[jacquesm]

Maybe they are under contract not to pass information to third parties or maybe the company policy is to not let internal email off the network.

That you don't understand it is likely from the perspective of an individual, possibly a private user. For those applications you can't beat the cloud. For business use every business needs to weigh their own needs.

Even then though, many business think they need to have their own server when they really don't and vice-versa.

[muro]

Sure, but those are rare and usually include enough budget to include sysadmins and definitely enough to buy ECC memory. For anyone weighing whether ECC is worth it, they are wasting time managing their email server.

[jacquesm]

Those are not rare at all. Every lawyers office has this problem, every journalist, every banker, every insurance company, every notary public, every administration and so on.

[pvg]

Most of these are not contractually obliged to run their own email servers so whatever problem they have, it's not that specific one.

[jacquesm]

No, but they are contractually required to keep their customers (and their own) data confidential. And that can lead to them deciding to run their own mailservers as well as other infrastructure. Whether that's a good decision or not is another matter, that mostly depends on execution.

[pvg]

Right, what I mean is that your average legal practice, notary public, journalist doesn't actually have this problem like you said. Cloud services cover them just fine.

Somewhat unrelated, your comment gave me the idea to look up the MX records of the last few law firms I've interacted with: mostly cloud, as expected. The biggest and fanciest likely probably has their own servers. Their terminating MX is some middling cheapo hosting company. Disturbing.

[jacquesm]

Yes, I would agree that for most companies that are in this position rolling your own could easily end up being more problematic than going with gmail or office365. That doesn't mean it does not happen and when it happens they are usually sitting ducks.

The chances of your average law office having an IT staff with capabilities comparable to Google are nil. At the same time the legacy of Snowden has caused a lot of companies to wonder if they're wise to put anything off-premises. And then there's dropbox, weshare and a million other 'handy' services that could easily hoover up and analyze everything that passes through (or whoever hacked them).