What email service do you provide? If we have our own email provider, how does that work?

Before your site launches, you'll want to make sure your email is handled correctly. There are three main options our clients will use for email:

Your Own Solution

If you have your own exchange server or another paid email solution, you are most welcome to continue using it. What we will need from you are the necessary DNS entries so we can make sure your email goes to the right place when we launch. You can contact your email service provider for that information.

Google Apps for Your Domain

If you do not have an email system already, or if it's tied to an old hosting account that you plan to close, we recommend Google Apps. If you’ve heard of Gmail, Google Docs, or Google Calendar — Google Apps is Google’s bundle of these services specifically for businesses and nonprofits. Some of the benefits of this service includes Gmail’s superior spam protection, faster interface, large inboxes for your users, and many other collaboration tools (Calendar/Docs). 

The Free Standard edition provides you with up to 10 email addresses for your organization. The non-profit (does not apply to religious institutions) edition requires an application which may take up to 30 days to process but will allow you up to 3000 users. Alternatively, Google offers unlimited user accounts for $50/yr/account.

We use Google Apps for our own email, calendaring, and document sharing, so we can vouch for the quality of service. You will be able to keep whatever addresses you already have on your domain as well as set up things like mailing lists to multiple members of your team or setup mail forwarding to personal email accounts. If you plan to use a mail client (like Outlook, Mac Mail), Google limits you to sending up to 500 emails per day per account. If you use the web interface, the limit is significantly higher.

To set this up for your domain, follow this step by step walkthrough.

If you are managing your own DNS, you can set it up now and start enjoying the benefits of Google Apps right away. Otherwise, please contact us when you are ready to set it up, and we'll help make the necessary DNS changes.

Note: If you are currently using Google Apps, we do not offer migration services. However, we can refer you to an outside source to help you do that if needed.

Other Solutions

If your organization's needs are more than 10 users and the $50/yr is too expensive, we also recommend Rackspace which offers accounts for $2/mo/account; and FastMail, their pricing starts at $90 for 5 users (see their quote builder)

Last edited: 12/14/2012