Steve Pope > wrote:

> Sqwertz > wrote:
>
>>A web hosting company provides web space for users to place their
>>pages. They are supposed to be "server gurus" that maintain 99.999%
>>availability since people rely on them to keep their web pages
>>available 100% of the time. Most of them also provide mail hosting.
>
>>In which case, they should be using their own servers and domain
>>for mail and not relying on a third party. It's very unprofessional
>>to use third-party servers when you run your own supposedly reliable
>>servers.
>
> This makes no sense. Mail administration is a lot of work.

Not as hard as web hosting.

> If you only have a few users it makes sense not to do it
> even if you run servers for other things, and even if you
> have all the necessary skills. A lot of orgainzations
> these days wait until they are 20 or 30 people before they
> even think about standalone email administration. They just
> use yahoo or gmail until then. Their man-hours are better spent
> on other, money-making efforts than running email.

As the very least, a web hosting company - or *any* tech company of
any size (3 or more people), should be using their own domain for
email, whether they physically host it or not. Not gmail, or yahoo,
or hotmail. Maintaining a mail server is not as hard as you make it
seem. I've done it for companies of 5-80 people by spending only a
couple hours a week on it once it was set up and running (Unix,
using sendmail and MMDF, not Exhange).

A professional company does not use yahoo, gmail, or hotmail email
addresses. Especially a web-hosting company. There's really never
any argument about it, except for your attempt.

-sw