It’s not often that I blog about business services that we offer as this is supposed to be a general IT blog, however I’ve had quite a few inquiries about what it is that eMailStor does so a blog entry is the easiest …
eMailStor was started to service one requirement: SMTP relay. This is the component that’s used by either an email server or an email client to send email. You might ask: Our ISP or our email server offers this service so why yours? There are 3 main reasons:
- Your upstream ISP often has restrictions in place to limit the amount of email you can send in a certain period
- You may be on unfamiliar networks that have additional restrictions for sending email ( eg. travelling, on other companies networks, internet cafes, etc. )
- Many relays are public relays and as such, are open to security and other attacks
For spam reasons, many ISPs have, over the last few years, implemented restrictions for sending email. Typically this is done based on the amount of email you send within a certain period of time. Locally, 25 – 50 emails per sender per hour seems to be a general average.
Anything above this and your email will either be rejected or you’ll receive notice that you can’t send any more email. Even 3rd party email services like Google use limits like these. Once you hit these limits, you can expect some issues, the worst is having your ADSL line locked or your Gmail account closed for 24 hrs.
So eMailStor provides a number of packages to service your requirements in sending email. These are classified by emails sent per sender or domain per period.
The biggest benefit is that eMailStor only defers your email for an assigned period should you reach your package limit – we do not block or alter your email in any other way ( if you use an on-site email server ). Once you enter a new period, any remaining email will be sent unless of course you reach your limit again, in which case the process repeats until all your email is sent.
Other benefits include:
- Custom limits and rates per user or domain
- Send email from any device and/or any network
- Outbound email anti-virus scanning
- Contain virus or malware outbreaks
- Usage reporting available
- Custom sending ports to work around ISP blocks
- Private relay ensures that only authenticated clients are allowed to send email, increasing the effectiveness of our solution and reducing the chances of blacklisting
We currently have around 250,000 to 350,000 emails sent through our system per month, and we have sufficient capacity to cater for around 10x this rate. So we can address the needs of Mom and Pop shops all the way to corporate requirements. We can also assist you in configuring your email client or server to use our service.
The Relay product has been an overwhelming success and as such, we’ve added additional Internet products over time, one of the most important being DNS/domain registration and hosting.
There are 2 parts of DNS if you want to use email, web or other services with your domain name ( eg. company.co.za ).
- registration: you need an anchor for your domain – this is the registrar and there is normally an annual cost for this service ( coza domains in SA are R75/yr )
- hosting: you need to host your domain records somewhere so that you can point them to the ISP or company that controls your email, web or other internet services
eMailStor DNS and Global DNS provide a one stop shop for registration and registration/hosting. We invoice you once a year for the package you’ve chosen and take care of all the management and renewals associated with DNS maintenance. Our DNS service includes some neat benefits:
- dynamic DNS updates
- bulk zone and record management
- all DNS record types supported
- easy and quick domain transfers
- fast turnaround for domain actions
- consistent contact and name server details
- wide variety of TLDs include .com, .net, co.uk, .cities ( .joburg, .capetown, .durban ), etc.
We also offer Email and Web hosting services locally and internationally with our dedicated custom support. These hosting services include shared, VPS, dedicated and co-location.
That’s quite a bit of information but I’ve tried to keep it as simple as possible. If you need more info, drop us a line at sales@emailstor.co.za