Messaging

VESN's Hosted E-Mail Service

The hosted e-mail service is priced on a per-mailbox-per-month basis, and should appeal to ISPs that have business customers but have not built an e-mail management interface for their customers.

by ISP-Planet Staff [February 12, 2002]

Virtual E-Services Network (VESN) announced its first product, hosted e-mail with built-in anti virus. The hosted service is priced at a monthly fee per mailbox served, with volume discounts available starting at 5,000 mailboxes.

Founded in May 2001, Sharon, Mass.-based VESN hopes to build a suite of Web services for ISPs, and hosted e-mail is merely its first offering. The company says that its data center, which is in Providence, Rhode Island, is less than 50 yards from the Network Access Points (NAPs) of such major carriers as Qwest, MetroMedia Fiber Networks, IXC, and NEON (Northeast Fiber Optic Networks), and is also within 1 mile of Bell Atlantic, MCI, Sprint, and Nortel. The facility has standby power and a battery backup, as well as other standard carrier-class goodies such as fire suppression.

The company says, "VESN prides itself on focusing exclusively on delivering the level of service required to maintain a highly available, always on and always secure status for your e-mail systems."

We spoke to Burke Anderson, of North Atlantic Internet, Inc. (NAII), a mid-sized ISP serving over 500 T-1 lines to businesses in the Northeast. He said, "this is a value-add, a good customer retention tool for our T-1 customers."

He noted that e-mail is a product involving a lot of calls between the customer and the ISP to handle problems such as reassigned employees, forgotten passwords, and vacation autoresponders. "None of these are emergencies," Anderson notes, "but they do take up time, both the customer's time and ours."

The VESN product allows customers to check and reassign e-mail addresses and passwords. Anderson says, "both I and my customers appreciate the instant gratification."

VESN also touts a feature that reports delivery problems to both sender and receiver. The company says, "How a failed communication is reported is very important to a business environment. VESN's policy is to notify both sides of a communication failure. For example, when a mail user exceeds their file allocation, we send messages to both mail recipient and sender so that the failure to complete a message delivery is understood and can be re-negotiated for future delivery. The goal is to close the communications loop, not leave one side hanging like other products do."

The company also adds anti-virus services to any rented mailbox, increasing security.

Pricing and availability
The product is available from the VESN website. Pricing starts at $4.50 per mailbox per month suggested retail, with a cheaper wholesale price for ISPs, and volume discounts after the first 5,000 mailboxes.

— End