SOHO Email Hosting or Alternatives

[Jim Kuzdrall]

> The smallest of businesses can get by with an account from their
> local ISP, example at conknet.com may be fine for a single craftsperson
> business. But if you're a slightly bigger business and are dealing
> with other businesses, you really want a sales@, info@, postmaster@,
> webmaster@, abuse@, support@ and individual accounts for your
> workers, spam filtering, remote/web access, etc.
>
> How do other SOHOs handle this? Suggestions welcomed from all.

    My company, Intrel Service Company, has had an Exclusive Web Server 
with MV since 1997.  The service has been wonderful.  I have never 
exceeded the alloted bandwidth (of course, being a stubborn dialup 
customer that would be unlikely).

    The cost is $42.50/month for the web and email service.  I see lower 
costs mentioned from time to time, but I don't mind paying a little 
more to support a local business - someone I could physically visit if 
anything required it.  Since this is a 100% business expense, it comes 
directly off schedule C, which means a 15.5% discount for Social 
Security tax not paid and an additional percentage for whatever your 
income tax bracket is.

    All of my business sales for 10 year were handled through the web 
site with no frills or additional expense.  I had a merchant VISA 
account since 90% of the business was foreign.  At the end, I switched 
to PayPal.

    All mail comes to the "catch-all" webmaster mailbox, as was 
mentioned in another post.  It has web-programmable filters at MV to 
snag anything you don't want to waste time down-loading.  The "webmail" 
feature allows me to inspect the contents of the webmaster mailbox or 
any of the other four using a web browser.  That is handy when I 
accidently get a 15MB testing report from Intel by mistake.  I can just 
delete it at the MV mailbox.

    My wife, our Director of Research, uses one of the mailboxes.  
Another was used by a part time employee who worked at home.  The rest 
just sit there, for the most part.  I prefer to do the "info@" "sales@" 
etc filtering with Kmail in the webmaster account.

    The web site is "fallow" right now, awaiting the patent approval of 
a new product line.  At that time, it will get some fancier PHP and 
Java script.

Jim Kuzdrall