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Email Services

gksgks Member

Can you recommend reasonably reliable and cost effective email services with support personal involved? We have about 15 emails, do you recommend shard hosting sites and plans [even though, we don't host websites] like

https://www.a2hosting.com/web-hosting/compare

or can you recommend other reliable services which can cost 3-5 USD per month.

Checked Zoho, it is expensive for us.

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Comments

  • brueggusbrueggus Member, IPv6 Advocate

    I've been very happy with MXRoute over the last years: https://mxroute.com/

    Look out for their promo plans.

    Thanked by 1jar
  • @brueggus , I am using them now, at present. This is for business purpose, little concerned about support.

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran

    gks said: little concerned about support

    What can I do to make the path to support more apparent for you? I don't mean your preferred method of obtaining support, but how I can make it apparent what path you should go down and what to expect along the way. I thought by putting "Support" in the website navigation and redirecting the "Open Ticket" link in WHMCS I would have done that, but I'm happy to hear the opposing perspective.

    Thanked by 1SpryServers_Tab
  • uptimeuptime Member
    edited December 2019

    @gks - might check myw.pt (@MikePT) for shared hosting using mailchannels, with support.

    Fastmail actually seems like it could a decent fit your requirements and budget at $50 per year. That's the only one I have any longterm personal experience with to recommend, but I also might check tuffmail.com for a more bare-bones but very solid email service.

    If you really want to dig a bit deeper there is the emaildisccussions forum - which might be helpful to get an idea of what other services are out there.

    I might also suggest just waiting for the dust to settle with regard to mxroute support - I would expect that it will get figured out better - and given that no provider is perfect, all things considered they may ultimately work out to be one of the better options in that price range.

    Thanked by 3gks MikePT yongsiklee
  • @jar, enable email support, that would be enough at least.

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran

    @gks said:
    @jar, enable email support, that would be enough at least.

    Sure, but that'll take us back to where it took about a week to get an answer. You got an answer in an hour and it would've taken less if you clicked "Support" or "Open Ticket" and read a very small amount of text. Are you certain that you prefer that?

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran
    edited December 2019

    uptime said: waiting for the dust to settle with regard to mxroute support

    It's done, settled, and customers are praising it left and right but no one sees it because that's happening in our customer chat. Unfortunately there's this odd thing where customers have to actually click a support link, which is somehow worse than having to click a support link or something :tongue:

    Thanked by 2uptime Ouji
  • @jar, I will go to chat here after, some mode of support is fine for me. Thanks jar!! appreciated.

    Thanked by 2jar uptime
  • uptimeuptime Member
    edited December 2019

    @jar - (just wondering) have you considered maybe using an autoresponder to email the links for preferred support options when people ping the support @ mxroute address?

    Thanked by 2jar kkrajk
  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran

    uptime said: have you considered mayhe using an autoresponder to email the links for preferred support options when people ping the support @ mxroute address?

    Too often lately autoresponders are seeing abuse for backscatter purposes. I fear they may be the next piece of email that has become extinct due to spammers.

    Thanked by 3Falzo uptime Ouji
  • I have MXRoute and would prefer emails rather than the chat btw.

    Thanked by 1jar
  • I prefer the chat, much more relaxing and easier to communicate as you get the reply quite quick : )

    Thanked by 1jar
  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran
    edited December 2019

    @tester4 said:
    I have MXRoute and would prefer emails rather than the chat btw.

    When we started, we had a simple support ticket system. Eventually we moved that to an email based system. For roughly the last two years of this, support requests would stack up to such high quantities that it could take us up to a month to sort and answer them.

    We were never priced to be able to hire that rapidly, our service was originally launched to cater to the needs of those who could find their own answers and didn't need to talk to us about it. However, our pricing and quality led to unexpected popularity among different crowds.

    Now, we could have halted growth and said "We won't grow any further without extreme price hikes" to enable us to hire staff to handle the support needs of these new customers, but that would have completely gone against our launch goals: to break the market of excessive pricing and challenge the notion that quality requires high cost. Not to mention the pricing is part of the reason for the growth, so a huge price hike is basically saying "Company failed, go elsewhere" and I don't think that's really what anyone wants either.

    So we were forced to come up with a creative solution to the problem. We began to look at some variables. First, what were people asking us about? Things like:

    "Do you support SMTP?"

    "Can I use this with WordPress?"

    Many of the questions would be answered by just reading the front page of our website or searching google for "how to use SMTP with {app name}." We needed to create a bottleneck that forced people to either:

    1. Find it easier to seek the answer than to contact us.

    2. Be more thoughtful in their questions.

    No matter what, if we give customers or potential customers a wide open place to simply dump a question with ease, we were flooded with questions that indicated zero effort and little thoughtfulness. We get it, to them the question is of value, but we're not giving up our mission and raising our prices because people want to ask questions more than look for answers.

    The second question, what are our resources? Well it turns out that we have an amazing community of customers that are thankful for the huge savings we've given them over the alternatives, many of which are very technically gifted.

    So the idea was to build a community support structure and a public archive of already answered questions, with a reasonable ability to escalate to staff after following the path. So far it's working brilliantly and we've lost less than 10 customers over it, while hundreds are getting fast support when needed and telling us what a great experience it is.

    I'll write a blog post on it sometime because it takes a lot to keep writing this history out, but safe to say we're not just being assholes or ignoring the requests. We're just not going back to cause problems so we can say "told you so" when we've already been there, failed, and we're looking right at a much improved reality.

    That's why my ask above wasn't "how do you want support" because I know the answer here, it's just incompatible. My real ask was more like "how do I make you realize how to get support?" Because we have it and it's working, but I don't know where I'm failing to get people to find it. I accept that the failure is mine, I have tunnel vision on it. To me, it's really obvious and well highlighted, but that's just proof that I can't see through someone else's eyes.

    Thanked by 1pr0lz
  • $3-5/month is considered "0 SLA personal use". Not business. Not production with any form of support SLO/SLA.

    Thanked by 1TimboJones
  • @hzr said:
    $3-5/month is considered "0 SLA personal use". Not business. Not production with any form of support SLO/SLA.

    True, Zoho is considerably expensive, a friend of mine recommended a2hosting with reasonable SLA.

    I am happy with mxroute [the new setup like chat is new to me, I am old school email person] as it was way affordable than anyone else, we still in startup stage, with 5-7 usd with netcup like 99% uptime is fine at this moment.

    While we grow, we need HA setup, I am sure, we need to pay higher price.

  • RadiRadi Host Rep, Veteran

    We are within your upper budget: https://drserver.net/mail.php. In regards to support, we reply within minutes usually, maximum hour or two and we do it via ticket.

  • bikegremlinbikegremlin Member
    edited December 2019

    @jar said:
    That's why my ask above wasn't "how do you want support" because I know the answer here, it's just incompatible. My real ask was more like "how do I make you realize how to get support?" Because we have it and it's working, but I don't know where I'm failing to get people to find it. I accept that the failure is mine, I have tunnel vision on it. To me, it's really obvious and well highlighted, but that's just proof that I can't see through someone else's eyes.

    Snipped the long post - all perfectly common sense.

    As a customer, I can say that the support system, as it is, works perfectly.
    Beyond what I would expect.

    Using forum for support has several advantages:
    1) One can find answers already given to someone else - like a sort of a knowledge base.

    2) Community members (other users) can help each other.

    3) It is Google friendly, serving as a sort of a long term free advertising.

    All these savings (on support and advertising costs) are, at least with MXroute, transfered to customers to a large degree. Providing a very affordable service of a rather good quality (at least in my experience).

    Those in need of a fast (ticket, phone etc.) response, for whatever reason, should most probably look elsewhere. If no other, MXroute resellers could be an in-between solution (should be able to offer still lower prices than competition, but depending on agreements, could offer a ticket support system).

    I personally prefer ticket/forum system to chat, or phone, for the above noted reasons (it's a lot easier to search for the answers already given). With forum being at an advantage for providing other customers' support answers, while still allowing for private messages to Jarland for the privacy sensitive data (suppose it's much like a ticket system?).

    My long drivel on phone/chat vs ticket support system.

    Thanked by 1jar
  • NeoonNeoon Community Contributor, Veteran

    5$ MXRoute or other providers where you pay 12$/y does the job good enough.
    It would not spend more then 1$ per month on email.

  • Neoon said: It would not spend more then 1$ per month on email.

    Of course, unless it is for business use cases.

  • Have you checked out Dynu like some users have provided feedback on this forum?

  • I have used dynu, it’s cheap with multiple accounts, just works.

  • I've been with Mailcheap for almost 2 years now, no problems yet.

  • @TheRealMakan said:
    I've been with Mailcheap for almost 2 years now, no problems yet.

    +1

  • @gks said:
    @jar, I will go to chat here after, some mode of support is fine for me. Thanks jar!! appreciated.

    I admit I was hesitant about this as well but the concerns about not having a ticket system (e-mail) seem to be overstated. jar (and his colleagues) have great support through both the community forum and through chat.

    Thanked by 1jar
  • I'm looking for the same, right now I'm running Debian with Postfix and Spamassassin on sandbox OVH VPS which cost a few bucks each month. But I have to maintain it. I just want a cloud service.

    I need SMTPAUTH though and I need full support for SPF/DMARC/DKIM as well as TLS.

    I don't need any email storage, I just need it forwarded to my existing e-mail address.

    Any idea? MXRoute seems pretty steep at $40 / year.

  • Have anyone tried this? https://postale.io/

    Thanked by 1doubled
  • @marvel said:
    I'm looking for the same, right now I'm running Debian with Postfix and Spamassassin on sandbox OVH VPS which cost a few bucks each month. But I have to maintain it. I just want a cloud service.

    I need SMTPAUTH though and I need full support for SPF/DMARC/DKIM as well as TLS.

    I don't need any email storage, I just need it forwarded to my existing e-mail address.

    Any idea? MXRoute seems pretty steep at $40 / year.

    @marvel said:
    I'm looking for the same, right now I'm running Debian with Postfix and Spamassassin on sandbox OVH VPS which cost a few bucks each month. But I have to maintain it. I just want a cloud service.

    I need SMTPAUTH though and I need full support for SPF/DMARC/DKIM as well as TLS.

    I don't need any email storage, I just need it forwarded to my existing e-mail address.

    Any idea? MXRoute seems pretty steep at $40 / year.

    Pobox.com
    I am their dead fans.

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran

    marvel said: MXRoute seems pretty steep at $40 / year.

    Oh LET, never change lol

  • marvel said: MXRoute seems pretty steep at $40 / year.

    $40 per year for unlimited users though! G Suite (which is very popular for enterprise users) starts at $72 per year per user.

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