Fusemail.com — grrrr!
GRRR.!!
I say the industry of web hosting is changing and we all need to move mail to mail places and web to web places. Blacklists, spam, zombie farms, all that stuff, it’s becoming a full time job for small business hosting companies, and we just shouldn’t do it. Email is just too important for our clients, you can’t afford single hour of downtime anymore, much less three days on the black list because some client reset a password to ‘password’ and the mail server was exploited by the spam bots.
That being said, I decided it was time to separate all hosting from all mail services and started looking for alternatives. Gmail came up of course since they do some good corporate and small business stuff, but it really seemed like a support-less kind of thing and I didn’t want to risk it.
After a lot of searching, I found this company called Fuse Mail. I read through all the website stuff again and again, and the more I thought about it, I figured how the heck can anybody beat that? Two bucks a month, support for imap, add as many mx domains as you can, as many mail accounts as you want, tons of storage ? And on top of that, built in rudimentary campaign management tools? Holy crap I was thinking.
So, I called in and grilled this company to get the skinny. The more I talked to them, the more I was liking it. More talk. More like. And then all the sudden I kind of drank the punch and decided these guys could take care of my client mail needs better than my little company did, so I decided to help my clients migrate to them.
I should note, my clients are the kind that I’ve known for years, that trust my word explicitly because our relationships are based mostly on explicit trust relationships that span a decade or more. In this fusemail case, the trust was so deep it even implied moving money that would generally come to me over to another vendor, because the other vendor I thought could do a better job for them.
So here’s this business, kind of small maybe half a dozen accounts I suggest trying to go over to fusemail. It seemed easy, they had all these migration tools to make it easy and everything was well documented. They pretty much were able to do it by themselves, I was rather impressed.
But after they migrated, we found the hitch.
If you have an account ‘myAccount’ on fusemail with 5 email accounts under it, so person1@mydomain.com, person2@mydomain.com, person3@mydomain.com, etc, they all basically use one of a small number of inbound imap connections available to myAccount. 10 or 20 or something like that… And with Mac Mail which is known to leverage multiple connections to make everything fast, and assuming you have your iphone and two computers checking imap, basically you’ve just used up all the possible connections for myAccount, regardless of how many persons@mydomain.com accounts you have set up.
So, we quickly pulled the plug on that, moved them back to where they were, and started looking for other alternatives.
Beware of this company. They seem to have some good ideas and may eventually get it right, but the number of imap connections problem should have been handled before they came out of alpha. I mean seriously, what the hell are they thinking? SERIOUSLY?! Are they so ignorant of a simple virtual server farm that they just forgot to cluster exim? Whatever.. This is a second grade mistake and they’re trying to play in a world where the scientists roam.
I have no idea what other ridiculus things will happen with the services of this company. Consider this a big fat stay away.
Tony Fraser, 9 june 2009
keywords : fusemail, fuse mail, outsourced mail hosting
