Moving from Qmail to Gmail

Email happens to be the bloodline of each organization, and if there are issues with proper functioning you can imagine the implications of that. Imagine an urgent notice being delivered late or being lost in transit. IndiaInfoline having more than 600 branches across India, were hosting their mail server based on Qmail in-house which was managed by NetMagic.

The company faced frequent mail delivery issues, where mails were not just terribly late but at times were also lost. Not only that, spam engine wasn't efficient as it marked genuine mails as spam messages. And with a buggy anti-virus there was constant fear of exploits on the mail server. With all these constant irritants, and the hassles of capacity problem and user mailbox manageability issues along with the maintenance costs involved, the resulting cost of running the mail server in-house was getting sky high and problematic.

To bring back the expenditure within reins, it was decided to move the mail server to the cloud, and therefore Google Apps were chosen. This would provide the company to focus the manpower towards other business oriented functions while Google will take the responsibility of quality mail service.
“Google apps provided 25 GB of space per user and also gave us lot more with spreadsheets, IM, groups, etc. Comparing it to other packages,” Sankarson said, “we found it cheaper as it offered much features than others.”

Sankarson said they have observed drop in bandwidth consumption by 5-10%, which is mostly attributed to the increased use of web-mail now as compared to Outlook. Since, Outlook has substantially more bandwidth usage. As with Outlook if a mail with attachment is sent to 6-10 people, the attachment is downloaded by Outlook for each of the person, while with Google Apps web-mail, the attachments is uploaded once and the recipients receive a link, and those who want to download can download the attachment, and there's where huge bandwidth is saved. Earlier 40-45% of the employee's support calls used to be for Outlook and mail related issues, now they are less than 5%.

Sankarson concludes by saying that, “Support costs of hosting email in-house is huge and surpasses the benefit of doing it, so I suggest that organizations should opt for hosted email providers rather than having the responsibility on their own shoulders, so as to save costs and have better administration, unless they are bound by certain regulations.”