What are the options and considerations when choosing an email provider?

There are many email providers. Reliability, availability, service, price are key considerations. With an email provider, security and records retention also become important factors. The major national players are Microsoft, GoDaddy and Google and there are numerous regional and local providers. It is also possible to host your own e-mail server, but for a small business, this is likely to be more expensive than using a provider.

If security and records retention are critical to your business, any email solution should be evaluated in terms of the corporate security and records retention requirements.

Any e-mail solution will provide mechanisms for accessing e-mail both from desktop/laptop environment and from mobile phone or tablet devices.