E-Mail Does Make Money

Members of the ISP-Tech list find that ISPs provide a wide variety of mail storage pricing packages.

[January 22, 2003]

On the ISP-Tech list in January, MR asked:

"I was wondering if I could get some feedback from most of you. I was wondering if you could share with me what your e-mail box limits are. We want to implement a limit on our mail boxes but we would like to know what the rest of you have as a limit. This is for residential and commercial customers. If they are different, please specify."

[PM replied] "Our basic e-mail boxes have a 10 MB limit, which we find is fine for most people. If people need more space we are more then happy to sell themsome!"

[RJ said] "We've found that the internal customers hit their limits more often than any other class of user. We provide:

• Residential—50 MB
• Commercial Customers—As much as they purchase
• Internal Corporate—150 MB"

[EH reported] "Hotmail defaults to 1.5 MB for free, 10 MB for $19.99 per year. Yahoo is 6 MB for free, 20 MB for $9.99 per year. For business class services, I would expect 10 MB to 15 MB. Most people won't use this much (Outlook and OE don't like mailboxes that large), but it's a good number in case on the customer goes on vacation.

Also, consider these premium services:

1. Spam tagging (SpamAsassin)
2. Catch-All mailboxes
3. ETRN mail queuing for businesses that want their own mail server,but don't have a full time connection
4. Mail queuing for customers with their own mail servers, but concerned about lost mail during an outage
5. More storage space

[DB laconically noted] "20 MB."

[DS said] "Our default box is 3 MB for home users (that's 1 MB bigger than AOL) and 5 MB for businesses. We find that for 95 percent of customers that is fine. If we have someone trying to do huge attachments we try to teach them about FTP. The biggest mailbox we will give is 20 MB and only for lots of money.

[DS added] "16 MB here and we allow for bigger if you want to pay for it. We charge $200 a month for a 600 MB+ e-mail box if you really think you need it. Not sure about the rest of our pricing scheme.

—End