keeping emails stored on the server, without someone "cleaning it out" can "fill up" her mailbox FAST.

Anyone have any suggestions on a program or service to use? :confused:
 

foggy

Valued Member
Hi, jabbamonkey

Welcome to the forum!

I guess I'm having a small problem understanding a part of your question (or her question). When you ask for "a program or service," ISTM that a program in the nature of the case has to be installed on one's computer. But if she's concerned about things when traveling without her computer.... You can see my confusion. :)

In any case, to be able to login to one location and thereby access multiple accounts is, I believe, possible only by 1) using a desktop client (MS Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.), preferably with an IMAP setup for the various accounts, or 2) signing up for what will likely be a premium email service that happens to use a webmail client that is itself able to connect via IMAP to the various other (business email) accounts she has. I know the Group Office suite can do this, and both EuMX.net (based in Germany?) and PolarisMail.net have it as one of their several webmail choices. The latter service is based in Canada and has a good reputation for customer support -- including answering questions via phone. The toll-free number is on the right hand side of the homepage linked to above. Perhaps she could call and talk to someone about her situation and see whether they could help her set up her various accounts there. It's reasonably priced, too. :)

Hope this helps.
 

foggy

Valued Member
A further thought: there is another way to go about this. Your sister could set up another email account somewhere (just about anywhere where she liked the webmail offering more than she apparently does SquirrelMail, maybe Gmail or Outlook.com or elsewhere) and have that newly created email account POP the email from the other (business) accounts or have those accounts set up to auto-forward all email to the newly created account. And she could decide whether she wants to have the email at those accounts deleted automatically after being sent to/POP'd by the other accounts. (If she'd like to keep a copy of important ones for back-up purposes, she can do that by doing what you said above: "leave copy on server.")

She could also set up sending aliases in that new account based on the external accounts, i.e. set up the new account to send out email as if she's sending it from those other accounts. Just about any premium service will do this, and there are some very good and inexpensive ones, including FastMail and the two I mentioned above (EuMX.net and PolarisMail).

This would localize all her email activity in the new account, and she could all but ignore the others (esp. if she has the mail removed from those other servers automatically after they're received in the new account), unless they have certain restrictions like requiring her to log in at least once in a while to keep the accounts from being closed.
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
Hello,

Is the email associated with the web sites all domain based email?

My first thought is why not get all of the email consolidated to a smaller number of email service providers?

Some of my personal preferences are:

- Google Apps, for business critical pop & map accounts have have to work
- LuxSci, cheaper than Google Apps and still has good support
- Using using your registrar, such as Godaddy, for free hosted forwards associated with your domain names

There are probably some accounts that can be converted to forwards so there are fewer accounts to configure and check.

Email message rules & filters can be used to help separate email To: the different accounts within her primary email account.

It should also be possible to consolidate the web hosting to AWS and save a lot on the monthly web hosting bills.

:welcome: to Email Questions!
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
OK, it's been a while, and I see the .com available, so I grabbed myself one of those.

Anyone have some thoughts on a paid Fastmail account vs. a free Gmail account?

:thanks:
 
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