Duh – cheaper to outsoure email services.

Will we see more organizations outsourcing email services? Having run my own personal mail server for a few years, I’d be quite wary of purchasing and operating your own mail servers. Yes, if you own your mail servers, you can make them as secure and redudant as you want if price is no limit. But there’s always a budget, and it will always not be enough to provide the uptime, redundancy, and backups that someone like Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft can provide. Plus, you can’t really put a price on being able to sleep at night, free of worries that your server will be hacked, relay spam, or hard drive will fail.

If you are a non-profit, and even if you are not, Non-Profit Tech Blog wrote a three part series on setting up your organization with Google Apps for your Domain.

Have you outsourced email servers? What led to that decision? Any positive/negative feedback about email hosting providers?

Report: Gmail about one-third as expensive as hosted e-mail

Despite the confusion, a lot of companies realize that e-mail has become expensive for two simple reasons: spam and malware. Nearly half of those surveyed were evaluating off-site solutions because e-mail costs had risen, while another 30 percent were performing the evaluation as part of an upgrade or service consolidation process. Fully 85 percent of these companies were leaning towards moving some of the services off-site.