Just how important are your emails?

I take email pretty seriously.  It is the way I stay in touch with a lot of people including a number of customers.  I recently wrote  a post, "Some recommendations on email."  I do not think I came out strongly enough in favor of treating your email like the mission critical application that it is for small and medium sized businesses.

Today I was in another real estate course, and we were talking about contracts and how important timely communication is.  I wondered how many email users are seeing their email turn into snail mail?  Do they actually have contracts which do not get done because of email which will not work as advertised?

I only had to think back to a conversation that I had with a small business owner a few days earlier.  He knew I had worked at an email company, Webmail.us.  He also knew that I do not pull any punches.  His small company's email had been shut down by receiving one million spam messages in one day.  He was faced with spending more money on another spam appliance or finding another solution.

He wanted to know if I thought outsourcing email is good solution now that I no longer work for an outsourcing company.  It did not take me long to give him my complete endorsement of the concept and the company.  He went live with them shortly afterwards, I will be very curious to hear his opinion, but I will venture to guess he will be a believer.  Fighting the email spam wars is no longer for amateurs.  You need someone doing it whose job depends on their being successful.

Before outsourcing this small business owner was faced with waiting twenty four hours for a very expensive and relatively new spam appliance to try to handle the deluge of email.  In that period of time, he was losing business and spending money to fix a problem that might no longer be fixable economically in house for a small business.

When we chatted just before he went live with the outsourcing solution, he told me that he could not believe that the email accounts that he needed would cost less than a total of one hundred dollars a year. He told me how close he had been to spending thousands more on top of the thousands he had already spent in the false hope of staying head of the spammers.

I think you have to get to a certain and level of expertise to be successful with email these days. I do not think that level of expertise makes economic sense for a small business.   The days of throwing up your own server or hoping your web hosting company might be able to do a good job catching spam are drawing to a close.

In my recent course I have noticed a lot of real estate agents using free email accounts.  Now I am all for free.  I am playing with MS Live and Google apps for your domain, but I would not depend on either for my customer communications.

Would you run your car on free beta tires where your only recourse if they go flat or have a blow out is to file a bug report?

Well I wouldn't, and I also do not plan to use any free email for communications where my money and career are on the line.

Comments

[Stephen]

I agree on both the criticality of email for business communications, as well as the concept of outsourcing it for small businesses.

1. We are a very satisfied small business using Mi8 (http://www.mi8.com, recently acquired by Apptis) for our email hosting. Mi8 is are superb, totally focused on customer service and customer satisfaction, and support flexible requirements for small, medium, and large businesses, to include Blackberry, Treo, and Windows Mobile support. They also support OS X and Linux users via IMAP and Webmail.

2. Outsourcing your email (and many of your IT needs) puts your IT expenditures in the "expenses" category of your balance sheet rather than the "assets". Think about this: Regular, predictable software/services costs on a monthly or annual basis rather than depreciating assets and unused, expensive software licenses. Several years down the road, when you are ready to sell your company or merge with another, you can either offer some old Pentium III Servers and copies of Exchange 5.5 (maybe the manuals are still around) as "assets", or something more viable on your balance sheet.

What is important is the data that you own and can migrate as necessary. Given that the majority of an organization's intellectual property resides in the email correspondence, certainly something to consider.