CanTrust’s Open Source email product is priced at $5CAD/mailbox monthly, which includes 5GB of storage per mailbox. Open Source email

Our email solution is 100% hosted and backed up in Canada. Hosted on our equipment makes the data stored with us subject to Canadian
data sovereignty laws and the enhanced privacy that brings for your communications. Here is some more info on that angle:

  • https://cantrusthosting.coop/why-canadian/
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_sovereignty

Challenges

Open Source email does have some challenges at first getting through spam filters and vendor lock-in that Google and Microsoft (the 2 main email hosts out there), currently have. This can be overcome – it can be a little annoying at the beginning, but it changes as your email becomes validated over time. Spam filtering in 2021 is very much based on reputation, as seen by the Big Data collection of activity over time.

In terms of the email product and how it will work for a team. There is a webmail interface as the primary interface, that also has some contacts and calendar items. Hook these up to email Clients (laptop/PC) and phones as well, it speaks standard protocols of IMAP, POP3, CardDAV and CalDAV.

CanTrust does not charge for aliases, so if you would like to make additional aliases beyond the info@ mailbox, those can then be directed to groups of people as required. We suggest having a mailbox (info@yourdomain.com), then deliver aliases to whichever people need it. This keeps the mailbox so inbound inquiries are stored in one central place. They are then there if you bring on new staff etc and they can review communications without needing into the personal mailboxes.

CanTrust vs Others – a comparison

For e-mails, you have a couple of options:

1) Open source email from us: we provide email hosted in Canada for $5/mailbox.  This is open source email so that means it works great if you’re using an email program like Mac Mail, Windows Live Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird etc.  If you’re a user who does your email in webmail, then you’re going to find the open source ones lacking compared to Gmail and Office 365.

Pros of open source email:

  • Canadian hosted
  • Secure
  • Compliant

Cons of open source email:

Webmail is nothing like as fancy as Gmail / O365

Deliverability problems

Email is much harder to get delivering and not put into spam by O365/Google. Their spam filters only start to accept mail after first spamboxing a ton of it.. You’re presumed guilty of spamming until proven innocent in other words.  It’s really really frustrating since we have lots of standards-based ways to identify if something is spam or not. Both Google and MS use these but ignore them for the most part and let their AI algorithms decide what is spam or not, based on huge amounts of data collection. These algorithms that battle the spammers are constantly in a game of cat and mouse with one another, and that means that mistakes get made all the time. Mistakes in this case mean that mail which should be legitimate is marked spam in error and can’t get through.

The good news on these:  They tend to just go away. We use that open source email ourselves and here we are corresponding just fine. Indeed once you send enough not-spam messages then google will grudgingly remove you from always having them go to spam. This going to spam thing happens ANY time you change providers too, so moving from Telus to us will be seen as weirdness and might cause some messages to go to spam.  It will get better over time.

We explain it in such detail because for certain organizations the idea of any mails going to spam is critically bad, say if those mails must get through to generate revenue etc.

2) Premium email from Google or MS:  ~$10/user/month to get Google workspaces or MS Teams.

If you and all your staff have been using MS Outlook forever and ever, and are addicted to the calendar/groupawre features, then Microsoft is the only provider that can get Outlook to do that stuff. Some users will accept nothing less. But, otherwise, Google is always a better choice, it’s much much better written.  Also they give it away free to non profits which is nice of them.

Pros of premium email:

  • Best quality interface: Gmail.com is the most amazing webmail client ever built, with endless money and engineering poured into it.. it’s a gold standard some users refuse to live without.
  • Great deliverability: both Google and MS accept one another’s messages and spambox everyone else’s.
  • Great feature set:  they can do anything even on an enterprise scale for compliance requirements (this is hard /impossible for a small org like ours to offer).

Cons of premium email:

  • Expensive – ~$10/user/month and maybe billed in fluctuating USD
  • American jurisdiction – hosted in the USA, owned by US companies.  That can be a show stopper if you need to meed PIPEDA compliance.

If you have anyone with strong feelings about Outlook as a mail program, or strong feelings about Gmail being the greatest email of all time, then you might not be happy with other platforms. If no one is that uptight about it, then our Open Source email is probably a great fit.  If everyone is using an email program anyway then they probably won’t even notice much difference.