Suggest an email service for my new law firm

[botolo]

Hello Friends,

I have been reading this forum for some years now and I am passionate about email providers. I have been trying many of them, from the big names such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and the new Outlook, to "independent" and popular services such as Fastmail and others.

So far, I always played around for my personal use. Now I just opened my own solo law practice and I need an email provider. I have been playing with Google Apps but I don't like the web interface of Gmail. Also, I love using my Mac Mail app and I hate how this app plays around with tags and folders when used with Gmail.

For my personal use I use iCloud and I am very happy with it. It works perfectly with all my devices, I have all my email backed up in the cloud, etc.

For the firm, I am looking for something very reliable, which can work well with my Mac Mail app and which can be used with my firm's domain name.

Any suggestion?

TIA

[William9]

In my opinion there is no better e-mail service for this sort of need than LuxSci.com. It's expensive (compared to some other providers), but delivers awesome service, reliability and functionality. It suits businesses like a law practices and other professions well. It offers encrypted e-mail communications as well regular e-mail.

[Cory]

I will second Luxsci, I do not personally use them but I wish I could! (its a price reason for me)


Another option to take a look at is Office365's Exchange only hosting. Its $4 a user per month, and last time I checked Exchange integrates pretty well with Apple Mail (it's been a while though, so I'm not quite sure). Again I do not use them either.

If your email can be outside of the USA I've heard great things about Polarismail, and if you go with Enhanced they have Card/CAL dav which will sync with iCal and Address book.


That is a complaint I have with Gmail as well, wish it would work well with Apple Mail, then it would be perfect for me to! (right now I've just been using the Gmail web interface, since my work email is also in a Google Apps account as well it works out).

[jeffpan]

LuxSci
Pobox Mail Storage
Tuffmail
Rollernet

I personally perfer Tuffmail.

[jeffpan]

And, if you transfer your domain name to Gandi.net , they give you 5 mailboxes with totally 1GB storage. I have several domains with them, and being happy with their emails, you can fetch mail with .Mail client by pop3 or imap with SSL.

[David]

It would be LuxSci for me as well - if money were not an issue - if I had to choose.

[botolo]

Thanks a lot everyone for your feedback. I have checked LuxSci. Their plans would be OK as for the pricing ($10/14 a month is doable) but I really don't understand some of their features. In the comparison between Basic and Premium service what does it mean that, for example, the privacy policies are "good" in the Basic plan but "excellent" in the Premium plan?!? Does it mean that if you buy the "Basic" plan they can take a quick look at your emails?!? And another example: the network infrastructure is "Good" with the Basic plan but "Excellent" in the Premium plan...what does this mean?!

[kijinbear]

Originally Posted by botolo

the privacy policies are "good" in the Basic plan but "excellent" in the Premium plan?!? Does it mean that if you buy the "Basic" plan they can take a quick look at your emails?!? And another example: the network infrastructure is "Good" with the Basic plan but "Excellent" in the Premium plan...what does this mean?!

Perhaps their Premium customers are placed in special servers with extra security and multiple redundant network uplinks? I dunno about the former (maybe it just refers to the availability of privacy-related features such as PGP integration), but the latter is definitely possible. Networks with 99.999% uptime are more expensive than those with 99.99% uptime.

[petergh]

Originally Posted by botolo

Thanks a lot everyone for your feedback. I have checked LuxSci. Their plans would be OK as for the pricing ($10/14 a month is doable) but I really don't understand some of their features. In the comparison between Basic and Premium service what does it mean that, for example, the privacy policies are "good" in the Basic plan but "excellent" in the Premium plan?!? Does it mean that if you buy the "Basic" plan they can take a quick look at your emails?!? And another example: the network infrastructure is "Good" with the Basic plan but "Excellent" in the Premium plan...what does this mean?!

Why don't you ask them directly? Send an email to sales(AT)luxsci.com. They're usually extremely responsive.

[botolo]

Originally Posted by petergh

Why don't you ask them directly? Send an email to sales(AT)luxsci.com. They're usually extremely responsive.

I will surely do it.

So, from what I see it seems like nobody suggested Fastmail. I used to like them but I read many negative comments in the past few months. Do you really think that their services are not at the top quality of the past anymore?

[William9]

I don't know exactly what the differences are either. However, my preference is to would go with LuxSci premium service for your law practice. LuxSci is top drawer, very professional. I also recommend getting its premium spam filter service. That's my set up, and I love it.

[William9]

Originally Posted by botolo

I will surely do it.

So, from what I see it seems like nobody suggested Fastmail. I used to like them but I read many negative comments in the past few months. Do you really think that their services are not at the top quality of the past anymore?

Regarding FastMail, the link below is not the most extreme example of slow customer service; there are other posts here on these forums regarding FM slow customer service and spotty inaccessibility problems.
http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=65873

[zmiller]

Originally Posted by botolo

Thanks a lot everyone for your feedback. I have checked LuxSci. Their plans would be OK as for the pricing ($10/14 a month is doable) but I really don't understand some of their features. In the comparison between Basic and Premium service what does it mean that, for example, the privacy policies are "good" in the Basic plan but "excellent" in the Premium plan?!? Does it mean that if you buy the "Basic" plan they can take a quick look at your emails?!? And another example: the network infrastructure is "Good" with the Basic plan but "Excellent" in the Premium plan...what does this mean?!

Hi Botolo! Welcome to EMD.com and please allow me to clarify. Our strict privacy policy protects your email no matter which environment you're in--we require written confirmation in a support ticket to login to your account for troubleshooting purposes. We have no access to your passwords (we only store password hashes, meaning we can't look them up but only confirm if a password provided is correct or not) and then if support does need to access your account, it's logged in your user login report.

The difference in privacy policy between the two server environments is related to how we handle requests from law enforcement. As long as you're not doing anything illegal, you've got nothing to worry about! The Non-Disclosure clause of our Privacy Policy explains the difference, which boils down to the fact that in the Basic server environment, we may respond to a request from law enforcement for account data even if not required by local, state or federal law. In Premium environment, we only comply if required by law.

Concerning differences in infrastructure

* Premium server environment is hosted at Rackspace with top-of the line powerful enterprise grade servers and is protected by redundant hardware firewalls plus software firewalls on all servers. Basic uses good but less powerful servers that only use on-server software firewalls (no hardware firewalls at all). The Premium environment provides optimal reliability, security & performance.

* Premium webmail servers are redundant and load-balanced (meaning if there's a problem with one, you wouldn't notice as automatic failover kicks in). Basic webmail servers are not.

* Premium has a 1-hour hardware replacement SLA, while Basic has 4-hour...meaning how quickly the server provider is obliged to replace a malfunctioning server part (hard drive, memory, CPU, etc.).

* Premium backups daily on-site plus weekly off-site, oldest backup can be 3-4 weeks. Basic backups only daily onsite, and only go back 6-7 days. Exclusive of backup, we offer Premium Email Archival for up to 10-year tamperproof retention of all sent & receive messages across your domain. Often a good choice for the legal profession. Please click here for a blog article explaining the difference between backup and archival.

We provide the same SLA for our own LuxSci services in both environments (99.99% uptime), and full feature set is exactly the same as well. Apart from the differences highlighted above, the only other differences are initial base account cost, amount of disk space to start with, and disk space upgrade costs. Full comparison list here.

Hope this helps and please don't hesitate to let me know if you have any further questions.

Best regards,
Zach
LuxSci Sales

[FredOnline]

Originally Posted by botolo

So, from what I see it seems like nobody suggested Fastmail. I used to like them but I read many negative comments in the past few months. Do you really think that their services are not at the top quality of the past anymore?

A damning indictment of FastMail?

Early days yet in this thread but not good reading for them, methinks.

[malcarada]

I like SlashMail, they are strong on security and $25/year seems very reasonable:

http://slashmail.org/moreinfo/