Amazon: Hey pal, since you're shifting all your IT over to AWS, why not that email server, too? AWS has flipped the switch on its WorkMail calendar and email service to bring it into general availability. Customers will now be able to sign up for WorkMail at a rate of $4 per user monthly. Each user receives 50GB of storage on the hosted service. AWS said the service is currently running out of the US West (Oregon), US …
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...it's too expensive.
The pattern of AWS releases has been to be disruptive but there is nothing disruptive about WorkMail. The best AWS can do is price the per user at a few cents below more established offerings.
Who needs 50GB of storage per person? My small business has 10 years email history for all 10 of us and the nightly backup uses a little over 4GB. Why would I want to pay for 496GB I''ll never use?
But its worse (though GMail, Yahoo! and Office 365 suffer the same problem) because we use many non-user email addresses for marketing and support etc. The cost of these services is prohibitive because in a small company, non-user accounts are the majority of accounts used.
We satisfy our needs by running hMail in a t2.micro instance along with ClamAV and SpamAssassin. The annual running cost is $45 for a reserved instance plus $32 in hourly charges plus $40 in storage charges. That's the cost of 2.5 WorkMail users.
A concern over WorkMail is that it signals the end of AWS forging the way and is instead using MBAs as product managers who apply the same thought processes and formulas as everyone else.
"Who needs 50GB of storage per person?"
Clearly you've never met my old bosses' daughter. Sweet reason, and plaintive requests for mailbox moderation and tidying were ignored, with the power of nepotism to back her position up. We didn't have a higher quota for her mailbox in order to satisfy her tendency to use Exchange as a storage filesystem.. No, we had a separate f***ing Exchange STORAGE GROUP. That kind of thing is a LOT more common than you think, and I can say with certainty that most 365 mailboxes in our marketing department are larger than your backup.
My small business has 10 years email history for all 10 of us and the nightly backup uses a little over 4GB. Why would I want to pay for 496GB I''ll never use?"
Yes, because obviously every business is the same, and specifically, is EXACTLY like yours. :-)
Agree. This is a solution to a problem no one has... probably just there as a dig at Microsoft, their largest competitor, more than something anyone asked for. If people wanted a modestly functional web based email service with a ton of storage, they would just buy gmail. I don't like Amazon... just a feeling.
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