We are currently investigating ways of improving, consolidating, and bolstering our self hosted, self managed electronic mail service. We wouldn’t want to move to a completely hosted or managed environment as we do try and run everything in house but e-mail is becoming a behemoth. Our electronic mail system is run on an Exchange Server 2007 system but it doesn’t stop there as we also employ a number of additional services in and around the delivery of e-mail:

• Mail Archiving
• Store-and-forward services
• Server based Spam Filter
• Server based Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware
• Gateway Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware
• Gateway Anti-Spam
• Email filtering

We have also been looking at Microsoft Forefront to bolster the email security and we really should look at mirroring the Exchange Server in case of failure – this all adds up, in terms of cost and time.

It would be great to combine, dare I even use the word unify, a number of these services but also achieve some added benefits:

• Business email continuity in case of server failure
• Move undesirable traffic away from our network (as we did when we moved to a hosted web platform)
• Faster, company wide email search
• Gain cost savings

However, some of the things we are concerned about include:

• Obtaining our data should we change service provider
• Ensure our user base experiences 100% uptime
• Flexibility in case of disaster
• To talk to a human being about any problems we face
• Ensure we don’t lose any important emails (e.g. access to the Spam quarantine)

The current options seem to be:

• MessageLabs
  (which is now part of Symantec)
• Postini
  (which is now part of Google)
• MimeCast
• MessageStream
• MessageOne
  (which is now part of Dell)

If you know of any others drop me a line or post in comments – it will help as we work through the options each has to offer.