Email hosting providers benchmark: Qboxmail
With this last chapter, we have come to the end of a series of related articles, written with the intention of helping the reader to gain clarity on the world of email hosting providers. This series opened with a reflection on why managing your customers’ emails is such an important activity. In the second article, we explained what best practices you should adopt when reselling and managing professional email accounts, which are useful regardless of the provider you have chosen.
To conclude, we compared the different alternatives available on the market regarding email hosting providers, analysing for each one, the seven features that should be evaluated before choosing an email service provider. The alternatives analysed are:
Today’s article, which will have Qboxmail as its object of analysis, is the last in this series that I hope will leave you with some useful insights for your future choices. Analysing all other alternatives before dwelling on our solution was indispensable. Only those who are informed truly choose, otherwise you believe you are choosing!
In order to make a neutral comparison that is actually useful for choosing the most suitable service for your needs, we will compare 5 categories of alternates on the market, analysing for each of them the 7 most important characteristics that an email hosting service should have.
The seven aspects on which the comparative analysis will be based are:
- Reseller mode of use. What features are available? Is it user-friendly? What possibilities / opportunities / threats are there for the reseller?
- Security and Deliverability. These are the fundamental requirements for an email service. If they are not at an adequate level, all other features lose their meaning.
- Help Desk. How can you handle the support requests from your customers that you will inevitably receive?
- Migration Tools. When you acquire a new customer, you will probably have to carry out a migration, which if not handled properly can become an annoying niggle.
- Backup services. Nowadays, backup services are essential and must be taken into account when evaluating an email hosting service.
- Email account size. Your customers certainly have different needs when it comes to mailbox capacity. How much flexibility do the various providers offer you?
- Price and costs. It is no coincidence that this is the last point, you should not even consider it. But since I am sure it is of interest to you anyway, let’s talk about it.
Qboxmail
Reseller mode of use
Before we begin, a brief observation is necessary. Qboxmail, unlike the alternatives analysed above, is the only service that focuses 100 per cent on the resale and management of professional email accounts.
This is reflected, for instance, in the way the various control panels are designed and developed. If the American biggies (Microsoft and Google) put the organisation, understood as the company that uses the various services provided by them, at the centre of their management panels, the Qboxmail Control Panel puts the reseller partner at the centre. In fact, the main purpose of our Control Panel is to provide our partners with an easy-to-use tool that enables them to perform all the tasks necessary for email management, saving you time.
You can manage all domains and email accounts of your customers from a single interface with the possibility of modifying every aspect, create different user roles for your employees/collaborators by defining specific tasks for each, and also allow your customers to manage their domains independently.
Security and Deliverability
At Qboxmail, we invest a lot of time and resources in ensuring the highest possible degree of security for our users. Our built-in email security solution consists of 3 commercial engines from the best providers on the market, which work in synergy thanks to a machine learning mechanism developed entirely by Qboxmail. Our solution is very robust and means that you do not need any supplementary third-party email security solutions.
As an additional security measure, all email accounts are protected by an Account Takeover Protection service, which can identify whether access to the email account has been gained by the legitimate owner or by an attacker who has managed to gain access to the email account. In the second case, the SMTP protocol of the compromised mailbox will be disabled, to prevent the attacker from carrying out malicious actions with the user’s identity.
In addition, all outgoing messages from our servers are also scanned in order to detect any illicit activity. This ensures that the reputation of our SMTP is always at the top, guaranteeing deliverability at the highest standard in the industry. It is of course possible and recommended to set up SPF, DMARC and DKIM authentication protocols.
Help Desk
The abundance of alternatives in the IT sector has meant that the importance of customer care has grown to become one of the first choice factors.
Responding clearly and promptly to your customers’ requests is the best way to prevent them from being taken away from you by your competitors. To help you in this task, Qboxmail has developed a help desk tool, called Tracemail, which will help you answer the three most frequent support requests you receive when handling professional emails. The three requests are: I cannot access my email account; I cannot find/view the message sent to me by this person; I sent a message but the recipient never received it. By analysing the email logs, Tracemail allows you to see in detail what happened to a message, and why it was not delivered/received. Tracemail is extremely easy to interrogate and all data are presented clearly, allowing you to respond in real time to your customers’ requests for assistance.
If your customer’s problem cannot be solved with Tracemail, you can take advantage of our customer care. In addition to a ticketing system, in case of emergencies, you can contact us by phone, and one of our qualified technicians will answer within a few rings. You can also request video chat sessions with members of our team for both technical and commercial explanations.
Backup Services
Backing up data in professional email accounts nowadays is such an important service that there are many companies that have focused purely on this service.
Like any other solution widely used in organisations all over the world, the needs with regard to this type of technology are not the same for everyone. For this reason, there are two different solutions in Qboxmail with regard to mailbox backups. The first, called Archive, is designed to be a security archive linked to the individual email account, where all incoming and outgoing messages are saved with no space limit. This solution is suitable for those who have to securely store a large amount of historical data on their email accounts.
The second solution, called Mail Time Machine, is an automatic backup system included for all mailboxes at no extra cost. Mail Time Machine allows you to go back in time up to a maximum of 15 days to search for and download mistakenly deleted messages or perform a full restore to the desired day.
Size of email accounts
All Qboxmail services are designed to give the reseller partner a tool that focuses on his needs. When it comes to the size of email accounts, the most important element is surely the flexibility of being able to set up email accounts of different sizes, to suit the needs of all your customers. Via our Control Panel you have the possibility to create email accounts ranging in size from 1GB up to 100GB, and you can easily change the size of the email accounts at any time. This flexibility will allow you to provide each of your customers with mailboxes that are best suited to their needs.
Price and costs
Like all email providers offering a quality service (Microsoft and Google for example), Qboxmail also adopts monthly billing per email account.
So I ask you, what value would you give to an email account managed via a Control Panel with advanced help desk and migration functions, equipped with a modern Webmail and an automatic backup system? 8€/month? 5€/month? The value of our offer is undeniable, but if we charged the same prices as similar services you would, as with Google, have a very low profit margin. As has already been said many times, Qboxmail puts the reseller partner at the centre of its service, and therefore the pricing strategies also reflect this philosophy. In addition to having a much lower starting price than our American competitors, you will also have access to our volume scouting program. The more email accounts you activate, the less you will pay per unit.
For more information about our partnership program, where reseller discounts are also indicated, I invite you to fill out our contact form without any obligation.