[HELP] Need a Quality Email Provider for company...

[Mr.Guvernment]

Hey everyone

I need some recommendations on a good quality Email provider - our current one our company uses literaly stinks!!

Reasons they stink are:

• They do not have virus scanners on their mail servers
• They do not have any spam protection on their servers - or none that work!!!
• They lose emails - i use receiepts on emails and with one test out of 30 emails only 23 were delivered - yet they say everythign is fine!!

So i am looking for a Email provider that has the above 2 and does not lose emails - also one to which we cna use their SMTP servers instead of our own as we have workers all over the US and it is a pain to get them all SMTP from their ISP's and to run our own SMTP gives problems because of reverse DNS look-up issues.


So all input is appreciated.

 

[Malpine Walis]

Well who are you using now? Frankly, it would be really helpful to know who not to refer you to. As far as your specific issues:

1. Virus scanning on the pop server is nice to have but I would not trust that alone. I would still want to see something running on each local machine.

2. For spam filtering, I am again a big fan of having local control running on each machine. For $20 per employee you can go with Spam Iinspector or something similar. For free, you can always get mailwasher but then you have to create the filters yourself.

3. As far as losing email, how is this happening? If it is bouncing back, then check your headers to find out what is going on. If it is just not going anywhere, then you probably need to do some probing with traceroute and ping to see what is going on.

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

We are currently using a company called beanfield

www.beanfield.com - they dont even have a proper web site - not sure how we got about using them, i beleive one of our offices uses them for an T3 connection and so they are using their email with that service.


Anyways -


1. I will certainly run virus scanners on all local machines, just most mail providers in the past that i knew of also had their own which cut down greatly on the amount of virus emails i received, i understand some emails will get through with viruses, but a good Email provider i would think would stop a good portion of them, much like hotmail scans an attachment before downloading it.

2. For spam, i am using outlooks spam filters where possible, but again much of that should be stopped on the email providers side from what i have been reading, or some of it with basic spam filters implemented.

3. the losing emails; i use the tracking option in outlook to send me a read and delivery receipt for the email when sent. I set up a few different address on computers and just randomly sent emails to them, some emails would show up to some address but not others..... We have one email provider with some free accounts for another company we have and using the same method - all emails were received and delivered - i tested this more using hotmail, yahoo and other accounts and domains we own to be sure and the only time emails were lost was when i used our main beanfield providers email service.



I was considering setting up our own Exchange server, but we only have about 40 email accounts, but total we probably do about 500-1000 emails a day total and then we have monthly mailing lists that consist of 100,000 + registered recipients So i figure it would just be easier to get an outside soruce to handle our email needs.


I explained the above to the CEO and even he has gotten frustrated with his emails not being received by our support department and i have his full backing on getting a good system going to solve the problems above