We haven’t hosted mailboxes since 2010. People sometimes expect a hosting company to do email as well, so here is why we don’t.
The First Reason: Spam
Filtering spam well needs a view of an enormous amount of mail. A filter learns what spam looks like from the mail passing through it, and from the people marking messages as junk. Google and Microsoft see more mail than anyone, so their filters learn from more examples than any smaller provider can.
Outside those two, the filtering we have seen is noticeably worse. A mailbox that lets spam through, or buries a real customer enquiry in the junk folder, costs the business more than the mailbox saves. We could run our own mail servers, but we would be competing on filtering with two companies that see most of the world’s email. That is not a contest worth entering.
The Second Reason: Devices
In 2010 a mailbox mostly lived on one office computer. Today the same mailbox lives on a phone, a tablet, a laptop, and often a second phone. Each of them is set up separately, and each of them can break separately.
When something goes wrong with email, the fix is usually on the device, not on the server: a password changed on the laptop but not on the phone, an account set up twice, a tablet nobody remembers configuring, a phone that sends from the wrong address. Fixing that takes someone who knows the hardware, can reset the passwords, can install and configure the mail app, and can sit down with the person holding the device.
That is what an IT support company does all day. A hosting company looks after servers and websites, which is a different skill set. So we refer mailbox work to IT partners who support Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace for a living. They set up the mailboxes, look after the devices, and are the people to call when a phone stops syncing.
The Gap: Very Small Businesses
That leaves one gap. A very small business, often one person, may not want to pay for a mailbox at all. They already read everything in a private Gmail account and are happy with it. They still want customers to write to an address on their own domain.
For them we sell email forwarding. Mail sent to the domain lands in the inbox they already use, on the devices they already have, behind Gmail’s spam filtering.
| Email forwarding | Price |
|---|---|
| One address or a catch-all | $4 per month |
| Up to 10 addresses | $6 per month |
| Each further 10 addresses | $6 per month |
Prices are in New Zealand dollars and exclude GST.
Different Jobs, Different People
Hosting a website and looking after someone’s mailbox are different jobs, and they are best done by different people. If you need mailboxes, we will point you to an IT partner who supports them. If you only need mail on your domain to reach the inbox you already use, forwarding does that.
