the Price of Email

The service is a personal, secure email facility that allows an unlimited number of "pseudonyms" or disposable email addresses that point to the original email account, 250MB of mail storage, a 25MB limit on attachments, secure instant messaging, digital signing of email messages, industrial strength encryption, spam protection, as well as both web and POP3 / IMAP access for email clients like Outlook or Thunderbird or an email enabled cell phone, and the ability to set up a secure form to send mail to your account from your website.

Business class services on your own domain and a dedicated server with customer-set storage and attachment-size limits are also available based on a per-user price that scales with required services and the length of the contract (longer contract = cheaper per-month per-user cost).

The service is excellent. I had a bit of trouble at the beginning setting up everything as I was not used to the procedures of a secure mail service, but the tech support guys were very helpful and got me sorted straight away so I became incredibly comfortable with it in a month, and am now a master of the system after only a couple months' use. As a self-employed consultant I get a warm and fuzzy feeling knowing that all my important business communications are as secure as possible. It's also not significantly more difficult to use than my previous free account, just a bit different.

The question you need to ask yourself is whether you really need a dedicated email service when there are so many good free ones out there with industry standard security, very good access, and even more storage for email than what I'm getting. Even though the free services are usually (almost always, in fact) paid for with ads.

One reason might be that you want your own email on your own domain (e.g. your-first-name@your-last-name.com), or like me you might want communication security beyond the industry standard, or you might even want to get a service that isn't beset with ads the way free services usually are.

If you decide that yes, you do need a special email service, make sure the company is actually providing the exceptional services it says it is and that it's not just rewording a generic service available for free elsewhere and selling those at a markup. And make sure they've been in business a while or are at least a serious start-up with good backing so you don't lose your email communications. Deals that sound "too good to be true" are often a sign of a company that will falter, as the deals in fact are too good to be true.