Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Free vs Paid email? Both it turns out, come with a price!

Free vs Paid? Both, it turns out, come with a price

A while back, I wrote a post asking if your business can afford free hosted email, given than free always comes at a price. Well it turns out that your business email can be at risk even if you paying for it.

Free cloud based email providers, including Yahoo and Gmail, offer upgraded email services for an annual subscription. The benefits for this upgraded service include email without ads, added filters and Live Customer Care.

So it would be logical to assume that if free email isn’t the right solution for your business, than paying for upgraded email services from these same providers is.

Well Eagle Technologies found out, just in time, that this assumption almost cost them a client.

Eagle Technologies, LLC (ETL), a small veteran owned company located in Hampton Virginia, is a leading supplier of quality research and development products to limited production runs primarily focused in the aerospace industry. For the past 10 years ETL was paying Yahoo for their small business services, including email.

Eagle Technologies faced a serious problem when they discovered that their emails were being flagged as SPAM by a major OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) aerospace company. The OEM was using Trend Micro to detect SPAM on incoming emails which determined that the emails being sent by Eagle was spam. When Eagle reached out to their decade long email provider, Yahoo responded that they do not separate their email routing between paying customers and free service members.

Ignoring this problem was not an option. Mia Copeland, VP of Contracts at ETL, immediately began to reach out to the email service providers to find a solution. InfoStreet was one of the suppliers who helped navigate the series of requirements of providing a small business a service at an affordable cost for a worry free email application. A solution was designed, tailored to the needs of ETL. By combining Email, Email Archiving, Website Hosting and Address Book Applications we were able to not only replicate the technology ETL was using with Yahoo, but also enhance their services.

After utilizing the service for a few weeks Mia Copeland was quoted stating, “Using an exclusive business email provider, who only specializes in business email coupled with their enhanced services, gives me the security knowing our reputation and service we provide to our customers will continue without interruption”

Email is still the primary method of communication for business and, even with all the talk about social media, will be for the foreseeable future. Any business, whether a sole proprietorship or one of the Fortune 100, must be able to rely on their email provider without the fear of being tagged as spam.

It turns out that it doesn’t matter whether you pay for your email service or use a free service. What is important is whom do you trust to provide this essential service for your company.