We are living in the internet age and the email is the most important and popular way of communication among businesses, family and friends. The email is the fastest way to send lengthy messages to one or several recipients at the same time. This email communication service depends upon email servers that transmit the message from senders to recipients.
Email messages in business, at times, are confidential and intended to be read by the addressed recipient only. Even our personal emails are sometimes confidential and contain important information about our family, friends and financial details. So it becomes obvious that we should choose an email service wisely depending upon the need. There comes the concept of webmail and hosted exchange. Let’s discuss them here.
- Webmail is a budget email service. Hosted exchange comes with a price depending upon the number of mailboxes you purchase for the users.
- With email hosting, you are relaxed that you are receiving emails in real time. They are secure and the emails are backed up on the server. Webmail, on the other hand, is always under the threat of being hacked, losing emails and sometimes, there is a time lag as well.
- Hosted email exchange offers you much more than email sending and receiving. You could schedule your tasks or appointments with other people using the calendar tool. You could share your calendar with other people and schedule meetings accordingly. Webmail does not offer any such delegation assistance. It offers “read only” access to the users.
- Exchange email offers you the setup of “out of office” (OoO) responses, when you are on a vacation with the family or if you are sick and cannot go to the office. That helps the senders know that you are not having access to your emails and they can contact you once you are back. It also keeps their emails to be read later. Webmail does not offer such a service. Your senders would keep sending emails and they will just accumulate in the Inbox. This could be frustrating for the senders at times, if it is an important communication.
- Hosted exchange is a dedicated email service and stays clutter-free. Webmail, being a free service, populates your screen with ads. This is really annoying. With dynamic ads, it happens sometimes that, in an attempt to close the ad, you delete an email and then you must look for it in the Trash folder.
- In hosted exchange, being a paid service, the providers ensure that you do not lose any data. They are responsible for any assistance you need anytime. Webmail does not offer this. You are always prone to lose your emails, even if there is a technical problem at the server. You hardly get worthy assistance to recover your data if it is lost due to some hacker attack.
So, you can see that while webmail is cheaper compared to hosted exchange, it has its own disadvantages. It is advised that businesses must go for hosting email services to keep their communication safe, secure and synced in real time. You may use webmail for less important casual communication though.