tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5384857.post3091237053055722623..comments2023-10-10T03:52:55.494+01:00Comments on Under The Stairs: Just when you think it’s safe to move to the cloudUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5384857.post-68984310592627545432011-09-13T19:15:25.213+01:002011-09-13T19:15:25.213+01:00I'm very happy with Tuffmail - $36/yr (about £...I'm very happy with Tuffmail - $36/yr (about £2/month) for 1 Gb. Not Exchange, though: IMAP. POP3 and a choice of webmail platforms, with some very powerful and flexible spam filtering controls, which were the main appeal for me. (I can block arbitrary-sized blocks of IP addresses on the SMTP level, so the worst spammers get hard bounces and think I've gone, grey list 'dodgy' subnets without fear of delaying legitimate email, filter forged bounce messages...) - and with continuous replication across the cluster, I have never observed any downtime in the year and a bit I've been using them.<br /><br />Calling this sort of thing a "cloud" service has always bugged me, though: what is "cloud" about this as opposed to any other third party mail service, back as far as plain old Hotmail of the 90s? If you were firing up an instance of Exchange on Amazon EC2 instances or Azure, yes, but paying for a plain old shared Exchange setup?<br /><br />Office 365 does look good; the university I do some work for is migrating there at the moment from a painfully expensive in-house setup (gold-plated SAN, lots of VMWare hosts and a pile of Netware instances running Groupwise, with about 1 nine of uptime.) The savings are enormous, and having quotas measured in gigabytes not megabytes (50 of them, for undergraduates, 300 for staff!) will be a welcome relief.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com