How to approach email for multiple businesses?

[martincho]

What are the best solutions for this situation:

    - You are running more than one company.
    - You might have to respond to or monitor more 
      than one email address per company.
    - You have more than one person per company with similar 
      needs
    - You want a unified portal from which a person can manage 
      all email for all businesses
    - You don't want a massive list of emails all mashed
      into a single inbox
    - You want to segregate email hosting from web and 
      DB hosting
    - You want online access to all email rather than limited
      desktop-only access

I had a look at Office 365 and Gmail. I can't say either one excited me. At first it looked like Office 365 could cover most of these bases. I have to say, Microsoft needs a lobotomy.

My current solution is to run multiple instances of Office on the desktop. Each one has it's own PSD file and they are, for all intents and purposes, fully segregated. For those of use who have to have visibility into multiple accounts (info@, support@, etc.) it's a very simple matter of adding those accounts and having those emails sorted to their own inboxes. So you can have full visibility into all the email you need for one of the businesses within an isolated application window. Need to do email for the other business? Pop over to the other instance of Outlook and you've switched environments.

As much as I hate to suggest this, I am now thinking that running a Linode instance as a pure email server might be the ticket. I could then have people log on to their webmail. One could have one company per tab and context switch very easily. Other Linodes would host web and DB, just as planned.

I am hoping I am not aware of a really cool unified solution that can deal with this elegantly. Looking forward to hearing what HN members might suggest.

[krmmalik]

I had a very similar question that I asked on here last week with no answers. Just like you, gmail or office365 didn't work for me.

I'm now considering forwarding all emails for the various mailboxes into RelateIQ and letting the SaaS manage my communication in multiple ways.

Haven't had a chance to try it just yet, but will do later in the week.

If you'd like to chat further/exchange ideas, my email address is khurammalik.me at gmail

Would love to exchange ideas and compare notes. :)

[martincho]

Well, let's see if someone comes up with a real solution. Maybe we can chat after that. I hope this thread gets a real discussion going.

[wise_young_man]

We're looking to build a solution like this at UserDeck. If you both want to talk about this over Skype. We're working on customer support and thinking of a way of integrating mailboxes (forwarding) and our embedded widgets so you can have conversations through them or email and manage in our control panel and different people you share access with your team can reply and collaborate. Contact info on profile.

[krmmalik]

Email sent

[martincho]

I am looking at this as a way to make things simpler:

https://github.com/JoshData/mailinabox

One small dedicated Linode instance for email.