Corporate mail, which one to choose?

Internet mail, or email, is today the backbone of communication and the operation of virtually every business. So what solutions should you choose for your corporate mail? Is it better for you to take advantage of the offer of market giants, or bet on Polish providers?

Thanks to this article, you will learn the ins and outs of corporate mail and be able to make a thoughtful and good choice of a provider of such a service for your company. This is a crucial matter for you – the smooth and trouble-free operation of your business will largely depend on how stable and reliable this service is. So familiarize yourself with the services that are offered by various providers and choose the one that will best suit what you specifically need. The optimal choice will give you peace of mind and low costs for a number of years of using a good corporate mail provider.

Corporate mail – why is it so important?

Email is today an essential tool for all corporate communication. This applies both to internal correspondence, between employees or departments, as well as contacts with contractors, customers, or acquiring new buyers of your goods or services by this means. Without this tool, no company will be able to operate properly in today’s competitive market. That’s why where your mail is placed is of paramount importance to the operation of your business. From the format of addresses to the stability of the service to the plethora of corporate add-ons that make it easier to manage your mail accounts – it all has to work perfectly for you to be happy with such mail and get the most out of it. There are a few of the easiest ways to set up corporate emails.

Just remember that giving an address with any of the popular endings does not sound professional, and it still happens. A company that sends a bid for big money and uses email from free services looks very suspicious and scares away potential partners and big customers. Mail with individual endings such as [email protected] or imię[email protected], for example, is offered by a great many providers. Therefore, you need to make the right choice based on price, security, stability of the service, ease of use, good customer support and a number of similar elements that make certain solutions much more professional and better than others.

Corporate mail – Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 (formerly called Microsoft Office 365) is a huge package of applications and services that Microsoft offers. This package has many versions, but for business operations you must use the versions designed for businesses and enterprises. These are the paid plans Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Microsoft 365 Business Standard and Microsoft 365 Business Premium. They differ in the number of applications and services they include for each user. In the richest version, i.e. Microsoft 365 Business Premium, you get access to programs and services such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, Sharepoint, Exchange, Intune, Azure, Access and Publisher. Around-the-clock support and technical assistance is available on all paid plans. The Premium plan pays €18.6 per month per user, the cheaper Standard option is €10.5, and the simplest Basic is €5.1. Each of these plans offers a webmail service consisting of such elements as:

• 50 GB e-mail box;
• own names with the ending [email protected];
• Through Exchange, it can be accessed from any mobile devices and via the website;
• Access to a shared calendar;
• Create and manage new accounts from anywhere;
• With Exchange Online unlimited archive for data – only in the Premium version.

Mail is handled in this package using Outlook, which is well known to many. However, those who use it point out some disadvantages of such a solution. These are primarily: unintuitive operation, especially for those accustomed to the latest solutions, poor performance of the program’s internal search engine and fairly high prices of the entire package for the Polish market. This solution is often used in large companies, where changing the habits of employees could require a long and expensive process. Young and dynamic companies prefer newer solutions, better suited to their dynamic growth and resilient teams.

Corporate mail – Google Workspace

Google Workspace (formerly called G-Suite) is a proposition of another market giant. The Gmail that Google offers, both to private users and businesses, is perhaps the best-known service on the market. In the Workspace package, however, you get much more. Every user of this package gets online access to such tools and services as Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Meet, Chat, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Sites, Keep, Jamboard, Apps Script and Cloud Search. Pricing for enterprise access is at a similar level to Microsoft 365, with Google Workspace Business Starter packages here for $27 per user per month, Google Workspace Business Standard for $54, Google Workspace Business Plus for $81, and Google Workspace Enterprise service negotiated individually.

All of these plans offer Gmail and storage space ranging from 30 GB in the Starter plan to unlimited in the Enterprise plan. You can create up to 30 so-called aliases, or alternative names, for each email account. These can be, for example, addresses like [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] and a number of others supported within a single basic account.

This makes it much easier to sort correspondence on different issues and with different people, and guarantees good reception by customers, contractors or business partners. Group addresses, for example, [email protected], are also a convenient solution – sending an email to such an address will result in delivery to all employees. This saves a lot of time and makes it more difficult to leak the full list of employees or contractors, which already in more than one company has been attached openly to emails and everyone could see it. The problems reported by users of the Gmail mail package are two basic ones. The first is the lack of a client, a program that can be placed on the desktop. For less advanced users, handling mail through the site can sometimes be difficult to master, and they prefer to always have an email program open separately. The second problem is the prices of packages for businesses, which are not among the lowest.

Corporate mail – Kru.pl

However, you are not limited to using the offerings of global giants, which are very broad, but not always best suited to the specifics of your industry or national regulations. You can also bet on services tailored to the Polish market offered by local providers. Such a provider is KRU.pl, which offers a range of services such as web hosting, domains, VPS servers and SSL certificates. If you believe that your and your clients’ data should be on secure servers in Poland, this is the solution just for you and your business. The financial aspect is also not insignificant. Access to your company’s email is much cheaper here than at industry giants. The cheapest Cloud Mikro plan offered is just 75 PLN per year. In this assessment you will receive:

• Hosting your website;
• 10 GB of storage space to be used;
• unlimited data transfer;
• web page builder;
• free SSL;
• Full compliance with Polish RODO regulations;
• Mailbox with an unlimited number of accounts;
• a range of additional services.

This means that you can have as many email accounts as you want. If you need more space for your data then you can take advantage of higher packages: Cloud Start for $125 a year, Cloud Medium for $175 a year, Cloud Premium for $300 a year, Cloud Gold for $400 a year and Cloud Platinium for $600 a year, where you’ll have up to 1,000 GB of storage space available. Email is included in each of these plans:

• unlimited number of e-mail boxes;
• unlimited number of autoresponders;
• unlimited number of redirects;
• Create your own newsletter lists;
• setting vacation messages;
• Access through the website;
• Strong antivirus and anti-spam protection.

Corporate mail – summary

Choosing corporate mail is a very serious matter for your company. You should think carefully about what exactly you need and which offer will be most suitable for you. There are plenty of smaller and larger providers of such services on the market. Large global corporations such as Google or Microsoft offer mail and a range of other services to the largest number of people, but this is not always the best choice. They operate worldwide and often their prices are calculated more for American than Polish customers. Also debatable is the issue of data security, which in the case of such corporations can be physically located on a server in virtually any country in the world, and you have no control over it, nor will you even be informed. That’s why, if you value safety and security, you should choose the services of domestic providers. This is undoubtedly also much friendlier for your finances. Offers from companies such as kru.pl or ith.eu are priced much more attractively. For each type of business you should tailor the package you order to exactly what you will need. It doesn’t make much sense to pay a large subscription for a whole lot of services that neither you nor your employees will ever use. So keep that in mind and order exactly the services that your business will use on a daily basis.