IT Employment

No limitation that I am aware of. Our hosting co. provides IMAP and 1000GB of e-mail storage. That should be sufficient.

I suppose my biggest fear is that the ISP might lose our data.

Thanks for any input.

I'd be more concerned about your employees lossing data rather than your ISP. But...

I haven't tried this recently, but you used to be able to set up Outlook to download your email to the computer and leave a copy on the server.

Of course you could still do this manually and copy every email that comes in.

Or you could also use Outlook as a POP client and locate the .pst file on your own file server. But then you would have to have an Outlook profile set up on each computer that employee needs to access email from. Unless you could handle this with an Active Directory roaming profile.

i manage a network that host a e-mail server (merakmailserver.com, fairly cheap and simple, theres others out there) for about 50 users. Weve been using it with POP3 but ive started trying to switch over to IMAP. Seems to have some nice features depending on your e-mail server. You can set up shared folders and use it for general announcements or updates. My main concern also has been losing the e-mails, but in my case its all on our server. Possibly you could look into backing up e-mail data from ISP's site to yours. Havnt dug into outlook to see if you can set it up to save copies. Pretty sure you can but then you have to get your users to set it up (the hard part). Personally i like thunderbird. Really I think if you have a good backup plan and solid server IMAP can provide some nice benefits.