Business email is compared on storage per mailbox, which is the least important variable. Storage is cheap and rarely the constraint. These are the things that determine whether the service works.
Deliverability controls
Your mail reaching inboxes rather than spam folders depends on authentication, and you need the provider to support all of it:
- SPF, with the ability to include other systems that send as your domain
- DKIM signing, with keys you can publish
- DMARC, including access to the reports — these tell you what is sending as your domain, which is frequently more than you expect
Also ask about the reputation of the outbound infrastructure. On shared sending infrastructure, another customer's behaviour can affect your delivery. Providers who separate transactional and bulk sending, or who monitor outbound reputation, are worth preferring.
Retention and archiving, which are different
Retention keeps mail for a period even if a user deletes it. Archiving stores an immutable copy, searchable by an administrator, typically for compliance or dispute purposes.
Most small businesses need retention. Regulated businesses, or any that might need to produce email evidence, need archiving.
Ask specifically: if an employee deletes everything and leaves, what can be recovered and for how long? The answer is often shorter than assumed.
Shared mailboxes and aliases
Every business needs addresses that are not one person: info@, sales@, support@, accounts@. Check:
- Whether shared mailboxes are licensed as full mailboxes or included
- Whether several people can access one without sharing a password
- Whether replies go out as the shared address rather than the individual
- How many aliases per mailbox are allowed
Providers charging full price for a shared mailbox add up quickly, and the workaround — sharing a password — destroys accountability.
Administrative recovery
When someone leaves, an administrator needs to access their mailbox, forward incoming mail to a colleague, and export the contents. This is routine and needs to be straightforward.
Ask what happens to the mailbox of a deleted user, and whether there is a grace period before data is purged.
Mobile and desktop client support
Support for standard protocols matters more than a good webmail interface, because staff will use whatever client they prefer.
Check calendar and contact synchronisation specifically. It is where cheaper providers are weakest and where complaints concentrate — mail generally works; shared calendars frequently do not.
Spam and threat filtering, with control
Filtering quality varies. More importantly, so does the ability to review and release false positives.
A filter you cannot inspect will eventually block something important — a customer's purchase order, an invoice — and nobody will know until they ask why you did not reply. Administrator access to a quarantine, and per-user release, matters.
Migration and exit
Ask what migrating in involves and whether the provider assists. Then ask the same about leaving: can you export all mailboxes in a standard format, self-service?
Email is data you may need for years. A provider making export difficult is a risk regardless of how good the service is today.
About the author. Kislay Chandan has worked with schools since 2014. Rather than gathering requirements from the outside, he worked inside a school to see what actually goes wrong day to day, and built what he found into the software. He still works with Shemrock Glitters in Patna — most changes to the product start with something that came up there.
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