The End of In House Email
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I have a better question - without having read this thread -
WHEN IS THE END OF EMAIL in general? This protocol needs to die! The lack of accountability and security (yes I'm aware that you can do SMTP over SSL - not good enough).
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@Dashrender said:
I have a better question - without having read this thread -
WHEN IS THE END OF EMAIL in general? This protocol needs to die! The lack of accountability and security (yes I'm aware that you can do SMTP over SSL - not good enough).
Honestly, it's pretty good. People need underlying ad hoc communications. Email is that. There isn't even a serious proposal for an alternative because, at the end of the day, email is like what we've always used. Mail, telephone, human speech... these things don't have that security and they work because of it.
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The bigger problem is that people use email when they shouldn't. It's not that email is bad or should go away, it's that other tools need to exist for those occasions when secure communications need to happen.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thanksaj said:
With solutions like Office365 being so cheap, why would anyone want to host in-house email anymore?
Especially when you realize that Rackspace email is half that cost!
If you're coming from a diehard Outlook client base, Rackspace with IMAP wasn't really an option until Outlook 2013, and from a collaboration perspective still might not be.
Does Rackspace offer shared calendars/contact lists/tasks/etc as part of their non Exchange email option? Heck adding ActiveSync costs $1-2 a month pushing you just that much closer to Office365 and the additional options you get there (unlimited storage, Sharepoint, Office online, etc).
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@Dashrender said:
Does Rackspace offer shared calendars/contact lists/tasks/etc as part of their non Exchange email option?
Yes, they always did. Always meaning back to 2009 at least when I started using them.
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If you need ActiveSync, Rackspace isn't for you. Rackspace is for web and IMAP users looking for enterprise email (Office 365 class) without the bells and whistles. Enterprise stability and reliability with excellent features but not fancy. It is fast and solid. Any business could run on it for $2. Most don't want to, but it is purely preference. The difference between Rackspace and basic Office 365 is almost exclusively in the branding and Outlook connectivity.
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@scottalanmiller said:
The bigger problem is that people use email when they shouldn't. It's not that email is bad or should go away, it's that other tools need to exist for those occasions when secure communications need to happen.
The problem is that those other solutions aren't free like email is free, and generally not as easy to use either.
Look at Zix - they charge $10/month/user for encrypted email, and they aren't really providing email service, they're just an add-on component in the middle. Sure they have a holding ground that allows non members to portal into a webpage to pickup a secure message, but really? that cost is outrageous!
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@Dashrender said:
The problem is that those other solutions aren't free like email is free, and generally not as easy to use either.
It's free because it is ad hoc. Security is hard to make free and easy is almost never free. Email replaces the low cost and nearly free legacy technologies for a reason.
If you want to avoid it, you need something complex. Email works because it allows anyone to talk to anyone, anytime. No need to setup the communications before you start. To get around this people use things like Google and Facebook but there are problems with putting all of your communications into the hands of a third party, too.
People want it all, but that doesn't really work. Email is actually a great tool. Add digital signatures and GPG signing and you have secure, free email - just takes a little effort.
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The signing doesn't solve my specific problem - I need/want full body encryption. And sure if I have an add-on Outlook can do this, but the recipient won't know what to do with it until I walk them through the process, etc, etc, etc...
I understand that Security is rarely if ever free - but $10/user/month - this is really just an example of the government mandate and the ability of these companies to hold us over a barrel at this cost.
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@Dashrender said:
The signing doesn't solve my specific problem - I need/want full body encryption. And sure if I have an add-on Outlook can do this, but the recipient won't know what to do with it until I walk them through the process, etc, etc, etc...
You need both. Full encryption to secure the payload and signing to know who sent it. GPG covers this.
No matter what protocol you use, no matter what tool you use, you will always need to arrange its use with the other party. This is true for absolutely all secure communications and always has been. In order to secure the payload you need a means of doing that securing in a way that doesn't allow a third party watching the exchange play it back and reconstruct it. This requires a pre-arranged security mechanism.
That's really not something that you are going to get around. That's the issue with wanting to secure ad hoc communications - it's fundamentally a mismatch in concepts. Secure means you know who each party is and have arranged a means of identifying each other and securing the payload. Ad hoc means you haven't had time to do that.
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@Dashrender said:
I understand that Security is rarely if ever free - but $10/user/month - this is really just an example of the government mandate and the ability of these companies to hold us over a barrel at this cost.
I think that it is more a sign of how lazy companies are. $10/user is a bit of money. But there are free options. People just don't like them. You could set up something like Zix, it's really not all that complicated. But the effort to do so and the cost of running such a service would make it hard to maintain.
If you think about the fact that they are doing something niche, that is more complicated than Exchange and only MS pulls off Exchange for $4/user. Rackspace charges $12/user for Exchange as do several other third party vendors. So $10 really isn't out of line with niche, high end email offerings.
