Emails – Siteground & mxroute, maybe

Recently I’ve been consolidating services in an attempt to manage the number of logins and reduce costs for myself and my clients. I’ve been on Siteground for a while and been sufficiently happy with it. Some of my clients also need email services, which is no problem for Siteground – I can throw up a few inboxes here and there without any issue. Folks tend to use gmail mostly, so they either have a forwarding rule or I simply setup a forwarding address instead of provisioning an inbox for them.

One of my clients is very old school though. By very old school, I mean, “keep all emails from the dawn of time in the inbox” type old school. Most of their staff don’t even use folders, and naive me didn’t even check for sizing issues when I started migrating their services over. I ended up being only able to migrate emails from the last three years.

They’ll probably move onto a Gmail or Microsoft-based cloud email (since they can get those for free as a Techsoup-certified non-profit), but I did start looking around at other solutions. Coupled with some odd sending/bounceback issues where Siteground’s server got blacklisted by hotmail servers and doesn’t keep retrying like a real mail server would do, I’m most likely going to go with something like mxroute for the email side of things for my clients. This solution also has the advantage of splitting up my clients’ eggs into several baskets – if Siteground goes down, at least their email will be up, or vice versa.

(I’ve also idly mused about switching to Proton for my personal and business emails, but I haven’t pulled the trigger yet.)

All in all, quite happy with Siteground except for the email bit, but I guess it’s about time I start paying for a real mail server anyway.