Why outsourcing your e-mail is a good idea

I outsource my e-mail server, keeping it on a third-party’s system.  Some people may not understand why, thinking that it somehow it exposes me to possible breaches of security.  To those people, I say Bah, humbug!  In fact, outsourcing my e-mail lets me sleep better.

Make no mistake – I’m not talking about using Gmail, Hotmail or some other service for my business communications.  For a variety of reasons, I don’t think that’s a great idea.  We’ll chat about that sometime soon, but it’s a conversation for another day.

No, I’m talking about my regular “jay [at] fclcny.com” business e-mail address.  My domain, my control.  Someone else’s hardware, someone else’s headache.  I don’t need to maintain servers, don’t worry if Internet access fails in my office, and can access my e-mail anywhere I choose.  As an added bonus, I don’t need to worry about viruses running amok in my e-mail – the service I use takes care of that.

Finally, and most importantly, is the fact that I will never lose my e-mails.  Ever.  If I were to host my e-mail on a server in my office then I could lose the messages if my server dies or gets hit by lightning.  If the building burns down, my e-mails would be lost forever.

By using a separate service and outsourcing my e-mail servers I know that there are back-ups put in place to keep my information available to me at all times.  If the server’s connection goes down I can rest assured that it will be be picked up by another connection.  I rely on the server’s anti-virus and anti-spam capabilities.  I know someone is monitoring my service 24/7/365, and I never need to maintain it on my own.  Something goes wrong at 2am on a Saturday?  Not my problem!

There are a number of e-mail hosting services, but most of them offer POP only; I prefer IMAP (again, another conversation – but soon), so I chose FuseMail.  For $24.99 per month I get all the e-mail functionality I could possibly need and then some.