email servers, hosts, reliability

Can anyone recommend a good email host? We have a small company, need
about 10 accounts, each with maybe 50 MB space.

It seems that GCI has only two options: For a flat $25/month, you get
10 accounts with 20MB each. Not enough. From there it jumps to
$5/account for the first 4 (or is $4 for the first 5) with 1 GB
storage space for each, then $8 / account. Way more than we need --
and expensive. Nothing in between. And you can't manage your own
accounts. Any time you want to make a change, their tech support has
to do it. Feh.

After a long wait on hold, to acsalaska customer service, I was told
that I needed to email the request to "coordinator@acsalaska.net". So
far, that inquiry has gotten no response. Not impressed.

The reason I'm looking for a new mail host is that the one we are now
using (lunarpages.com), who also hosts our website (unlimited email
accounts, 50 GB storage for $22/month) is no longer reliable. We've
been having problems with email not being delivered. Just
disappearing into a black hole. No messages saying they bounced, just
gone. And the problem is intermittent, nothing that makes any sense,
or that I can duplicate consistently. Sometimes incoming messages
fail to arrive, sometimes outgoing messages fail. So we're looking to
make a switch. Though I'm still not entirely convinced it is
Lunarpages, but something else going on.

Lunarpages tech support has been responsive, but unable to
help. Whenever I've contacted them, they ask me to send them a copy
of failed delivery messages with full headers, etc. But on the
disappeared stuff, I don't have any...

Another alternative would be to migrate our domain to the local
server I'm running our intranet on (Fedora core 4). To date, I've
shied away from hosting our own email because of all the potential
pitfalls. But if I thought there were good strong tech support
available, I'd reconsider it.

Is there anyone in the LUG community who offers that kind of support?
Or can give some other advice?

Thanks in advance!

Bob Crosby

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Received on Thu Oct 26 17:18:31 2006