Multiple service providers and ISPs are offering free email for corporate users. Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail are probably the most prevalent email services known to typical users and corporations. Statistics show that many small businesses are using these free services for their primary corporate email.

Most of us understand that using a free email service means that you do not have to pay for email service or usage. However, what are the ‘true’ costs of free service? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using a free email service? Here are some thoughts to why you need to own or pay for your email service.

Advantages of free email service:
One of the obvious advantages of free email service is that there is no cost to having an email address and access to emails. It is very cost effective if you are just looking at the initial investment and do not conduct business via email. If email is one of your primary tools for business, see below.

Another advantage is that you do not have to manage a mail server or anti-virus and spam security applications. All of this is managed by the hosting company. You do not have to hire someone to manage your email server and users.

Storage and equipment needs are significantly reduced with free email services. Most service providers offer virtually unlimited storage or so much storage, that most users will never run out of storage. This reduces the cost of managing and purchasing hardware and networking equipment for email use.

You can also synchronize your free web mail with desktop applications like Outlook, Outlook Express, and Thunderbird. Your users can continue to use their favorite desktop applications for email.

Disadvantages of free email service:
I believe that the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages even for very small businesses. Companies are primarily communicating with customers and partners via email, and it is a very critical 24/7 tool that needs to be managed for your own needs and interests.

The main question is what does free service mean? What do you really get with the free service? How much are you paying in downtime, no support service, loss of functionality, no guaranteed delivery of email, and no email recovery? Is your email getting backed up? Can you recover your email and how long will it take the service provider to recover your email and other objects like your contacts? Even some of the paid-for hosted providers do not restore emails. How is this affecting your legal requirements to maintain your email history? What happens if you get sued and need last year’s email conversations? Do you need to purchase an archiving service? Assess and calculate the true cost of free email for your company. I believe that you will be surprised by the number.

Personally, when a business does not have their own domain and use free domains like gmail.com, my perception is that they are not a serious business. It makes me leery about doing business with companies who do not have the resources to manage a very critical part of their business like email.

Also, even small businesses have multiple email addresses assigned for different departments. Depending on your inquiry, you have sales, support, general, and business development emails for customers and partners’ use. These are some of the examples. You will need to assign a live person(s) to check all of these email boxes and manage them.

With free email services, support is usually provided via their knowledge database with frequently answered questions. (FAQs) Can you run your business without technical support? If they do have support via email, it usually takes days to get a response back. Sometimes, you do not get a response at all.

If you lose or accidentally delete an important email, can you get it back? For most free services, the answer is no. The free services do not restore your email for you.

When your email service goes down, what recourse do you have for lost emails, business, and time?
You are at the mercy of the service provider, and they are not responsible for lost emails. We have seen how even companies as large as Google have massive outages.

There is also the Privacy issue. Because you are using a free service, some of the services scan your email and pop up ads in accordance to what is in your email. Are you willing to compromise your company’s confidential information? Instances of hackers accessing free mail services make the news often. The other annoying aspect of free email is the ads that show every time you view your email.

Free also means that there is very little sharing with other users. Gmail offers some collaboration for file sharing. However, you cannot share the files with users outside of Gmail. Sharing calendars and contacts with other users are not available for most free services.

There are many other issues with free services in a corporate environment. If you are using a free service for your personal use, it is less risky when you lose email, the server goes down, or someone hacks into your inbox.

Email service/application is one of your most critical applications and needs to be running at all times. Assess the importance of email for your business before using a free service.

A few years ago as we were testing the compatibility of PST file data with our IMAP server, Insight Server, we found that there was not an effective and inexpensive tool, open source or commercial, that allowed complete migration from PST files to IMAP servers. Out of necessity, our developers created a tool to export PST data into the email server that included all the groupware objects including calendar items, contacts, tasks, etc.

Using the tool, exportPST, we could determine what was corrupted on the PST files by what data imported to the server. We also found multiple compatibility issues between the PST and IMAP data. Once the issues were resolved, it provided us with a reliable and fast tool for migrating data to the server. If this tool was useful to us, there were probably others who would find this tool to be helpful. When we mentioned this to our partners, we immediately received responses back stating their interest. Our partners also were frustrated with trying to migrate users’ PST files to email servers; migrating PST files can be arduous and time consuming.

If you search for email migration, the most prevalent type is Lotus to Outlook migration. In other words, there are several expensive migration tools that allow you to migrate from IBM’s Domino™ server to Microsoft’s Exchange™ server. There are other tools that allow you to migrate from one email client to another. However, the groupware objects like calendars, contacts, and tasks are not migrated. There is also a lot of conversation about migrating Outlook data to the Gmail server. It looks like Google already has a tool that migrates PST data to their Gmail server. If you want to go from one IMAP server to another, an open source application called Imapsync allows migration of mailboxes from one server to another. Some archiving solutions are being sold as a migration server as well as an archiving solution. Once the archiving software is connected to a particular type of email server and the data is moved, the archiving server acts as a middleman to move the data over to the new server in the right format.

Many solutions are available if you have one of the popular email servers. What happens if you do not? In terms of straight PST file migration to IMAP server, not a lot of options are available. Once we supported the popular open source IMAP servers like Cyrus, we were asked to add other server types. Kolab server, another open source email server, format has been added for easy migration of all PST objects. A natural extension to the Kolab format was to support iCalendar and vCard formats. Since many email clients and servers supported these formats including Kolab, it allowed seamless migration for the Kolab and other types of servers.

We added an administration interface to allow multiple PST migration at the same time. We are working on providing a batch mode migration so that multiple files can be migrated without interrupting other tasks.

If you are looking for an easy way to move PST data, try the exportPST tool for free.

Some of the most overly used words in telecom are VoIP (voice over IP) and unified messaging. It seems like every vendor is trying to develop a full suite of products and solutions for unified messaging. Buy why? With today’s mobile devices, most of the advantages of unified messaging are available without having to invest in expensive equipment that needs to be managed and updated.

What is unified messaging?
It is combining voice features with instant messaging, email, fax, video messaging, etc.
Cisco offers a click-to-dial solution that allows users to dial directly from Microsoft Outlook’s contacts list and allows voicemail messages to go directly to the user’s inbox. Salesforce.com has integrated with Skype to offer direct chats and calls from their CRM system. Many other vendors like 3Com and Nortel are offering some type of integrated solutions.

When it comes to email and voice integration, the typical options are to get your voicemail via email and to call directly from your contacts’ list. It can be from Microsoft Outlook or from some CRM application. The other integration option is to get your email read to you on your phone. It converts text to speech.
These are “cool” features, but are they really necessary?

As more and more people switch from landlines to mobile phones, and emails are delivered on the mobile phones, the typical office phones will not be needed. Most businesses communicate via email, Skype, or IM and use less landlines. One of the perceived advantages of unified messaging is that employees can leave one voicemail or email, and the recipient will get it in their mail’s inbox. It is supposed to increase productivity among the workers, because they do not need to leave an email and a voicemail. Most workers these days have mobile phones and can be reached anywhere around the world via phone, text or email. All you need is a wi-fi connection which is available just about anywhere.

So, why invest in a unified platform when any collaboration is available on a mobile device?
Collaboration among not only employees but also businesses has become much easier with video conferencing, Skype calls, and email. Partnering with companies from around the world without meeting them in person is normal and does not require travel expenses. Integration of these applications would not increase productivity for a typical employee. There are many tools/applications that increase productivity without unifying the communication applications.

Unified communication is more than just about integrating the applications. Multiple hardware devices and software operating systems must be integrated before the actual applications are added. As these roprietary systems grow, managing and maintaining these products become complex and expensive. If you do not have an in-house team who knows how to implement multiple unified messaging systems, you will need to hire outside experts to implement and maintain the environment on a daily basis. Also, because these systems are proprietary, you will need to invest more resources if you want to change to another system.

For practical purposes, most companies should use their mobile devices and get their email and phone calls on one device. Unless you are a telemarketing company or doing a lot of telemarketing where clicking on your contacts to make phone calls would increase the productivity of an employee, it does not seem to cost justify adding a unified solution to your already complex network infrastructure.

When most people think about email security, they think in terms of virus and spam protection. The typical questions are, how do I protect my users from viruses and spam, what about phishing, and how are Trojans and other threats stopped?

What is missing is a comprehensive, holistic approach to email security. The above are some of the issues that a company needs to consider. However, there are many other issues that need to be addressed.

According to security experts, most of the theft and security breaches occur from within and not from outside of the company. Employees have access to your confidential customer database, salary information, and other highly sensitive data. They also have access to all the confidential emails that are meant for internal employees only. We have seen throughout the years that many confidential emails are “leaked out” by employees and are passed all over the internet. (Microsoft being one of the prime examples)

To design a comprehensive email security environment, multiple facets need to be considered. The most important is educating the employees and helping them understand how security affects their livelihood. Someone releasing confidential information over the internet can have serious side effects. If it is a confidential product, competitors can use the information and create a similar product or can create an opposing product that undermines your products. If your business can not sell and grow, the employees’ jobs are at stake. Layoffs and salary reductions are probable.

In addition to educating the employees, physical security should be reviewed regularly.
Where is your email server located? What access do employees have to the system? What kind of redundancy/failover systems are in place? Where are the failover systems? Are they in the same location as your production email servers or are they at an offsite disaster recovery site? Because email is a 24/7 critical application, the same planning needs to be made as any other business critical application. If it is hosted, what physical security has your hosted provider added? What SLA (service level agreement) guarantees are they promising? What about Network security – how well is your network protected? Firewall? Encrypted network?

Next, who is managing your email server? How many people have access to the administrator userid?
It is recommended that two people have access to the administrator userid. The administrator password should be kept in a safe where a manager can access it and provide it to the appropriate person if the two people who have the administrator password are not available. Who will manage your email when there is a disaster? Do you have a designated person who is responsible for making sure that email is running at all times?

Finally, there is software security. Most companies have anti-virus and anti-spam products installed on their servers to manage the attacks from foreign, unwelcomed intruders. Multiple products are available that address these issues. However, software security is more than just virus and spam protection; securing the email itself from others’ views requires email encryption software. There are two types of encryption. First, connection encryption secures the network connection between the user and the server. It does not secure the connection to the intended recipient. Second, email encryption secures the email itself so that the connection to the recipient does not need to be encrypted; however the recipient must have a private key to decrypt the message. A less secure method is the signed option that does not encrypt the message but checks for any alteration to the email when the intended recipient receives the email. The recipient receives a public key that confirms that the email has not been tempered or altered.

Too many times, the biggest security threat with email is the users themselves and their careless use of the password. Numerous cases have been reported with users writing down their password anywhere in their office area where anyone can see their password. Within companies, management of passwords needs to be practiced, however, a delicate balance is needed between the strictness of passwords, intervals used for password change, and their users’ ability to remember and manage their passwords. If it is too strict, the users will cheat the system by writing it down somewhere or enter it somewhere so that they can remember it. If it is not strict enough, then it is easy for someone to discover the password and access confidential information.

Email security encompasses much more than just anti-virus and spam protection. The biggest threat does not occur outside of the company; most of the threats are within the company where information can be easily shared and hacked.

Multiple debates have ensued in regards to social networking surpassing email as the defacto method of communication. Some are saying that the email will be obsolete because social networking sites have increased in popularity.

Most people are aware that social networking has increased in usage. According to the most recent Nielsen’s global study, social networking is growing at twice the rate as email or web portals. It has also outpaced email, based on the time spent by online users. Facebook is the most popular social networking site. Facebook’s major growth comes from 35-49 year olds. It makes a lot of sense. This demographic grew up with technology, so they are very comfortable with new technology. They are also trying to reconnect with high school and college friends. Given the statistic that over 50% of married people get divorced, many of these social networkers are probably looking for relationships. They have created enough connections over their lifetime to seek their old friends and lovers.

What are businesses doing with social networking and how does that affect email?
Many large organizations do not allow instant messaging (IM) or internet access outside of their organization. Internally, enterprise companies have created their own social networking sites and instant messaging capabilities for their users to collaborate instantly. However, organizations are still using email heavily for general communication. IM is mainly used for informal chats. Just 10-20 years ago, workers used their phones to have an informal or quick conversation. That was the form of instant messaging in the old days. The downside was that you were constantly leaving people messages when they were not in the office. So, instant communication was hindered if they did not have a cell phone. Currently, workers are moving away from phone conversations to online chats. As more and more companies conduct their businesses globally, online capabilities and video conferencing provide instant communication to their partners, customers, and employees.

The public social networking sites are used by businesses for external communication and brand marketing. It is mainly used by B to C (business to consumer) companies or companies who market to the consumers to promote their products and extend their customer service. Social networking is another marketing avenue for B to C companies to extend their marketing reach. Twitter is the most used medium. Enterprise companies are using social networking to elicit instant feedback for new products or changes to current products. It can reduce their time to market from months to weeks. Social networking redefines the meaning of customer driven products.

In addition, companies are using chat as an extension to their customer service and offering it as an alternative to phone conversations. Email inquiry has been offered for years, but the delay in responses or sometimes no response at all has reduced customer service instead of enhancing it.

For formal communication that needs to be documented, email is still the best way to track agreements, conversations, legal contracts, etc. Communicating with the outside vendors, partners, and customers require formal writing. You can also archive email conversations and provide them as legal documents.

Email seems to be proliferating, and the email industry is growing at double digits. Most people want to communicate by email in business. The debate should not be about will social networking replace email; it should be about how social networking is replacing phone conversations. Unfortunately, human beings are losing the ability to talk to one another without having an electronic device that dehumanizes the interaction.

The days of having lengthy phone conversations are becoming obsolete. If you want to get an update from a friend, all you need to do is look at their Facebook page.

Back in the 90s, businesses were purchasing ERP, CRM, and database systems from top vendors thinking that having the right applications would provide them with their competitive advantage. Many issues arose when companies started implementing these complex applications. One, their competitors were implementing the same applications. So, where was the competitive advantage? Second, the modules for these applications were extremely complex and took many years and millions of dollars to implement. Many companies never implemented the full suite due to the amount of integration and customization made to the applications. Third, because the vendors used their own proprietary databases, the databases did not talk to each other, and information was not readily available for quick decision making.

Companies like SAP and Oracle accelerated their market share due to businesses thinking that the right application would provide them with the competitive advantage. Business Intelligence tools proliferated in the 90s because companies wanted to extract intelligent information from their structured data. The data was in some kind of relational database with defined fields. You could get the information needed because the data was fixed and meaning was easily extracted. For example, one grocer found a pattern with men who had small children. They bought beer when they bought their children’s diapers. If the grocer put the most expensive diapers near the beer section, then those diapers sold very well. Finding meaning through structured data was relatively easy.

As businesses acquired and merged with others, they found that there was a proliferation of the same type of applications across their enterprise. Multiple challenges presented themselves when they tried to integrate and share data across organizations with different databases. Where was the master data?
How do you consolidate multiple applications? How do you share data across the enterprise? What global attributes are critical for all units across the enterprise?

75% of CIOs believe that competitive advantage can be gained by better use of data. However, only 15% say that their data is well managed.

In today’s environment, not only do you have the complexities of structured data, you have to manage unstructured data. What is unstructured data? It is all the other content based information that is not kept in a database. Blogs, IM chats, email, text messages, customer support text logs are some of the examples. How do you extract content data and make sense of what the information is telling you? How do you tie unstructured data with structured data? In other words, how do you tie outside services like email with internal business operations like the ERP system?

As most people are aware, email is one of the most mission-critical applications for any company.
Every organization has mounds of email data, but how do you get any intelligent data from it? Especially the customer service emails, how do you determine how satisfied your customers are with the quality of the emails, responses, and effectiveness of the email?

In addition, there is information on the Internet, press releases, online literature, blogs, articles, etc. These require constant monitoring and attention. With unstructured data, processes and applications cannot be fully automated. There are too many ways to say the same thing.

Integrating content data like email with structured data is daunting. Businesses have to take the holistic approach and study the interaction cycle from customers, business partners, suppliers, employees, competitors and industry. Many software vendors have been working on solutions to address these issues. However, it will not be perfect because content data cannot be easily compartmentalized by the words used in the email or other data.

Some of the best practices for managing structured and unstructured data are to look at common set of standards that apply to both sets of data, incrementally marry the products together, and focus on the middleware between the platforms to integrate the data. Find where you can create more business value with what you have and find a single version of truth. Create a single point of origination for your data and make that the master copy. This will create a single view of information management. You will know that what you are sharing is accurate.

The most important element for managing heterogeneous data is to train the employees. They need to understand the critical nature of the business uses; why they need it and what the data means to empower them to make the right decision.

After talking to customers, partners, and prospects, at Bynari, the recessionary period has redefined what customers want in an email server. In the recent years, the buzz words were collaboration and unified messaging. Even though these continue to drive how email server companies design their products, customers just want to be able to get their email and reduce their operational expenses.

The feedback that we have received is that in this tough economy, the only function that customers are concerned about is getting and sending email. Because of this, they are willing to settle for free email services like Gmail. They are also concerned about security with the ever increasing spam and virus attacks. However, at this time, advanced collaboration features are not their priority. The most surprising finding is that customers will continue to invest in purchasing mobile devices where they can get their email remotely; in other words, wireless e-mail is growing.

As evidenced by the record sales at Apple for iPhones, mobile devices continue to grow and accelerate.

While companies like Nokia and Motorola have abandoned the wireless email software market to focus on their core competency, RIM continues to accelerate and dominate this market with Microsoft and Apple closing the gap and gaining speed.

The market for wireless e-mail products has been available for many years and every email server company provides a method to get their email on mobile devices. RIM revolutionized the market with their Blackberry devices. Since then, the price for mobile devices has dropped significantly as new entrants have forced existing manufacturers to reduce their prices. Even Apple continues to drop their price for iPhones.

The challenge to any business and email server companies is to support the different devices and wireless software that are in the market place. As the wireless products have matured, multiple versions of the software and hardware have made it extremely challenging to stay abreast of the products and support the new software. Many companies have created policies to support a specific device and software. For email server companies, partnering with software companies that specialize in providing integration with mobile devices has reduced their expenses and development time.

Industry experts are predicting that there will be more consolidation in wireless email software leaving only a few players to dominate the market place. If so, it would greatly simplify the complexities and costs of supporting wireless software.

What customers want from wireless email:

Customers want to be able to access their corporate email and keep the master copy on their email server. They want to be able to read, delete, and change the email and have the change synced back to their server. A secure connection from their mobile device to their data to safeguard their data is a must, and also, a secure log-in where the users can access their email. They want a consistent interface to access their email no matter what the device. “Nice to have” features are to be able to get push email and access to their corporate email addresses.

There are three Internet companies vying for the desktop email client space. It should be of no surprise to anyone that Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo are all trying to win your desktop environment.

To start, if you have not seen Microsoft’s email client, Windows Live Mail, it is a replacement for Outlook Express 7 and Windows Mail – Vista. Although it only has 3% of the market share among the business users, it is still ahead of GeeMail and Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop.

GeeMail is Google’s desktop email client for the web client, Gmail. It is an extremely basic email client. The only advantage is that you can work offline. It syncs your Gmail data to the desktop.

Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop is Yahoo’s version of the desktop email client. It is the most feature rich of all the desktop clients. It also allows you to have Gmail and Windows Mail accounts on the same desktop. Yahoo has a calendar and contacts application in addition to just email.

What they have in common:

These are no-frills email clients with no collaboration capabilities. GeeMail is absolutely the most basic email client. All the email clients are “free” however, to get additional features, you will need to pay for them. They work in “offline mode” which means that you can keep a copy of your email on your system.

What are their differences:

If you want to add multiple email accounts with Windows Live Mail, you will need a premium account. Windows Live Mail has some very nice security features like automated filtering of junk email.

GeeMail has no searching capability or any kind of collaboration in the email client. (as of this post) It is a very basic email client with no calendar or contacts’ features.

Yahoo’s desktop client has the ability to sync with Gmail and Windows Mail accounts. It has some basic editing capability with documents. If you want to sync with your mobile devices and have web access, you will need to purchase their collaboration suite.

It has also been reported that Zimbra’s web client requires a lot of hardware resources and can be very slow.

Given that there are existing choices like Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook for the desktop as well as numerous web based clients, there does not seem to be any advantage to adding these desktop clients.

I would like to do a survey, and I hope that people will provide me with some feedback on what they like about different email clients.

We, at Bynari, would like to create a web client that provides the core functions that most people need in business.

Here is what we know about email clients. Source: http://fingerprintapp.com (Sept 2008)

Microsoft Outlook has the largest market share, 36%, and most corporations are using it as their primary client. Hotmail has the next largest market share with 33%.

Yahoo mail is third with 14% market share, but as many of you already know, Google’s Gmail is becoming widely popular and gaining market share, 6%.

The current trend for email clients seems to be pointing to the web. It is either because the web clients are free and convenient OR it is preferred because of the features. Common sense points to the former not the latter. I believe that most people use the web client out of convenience. I have been using Yahoo mail for years not because it provides me with great interface or features, but because it is always available and can be accessed from any browser. I also have a Gmail account, but I rarely use it. Out of laziness, I do not want to change my email address and have to email everyone in my address book that my email address has changed. Other reasons are that I do not want to have to backup my email or worry about losing data. I also do not want to manage it  or migrate it to a new email system.

Then, there is Outlook. From a developer’s perspective, what I do not like about Outlook is that it is proprietary software that is not particularly well written. Every developer who has written a plug-in for Outlook could tell you horror stories about crashes after crashes for absolutely no reason. Memory seg faults just to name a few issues are common with Outlook. Every version of Outlook has its own personality and very little consistency exists between versions.

From a business user’s perspective, many users have ‘grown up’ with Outlook since it is integrated with the Microsoft Office suite and are used to the quirks and limitations of Outlook. Even with the quirks, Outlook has a lot of great sharing features for business users. It still maintains the leadership position, however their market share is steadily eroding due to the rise of web clients.

As I have mentioned, I have a Gmail account and have used the collaboration features as well as basic email functions.  I do not see anything remarkably different about it versus other web clients. I noticed that I could not copy and paste from the Gmail client to my Yahoo client. It could be a bug…I did not have the time to pursue it. I know that Gmail has some office type applications built in. It looks very similar to Microsoft’s Office products but more of a stripped down version.

So the question is, what would business customers want from an email client? How do business customers define collaboration in an email environment? Do business users want a web client that can do calendar and contacts sharing with other email clients like Outlook and Gmail? What features will be useful? What tools would be helpful for users?

More research coming soon…

In a traditional ISV (independent software vendor) relationship model, the ISVs develop the products. Then many ISVs, including Bynari, depend heavily on their partner channel to cost effectively sell, implement, and support their customers. For their efforts, partners are compensated based on the initial sale. The after-implementation support and relationship with the customers are mainly managed by the ISV vendor.

With a SaaS model, the ISVs compensate partners on the whole solution from the software to services. Partners shift their focus from the initial sale to working with customers in a longer-term relationship. The partners think about the whole life cycle of the customer and offer complementary services and solutions.

To have an effective SaaS model sold by partners, ISVs and partners need to define their working relationship and clearly define what components of services belong to the ISV versus the partner. Partners will own specific parts of the customer relationship so that they can grow and retain their customers. Communication with the customers will also need to be coordinated as well as what is to be communicated to the customers and by whom. These issues will be a challenge for the traditional ISVs. They will need to adapt their culture, business processes, infrastructure and skills to manage a new business model that include a very close relationship with their partners.

Another component of services is compensation. The compensation for the services is small relative to selling a software package. The initial upfront costs to engage in a SaaS model are high so expect to lose money at the beginning. The compensation comes from the long-term relationship with the customers; this creates a predictable recurring revenue stream for the partner. Of course, this is another aspect of the partnership that will need to be negotiated with the ISV or the provider.

What partners would benefit from the SaaS model?

Partners who have established a long-term relationship with their customers will fit well with the SaaS model. Partners who can assist ISVs in delivering and supporting services efficiently will be in great demand.

Hyun Kim

Bynari Inc.