Imaginary Landscape, LLC

When it was first suggested, I was immediately against it. The thought of outsourcing our company email to anyone, even Google, was simply not acceptable.

However, when asked "Why?" I stumbled and stammered. "Because we are an Internet company and, well, we just have to do our own email?" I trailed off, ending in a weak question as I heard myself.

Then the ever-so patient folks that handle our systems quietly pointed out:

• Gmail supports our domain
• It offers 99.9% uptime guarantee
• It is available through POP, IMAP and Web
• It manages spam beautifully
• It costs $50 per year per person
• Each mailbox comes with 25 GB of storage
• They even have a spiffy way to migrate our existing IMAP accounts

That's a lot of benefit for around $1,000 per year. Depreciation on our mailserver alone equals that, let alone the maintenance of it. I don't even have to go into spam productivity issues to know it is a fiscally sound idea.

Sometimes sacred cows really do make for good hamburgers.