Email Hosting has no Value

May 27 2008 Published by under Ramblings

I pretty much agree with most of this blog post:

What Web Hosting is For

Nobody puts any attention on email hosting, and everyone is giving it away for free. And all the free services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc are remarkably good… much better than what you could roll on your own, or buy from any for-pay email hosting companies.

Personally, I’ve stopped hosting any of my email on my own servers about 2 years ago.. which I’m sure surprises lots of people since I love managing email servers… but the reality is that its just a huge pain, and its a 24×7 service that you can’t live without – and frankly, Google/Yahoo/Microsoft are all really good at it and I have other things to do. 🙂

Lately, I’ve also grown fond of the web-based interfaces from Google/Yahoo/Microsoft… I find them much more useable than OutlookXP/2003/2007 and even better than my all-time favorite Eudora. I’m getting really close to going 100% web on my email – maybe this summer… hmm…

4 responses so far

  • Shawn Powers says:
    May 27, 2008 at 3:40 pm

    I agree — particularly gmail. I hated the interface at first, but after a week or so, I began to love it. Well done Google.

  • Rakesh Agrawal says:
    May 27, 2008 at 5:05 pm

    I’ve been an email-in-the-cloud convert for a while now… wrote this blog post about my switch to GMail 2 years ago:
    http://rake.sh/blog/2006/05/08/using-gmail-for-work/

    And we switched SnapStream off of Outlook/Exchange to Google Apps late last year and have been very happy with the switch.

  • Jeremey says:
    May 27, 2008 at 5:24 pm

    Yep… I posted roughly the same thought after using Google Apps: http://blog.jeremey.com/jeremeys_weblog/2007/11/email-hosting-i.html

  • Laban Johnson says:
    June 29, 2008 at 10:07 am

    Hi Richard! Like you, I’ve finally just made the switch from hosting my own e-mail on several domains to forwarding it all to my gmail account, which I also have forwarded to my cell phone via SMS so that no matter what I’m doing, if I get an important message, I already know its there waiting for me. I don’t respond from my phone, thats what laptops are for, imho, but also because my phone keypad is T9 and not qwerty.

    Gmail is just loaded with features, you can set up as many filters as you want, and I love the javascript interface.

    Setting up forwarding was a commitment tho – I had to delete my email accounts on the server, or else the email would fill up the inbox there even with the forwarding in place. But now that its done, I’m a happy camper.