I seriously wish I would have gotten rid of my POP3 mail system and moved to Microsoft Exchange a lot earlier than I did. Believe it or not, I really have only been running Exchange for about two years now. Prior to this, I thought it was too expensive for a shop like mine to afford. It can run thousands of dollars for the licenses, not to mention the IT infrastructure and maintenance required to keep it running, either in-house or via a contractor. It’s simply not feasible for a smaller company to justify such costs. However, then I discovered how Exchange can be accessed as an application service provider (ASP) solution. It’s a brilliant idea. These ASPs are able to take hundreds of different clients and host them on one server. You don’t have to worry about support or any large upfront fees. Currently, I pay $10.00 per month per email address with a company called mailstreet.com. They also support Blackberries and goodlink as well Microsoft Smart Phone devices for another $10.00 per month per device. This is yet another great advantage of such as ASP because if you had your Exchange server and wanted to support your Blackberry, that’s another $7K for the Blackberry server.

Not convinced yet? Here are the 4 main reasons why you need to get away from POP3 and go with hosted Exchange as soon as possible:

1. You can get your mail on the go with blackberry support
2. You can share your calendar, tasks, and contacts with everyone in your company
3. All of your data is online available to you 24/7
4. It comes with a enterprise-grade spam filter

Of course, that’s not to say hosted Exchange doesn’t have its own unique problems. I have had my ups and downs with Mailstreet. They had us on a server that was getting listed by Spamcop (a major anti-spam organization) so some of our corporate mail was getting blocked. We bitched and moaned a number of times and threatened to take our business elsewhere. They finally decided to switch us to one of the better servers where only customers who have proven they aren’t spamming and receiving complaints can go. My suggestion is to skip this BS and ask the ASP upfront what type of server you will be on and with what types of businesses. Tell them you cannot afford to be blocked by Spamcop or other major blacklists and you need to be on a good server from the start. Also, their spam filter was bit weak so we are still using our own. Be sure to ask your potential hosted Exchange provider for some customer referrals and ask about how good their spam filter works before you make the commitment. In my experience, Mailstreet.com does a good job in answering the phones quickly and replying to support tickets and I would say most of our issues have been ironed out so we’re happy with them now. To look for other providers just Google “Hosted Exchange” and find a provider for yourself. I promise you wont be disappointed!