My firm has about 50-60 users and about 80-100 email accounts. We use a third party email service from which Outlook on our user machines pulls the emails using SMTP/IMAP. The problem with this is that the email service provider has absolutely no SPAM filtering service. As a result each of our users get on an average 10-15 spam mails every single day and some of them get up to 200 spam mails per weekend.
I have been thinking about alternatives. Having a dedicated Exchange server with Baracuda Spam filtering service is one of the options we have, but I feel it will be very expensive for our firm, which is growing, but still quite small. Besides, the IT department has only one IT employee, and having an exchange server will basically tie him to the server maintenance role to forget about the rest of the IT issues.
The other solution I have considered is using Google Apps for our emails. This way, Google Apps can be used as very powerful collaborative tools in our network. However, each user account on Google App will cost us $50/user/year. Paying that amount for about 60-70 employees for next 5 years will be a huge sum, probably more expensive than having Exchange.
I am interested in finding out what other third party email service providers that I can use, which are affordable, reliable, and have a strong spam filtering service. Something similar to Gmail, except cheaper.
Thanks.
