Microsoft Exchange 2010

Email hosting is becoming more and more common. Many companies will not want to have their email accounts hosted with the same company that hosts their website. This is to keep everything separated as well as to provide an extra layer of information security. An Email host is a very delicate business requiring perfect up time as well as special attention so that emails arrive on time and in tact. Any delay of an email can result in both time wasted as well as money lost.

Many larger email hosting customers use Outlook or another desktop management program. These programs download and upload email through the program to the email account associated with the program. These email accounts require that the upload/download speed work at all times. It must also be rather speedy to ensure that emails are sent and received on a regular basis. Check with your email hosting provider about SMTP lag times or restrictions. Some providers may limit the amount of “pushes” that can be done within one hour. Other providers may not visibly limit the number but secretly limit the amount that can be sent each and every hour.

There are a number of different ways in which an email host can charge for accounts. The host can either charge per account or for the entire plan for a company. It depends upon the account. Many hosts implement limits on total file attachment size. Anything over ten MB is extremely generous for a host to give. Do not neglect checking into the hosts IP address. Some email hosting companies have been abused or abused their servers themselves. These servers sent out spam emails and were blacklisted by major ISP’s. This simple black listing could cause problems with the deliver ability of messages as well as cost you a number of customers.

There are a number of tools available to check how many websites are hosted on a specific server. It is slightly more difficult with an email hosting company but is still able to be done. While it is common for companies to put hundreds of websites onto one email host server, it is important to check server specifications. Any server that has a load higher than the number of processors should not be handling any more new accounts. Also, ensure that these servers have adequate processing power. One dual core processor is not enough for a server with hundreds of thousands of email accounts. Any web host that is providing this type of service should be avoided at all costs!

Customer service is the last step in the email hosting chain. While no one ever wants to have to speak with customer service that does not mean that it does not happen. In fact, it may be much more common than you think. Talk with customer service about any small problem and see if they will help you. Pricing may be the final factor but without a good customer service team, an email hosting company has nothing!

Our love for email only increases as time goes on. It’s quick, convenient and offers huge advantages over “snail mail”. Business has adopted the technology with gusto as it saves time, money and can be tracked, stored and investigated as the business sees fit. With technology comes responsibility, and HIPAA email compliance is something that every organization has to content with when they provide medical insurance, or deals with anything to do with employee health.

The most relevant rules fall under the Administrative section of the Privacy rule of HIPAA. They stipulate that adequate safeguards are in place to protect email and any other media electronic or otherwise that contains Personal Health Information (PHI). Any record that includes details about your health or medical information is regarded as PHI and falls under the HIPAA email compliance rules. The Privacy rule is a stipulation of what we would all hope was what most organizations would consider good email etiquette anyway. Practices like making emails secure, checking the address before sending to prevent information being sent to the wrong people, and checking attachments and records to ensure the right information gets to the right people.

HIPAA Email Compliance is one of the many parts of the legislation that is enthusiastically enforced. It’s something that both the government and the consumer both agree on, and should take steps to ensure is complied with. We all know that information is a commodity, and is a valuable resource that many entities would pay good money to access. Ensuring your own medical information is secure is as important as the government ensuring compliance of HIPAA.

The cost of becoming compliant was significant for many organizations when the law was first passed in 1996. Fortunately, the measures needed to become compliant benefit the business as a whole, so while it was a significant effort to comply with the HIPAA Email Compliance rules, it wasn’t wasted money.

To become compliant, companies have to secure their IT systems, especially email servers and storage. They also had to increase building security, employee security and ensure their email system was safe and secure. These are steps that many companies were taking anyway to secure proprietary data. Others weren’t so careful and had to spend thousands of dollars securing systems, upgrading security and taking other measures to safeguard information. The added benefit of this was that every company involved lessened the risk of their own data being accessed as well as that of their clients or employees.

Of course now, HIPAA email compliance is only one of the myriad of legislation that business has to contend with in order to be completely legal in the American marketplace. Since Enron, there has been a raft of new accountability legislation from several entities that stipulates that email has to be stored securely, used securely and be available for inspection at any time. The modern marketplace is a complicated one and the average company needs expert legal assistance to even start trading.

Every internet service provider has free email hosting because it comes with your monthly subscription. Approximately three years ago, Google began free email hosting for businesses assuming online and other businesses would fade. This may not have been their intention, but it is what other businesses were worried about. Since established email hosting businesses saw this coming, they revolutionized their way of service. They offered more features, built their relationships with their customers, and many aligned themselves with each other. Revolutionizing the way they provided email hosting actually helped them when Google announced that their email hosting was free.

The main way that Google and other free email hosting sites are paid is by having advertising on businesses web pages. This is what keeps email free with these sites.
So the question is – is it worth paying for an email hosting service? Absolutely it is. Email hosting services offer businesses much more than the previous mentioned company. They offer spam blockers, php services, amongst other amazing features that are just too many to list. Good luck trying to get any customer service support from free email hosting services. Many businesses think that having ads on sites is a nuisance and unnecessary. When one pays for email hosting, more storage space is widely available just with a few dollars per month. As mentioned above, security is also better. There are things called spam bots that look for a number of things to destroy your website. One of theses things is email. I have an website with email hosting and I was ignoring my spam blocker because I didn’t think I would get as much spam as I did. When I ignored the spam, I received more than eighty ignorant spam emails per day. It became a hassle just deleting them, so finally I searched my email hosting and web hosting company trying to figure out a better way to block the spam.

Eventually, I found an anti-spam blocker in my control panel, downloaded it, and now I have been one hundred percent free of spam. I am able to control it. This almost backfired on me because there is a place that you set how many emails are allowed. I set it to one per email, then a friend emailed me twice, which went to my spam folder. Needless to say, this was easily resolved.

In truth, if you own a business and you don’t have a paid email hosting service, you will soon regret it. I could understand not paying for email hosting if it cost in excess of $40 per month. Almost all email hosting can be purchased for under ten dollars per month, so it is inexcusable if your a business and you don’t have email hosting. There are websites in abundance that offer email hosting, but you can get it right here, right now at our site. Make it worth your while as you see your business becoming more profitable with email hosting.

Company email has become a vital source of evidence in legal proceedings over recent years. As it became more important to the way businesses operated and communicated, both internally and externally, the more useful email became in litigation.

Email compliance soon became an important part of an IT department’s life, and plans were hurriedly drawn up so organizations could meet their obligations. While archiving email has been a part of the IT schedule for many companies, it was often on an unofficial or ad-hoc basis. Then along came a raft of legislation compelling businesses to create and maintain an effective, and compliant archive and retrieval system.

Fortunately, even during its infancy, there were two methods of email compliance. The first was to control everything in-house, on the organizations own servers. Then build in a secure storage function, efficient retrieval and processes to answer E-discovery requests.

The second was to outsource the operation to third party providers and let them take the strain. They would take the email information off Exchange servers or other email platforms, format it, compress it and then store it securely. They would then service any E-discovery requests made by the client or their legal team.

Both have pros and cons.

Keeping it in-house involved a hefty investment in time and money. Extra hardware, networking, staff and processes would be needed in order to build a coherent, and compliant process that would satisfy the needs of the legislation. The benefit was that the organization retained full control of the data, the systems and the process.

Having the email compliance hosted offloaded just about all of the initial outlay, the need for the hardware, extra staff and the infrastructure to support a compliant system. That would be in the hands of the vendor. The size of the solution could also be scaled according to seats. If the client company grew, bought other entities or got purchased itself, the outsourced service could be scaled to meet the new needs.

The downside was that it is a recurring expense that the business has to pay, but doesn’t own. The organization also has to rely on the professionalism of the vendor in order to ensure the data is safe and that they are completely covered in the event of litigation or E-discovery requests.

There is no right answer to the question of what method is right for which business. That comes down to the individuals involved. Both solutions lend themselves to different scenarios, and different situations. The decision whether to go in-house or outsource depends entirely on where the organization is now, and where they plan to be in a few years time.