Can anyone tell me mailbox quota at their ISP - for comparison?

usignuolo

I have a Small Business account for my email which has gone through various ownerships and is now currently part of TalkTalk. I travel a lot and make extensive use of remote email access. In particular I edit a magazine and so people send me adverts and photos via email. These go into my mail box and I download them when I get home.

Recently my mail box has been filling very quickly and incoming emails have been blocked. I asked Sales about this and was referred to TT's Tech Support who told me my mailbox had been assigned a quota of 100mb .(In fact it is becoming full and blocked at around 75mb and messages with quite small attachments are being routinely blocked.) This is much less than I had previously but TT Tech Support seem a law unto themselves.

I spoke to Sales and pointed out that gmail assigns its emails users 9gbs. I said I would pay for more storage and they said they had no control over this quota size and referred me back to Tech Support who told me, in so many words, to get stuffed. That is the limit and we cannot and will not change it. We don't care what other providers offer.

So I shall have to move my account somewhere else. I have told TT Sales this but the girl on the phone said it is a tech support problem and they cannot help. So much for customer retention.

So what I need to find out is what mailbox quotas are imposed on users by other small business ISPs in order to chose a new one.

Anyone know, or care to tell me what their mailbox quota with their supplier is?

stilltheone

O2 is 1GB.

debitcardmayhem

usignuolo wrote: »

Anyone know, or care to tell me what their mailbox quota with their supplier is?

No Idea, but I don't leave my mail under/over the cloud, I download it at home and back it up, but temporarily leave it in the cloud when I am out and about i.e. on holiday. Plus leaving it on the ISP's servers is more prone to attack, as are your contacts.

eneville

I'm shocked, really shocked at any "business" grade ISP email being capped at a 100MB quota. That's a tenth of what I'd expect from a free service such as Hotmail/Gmail.

In the past business packages have had more bandwidth or more storage, or perhaps in some cases more reliable availability.

For some idea, I have a Virtual Private Server running from London Telehouse Docklands data centre. It costs something like £12/month. For this I get 200 Gbytes inbound data alloance, 100 Gbytes outbound traffic and 20 GBytes disk space. Of course since I'm renting a virtual server, it runs whatever programs I want, so I have configured things just how I want them. This is provided by BitFolk I've written a good review about this service on my website.

The point is that you can get great products for next to nothing these days, in some case you just have to put up with looking at adverts, such is the case with Gmail and Hotmail.

If you just want email, with business availability and business grade storage then £5/month should go a very long way and should give you many gigabytes for the cost and in all cases they should be more than happy to add the MX records to your business domain if you have one and should hos tall the mail that arrives at your domain, or just a choice of mail boxes. Also if you need DNS hosting too I don't mind doing that for free, providing it's just a few modifications per year.

If you have a domain, I really don't mind forwarding mail for you, you it can arrive at a Hotmail or Gmail mailbox and you can configure your from address so that it appears to be from your domain rather than a Gmail account, send me a private message if you're interested in this - so long as you don't exceed a few gigabytes per month I don't think I'd even notice!

eneville

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

No Idea, but I don't leave my mail under/over the cloud, I download it at home and back it up, but temporarily leave it in the cloud when I am out and about i.e. on holiday. Plus leaving it on the ISP's servers is more prone to attack, as are your contacts.

There shouldn't be any attack on your mail at the server. If there is I think someone will probably get the chop.

The only thing I can think where mail on the server would get attacked is perhaps with Gmail where your mail is parsed and adverts are associated with that (to the best of my knowledge since that's what I hear, I never use their mail as I have my own solution which Works For Me(tm)).

It's possible that someone could "phish" your account details but that's more a matter of being careful where and when you log in, mostly over web. If you use SSL with IMAP/POP/SMTP services then there shouldn't be any issues with your data being sniffed.

debitcardmayhem

eneville wrote: »

There shouldn't be any attack on your mail at the server. If there is I think someone will probably get the chop.

The only thing I can think where mail on the server would get attacked is perhaps with Gmail where your mail is parsed and adverts are associated with that (to the best of my knowledge since that's what I hear, I never use their mail as I have my own solution which Works For Me(tm)).

It's possible that someone could "phish" your account details but that's more a matter of being careful where and when you log in, mostly over web. If you use SSL with IMAP/POP/SMTP services then there shouldn't be any issues with your data being sniffed.

Pants, it depends on the server, and the strength of your password, not only that but several months ago (more than 1 year i think) but all the home email addresses of some people on this forum were compromised, Sony ring a bell , FT and other sites have been leaking more than the sky above essex (until today when it rained for 2 hours for the first time best part of 3 months). Enter your real email address anywhere on the cloud wait for the rain... go back under your umbrella.

Edited : this "There shouldn't be any attack on your mail at the server. If there is I think someone will probably get the chop." deserves this :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

eneville

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

Pants, it depends on the server, and the strength of your password

That case is not a subset of having email on the server, that's a case for the end user account credential strength, doesn't matter where or by whom it is held.

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

not only that but several months ago (more than 1 year i think) but all the home email addresses of some people on this forum were compromised, Sony ring a bell , FT and other sites have been leaking more than the sky above essex (until today when it rained for 2 hours for the first time best part of 3 months). Enter your real email address anywhere on the cloud wait for the rain... go back under your umbrella.

Edited : this "There shouldn't be any attack on your mail at the server. If there is I think someone will probably get the chop." deserves this :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

Transferring your mail from the server to your home computer probably won't be doing anything for you, (other than making your mail polls a bit quicker) - if your credentials are compromised then your mail is probably already being harvested.

asbokid

You pay £10 a month for business-grade broadband.. That's peanuts.. At that price, the email service is a freebie.

We are also with TalkTalk Business.. It's excellent value for money.. I wasn't even aware there is an email account, and wouldn't use it any way.

It's bad practice to use an ISP's free email service. If you decide to leave the ISP, you've lost any emails that are sent to you in the future.

A moneysavingexpert would use a free third party email service, from gmail for example.

However, an IT-savvy business which wants to create the right impression, has its own domain and has mailbox services configured for the domain.

This can be achieved through the domain registrar's email facilities, a third party's mail server, or an in-house mail server. Costs start at £5 or £10 a year.

debitcardmayhem

eneville wrote: »

That case is not a subset of having email on the server, that's a case for the end user account credential strength, doesn't matter where or by whom it is held.



Transferring your mail from the server to your home computer probably won't be doing anything for you, (other than making your mail polls a bit quicker) - if your credentials are compromised then your mail is probably already being harvested.

Where are my credentials compromised ?

eneville

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

Where are my credentials compromised ?

Usually this happens from a phishing attempt, or the details can be sniffed from an insecure wifi link, such as GPRS, or even via some physical intrusion in some segment of an ISP's network. My point is that if someone/something gets your details (and they are easy to get if not using SSL) then anything that's passed your email box, you wouldn't know that this has happened of course, but whenever new mail arrives at your mailbox then it could silently be retrieved. Normally your POP/IMAP paswords would be the same as your web hosting account at the same place, maybe something new will get added to your web site and it's could be used as URL spam else where...

paddyrg

Slightly off-topic as I don't use Google as my ISP, but I do use GMail, my mailbox is about 5GB full of a 7.5GB capacity, and I haven't deleted an email in 5 years (aside from the ones the spam filter autodeletes). HTTPS is always on, and I use 2-factor authentication with a tiny phone app so I could even post my password here and you'd not get to my mails without mugging me for my phone (and phone password too, of course!). Unless there's a server-side leak of course. Uptime is good enough, and on the odd occasion it goes down, the phone interface/IMAP still functions well by and large. I've been running a couple of companies through it, with emails from various domains set up all into one inbox and sent from the right domains...and one of the browser add-ins gets rid of the ads for me.

I suggest it may be a good option instead of relying on 100MB from your ISP (that's sooooo early 2000's!), and then you can switch ISP as you please, too.