Email hosts are either very expensive or completely unreliable so neither option suits us or our smaller clients who don’t have a requirement for an inhouse enterprise solution.

It’s also a lot of fun when Microsoft Exchange encounters a problem or you have an outage at your datacenter and every single client’s emails stop working all at once. Calls and emails flood in, work stops while you deal with a emergency situation and no one expects to pay for a technical issue being resolved.

I also think exchange is also very overpriced, a misuse of time to setup and maintain on the server and far too complicated to make setting up on a local client fun for anyone.

Just some of the reasons why Gmail rocks:

1. It’s free
2. It supports POP and IMAP which are both quick and easy to setup in email clients
3. The built in spam filtering does an amazing job
4. You get 7.5 GB of storage
5. Emails are grouped together by conversation
6. Easily access via webmail or a client
7. Built in features in webmail such as out of office replies, signatures and keyboard shortcuts
8. Webmail supports accessing multiple accounts in one place
9. You can tag emails with labels and use multiple labels for cross referencing
10. You can automatically forward mail from your gmail address and keep a copy in your inbox, delete the original mail, archive it or label it
11. Offline Mode is available so you can access your mail even when you are not connected to the internet
12. Choice of themes for webmail
13. Gmail labs provides optional features developed by users. Some are quirky and gimmicky and others are invaluable such as Advanced IMAP controls and canned responses
14. Using Google Apps you can point your own domain at your account so you get all the benefits of a Gmail account but with email addresses @yourowndomain.com
15. You can then have up to 200 users per domain with umlimited aliases. You can request more if required.
16. You can add domain aliases so yourname@ works with multiple domains you own
17. You can change the Google logo to your own for a more personal user experience
18. If you run out of space you an upgrade your account to 25GB storage for only $50 a year and you get other benefits such as an SLA and 24/7 support
19. You only get a 99.9% uptime guarantee with the premier edition but, it’s Google. Downtime is very rare and quickly resolved when it does occur
20. New services and features are added regularly and as with everything Google they are normally useful, easy and exceed expectations
21. And more…

Why are you still using hosted exchange?!!!??