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When doing freelance work on websites, as part of my service, I offer email addresses and inbox storage. I currently use a postfix/courier stack. I tend to point people towards setting up a separate gmail account, however, just for all their business emails, I then forward as many aliases as they want to this address. I do this because:

  • Much better web based client than I could even hope to offer
  • Still integrates with IMAP/POP clients on the desktop/phones
  • Much less stress on my server and my admittedly flimsy set up

Points against this:

  • Much less professional, I can support multiple users x@domain.com but they all have to go to one gmail account, unless they set up multiple inboxes there too.
  • Doesn't look great that I can't offer a decent email service and just point them elsewhere
  • I've got much less control if something goes wrong for them (I provided it to begin with which makes me somewhat responsible to help them)

What do other freelancers do when providing email services along with websites?

  • Google Apps?
  • Better server side setup?
  • Purposly don't offer email service?
  • Any other service?
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Many platforms like Joomla will have plugins which manage e-mail aliases, meaning you send to info@site.com and it really gets sent to myemail@hotmail.com, which not only provides a professional e-mail address but it allows your customer to continue using their own. – Neil May 4 '12 at 14:18
But how does that email get picked up by Joomla in the first place? Does it listen on port 25 too? I'm not familiar with it. I mainly use PHP/MySQL anyway. But I'm curious for any advice and ideas – Paystey May 4 '12 at 14:28
I honestly don't know how they're implemented, but I'd imagine it has the interface of a normal smtp mail server, except rather than store the e-mails, it forwards it to the actual e-mail server. I'd imagine that it would use the default port to do that. I'll try to see if I can't find some link for you. – Neil May 4 '12 at 14:45
Here is a simple e-mail extension for Joomla. Since Joomla has access to a database, if the server supports it, then it is possible to do. – Neil May 4 '12 at 15:00
Thanks, I think that communicates with the existing IMAP server though, pulls messages in and handles them. Something would still need to be setup at a lower level to handle the messages coming in. – Paystey May 4 '12 at 15:24
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3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

I'd recommend setting your clients up with a Google Apps account so that they can have their emails set up using their own domain name.

The benefits are that they will have plenty of storage, access to additional services like Google docs, IMAP/pop3 and if there is a problem with their emails, its a problem with Google Apps and not your postfix/courier stack.

If you ever part ways or change server in the future, you don't have to worry about their emails, they're already stored separately.

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That's precisely why I'm looking at it, it looks fantastic. Would you recommend setting them up with their own free account (limited to 10 users)? How can I then manage it? I'm not keen on the idea of me knowing their passwords or is there some sort of administrator role I can have over all my clients? – Paystey May 4 '12 at 16:03
You set up DNS records to get it going day 1 and then you have an Administrator account to Manage the domain and create the users. Any time you add a user it will create a temporary password (or you can choose one) and then the user is asked to change their password upon sign in. – Gortron May 4 '12 at 16:13
Ah very nice, so I just keep an admin account for each of my clients. I'll give it a day or so in case someone has any other ideas but otherwise I'll accept. Thanks – Paystey May 4 '12 at 17:33
Google Apps is a good solution. Just make sure to tell your customers on the limitations(max 10 users for free), also having an admin account can lead to some unwanted situations, as you can change the password of an account and read/send e-mails. If anything goes wrong, they can blame you. So explaining this and having some kind of agreement to relieve you of the possible liabilities might also be a good idea. – Hakan Deryal May 4 '12 at 19:50
Thanks @HakanDeryal I'm just trialing it now with another domain and it's looking pretty good. Will bear that in mind though. I'm tempted to say I'll get them set up, provide support and then hand over the admin account. Leaves me out of it that way, and most issues can be solved through google's help anyway. – Paystey May 4 '12 at 21:16
up vote 1 down vote

Office 365

Another answer already mentioned Google Apps so I'm adding this for completion-sake. At its core, Office 365 is just an exchange server in the 'cloud'. You can customize it to use a custom domain name and, in general, the email part works the same as Google Apps. Just point the DNS MX records to Office 365.

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up vote 0 down vote

Given that Google no longer offers a free version of Google Apps, anyone reading this question now might want to look into using Outlook.com. It supports POP3 (but no IMAP), it comes with Office Web Apps, and it supports up to 500 users for free, instead of the 10 that Google Apps supported in its free version, when it was free.

http://www.labnol.org/internet/setup-outlook-on-custom-domain/24699/

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