End of support for standard mailboxes
Over the last 15 years, we’ve designed and developed hundreds of websites, and we host the majority of these on our world-class hosting infrastructure, based at the Pulsant datacentre in Reading. We pride ourselves on the quality of the environment that we run, and the level of support that we offer. In order to continue to provide this level of support, we’re making some changes to our setup, particularly in terms of how we provision and support email addresses for users of our hosting services.
Standard mailboxes, as we used to include with hosting accounts, were simple facilities accessed either via the POP3 protocol, or the IMAP protocol. The key difference between these two is that, with IMAP, mail is left on the server, whereas with POP3 it is downloaded and deleted either immediately or periodically. These standard mailboxes worked well and served client needs for years. However, times have changed!
When we started providing mailboxes 15 years ago, email usage was much lower, attachments were much smaller and most users were accessing their mail on a single desktop or laptop device. For many years, our standard mailboxes were 10Mb in size, and there was seldom a reason to require more than this.
Fast-forward 15 years, mail volume has increased dramatically, email users are needing to send ever-larger files, and there’s a requirement to access mail from multiple devices, including mobile devices, as well as the need to synchronise calendars, contacts and more.
Quite simply, the standard mailboxes of old are no longer fit for purpose, and trying to shoehorn them to fit the world of email in 2016 is simply impractical. We have clients running standard email boxes in excess of 5Gb. Not only does this become very unstable in many mail clients, the level of synchronisation is unreliable, and any incorrect login attempts from any device cause the account to be locked out, requiring time-consuming and frustrating support calls.
The whole problem is answered by Microsoft Office365, which we are now provisioning as standard with all new client setups. For less than £3 per user per month, you can have access to a fully-featured Exchange mailbox. This includes 50Gb (yes, fifty gigabytes!) of storage, 1Tb of online cloud storage and, most importantly, full synchronisation between all your mobile and desktop devices, meaning your contacts, calendar, mail and more can be replicated on your desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile device. You can also upgrade the package to include access to the full version of Microsoft Office, and much more.
By separating mail functionality from your website, you ensure maximum integrity and stability of both platforms.
Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss options for upgrading your current mail setup from standard mailboxes to Office365. If you’re looking to extend to the myriad of other functions available, we’re happy to recommend our friends at Host My Office or AffinIT, who’ll be delighted to discuss the full range of options to suit your business requirements.
In terms of our standard mailbox offering, we will continue to support these until the end of December 2016. From that point, they will continue to operate as normal, but we will be unable to provide additional device-related support beyond ensuring that mail can be accessed via webmail (demonstrating that the mailbox itself is working). We will also be limiting mailbox sizes to their present size or 1Gb, whichever is the smaller. This step is necessary to ensure that we can continue to provide the maximum levels of performance and speed of your website, which is our primary focus and goal.
As always, please do let us know if you have any questions, and for those clients who haven’t made the move to the powerful Office365 platform, we’ll be looking forward to supporting you every step of the way.
