“Wherever you go, there's your e-mail,” was the Buckaroo Bonzai-inspired signature file used by Mike Azzara, editor of Unix Today, when he hired me for my first regular network column back in 1989. I quickly learned all editors have, um, interesting traits.

At the time, e-mail meant MCI Mail or pine or elm on Unix systems. E-mail wasn't everywhere then, but it is now. E-mail service providers are doing a good job keeping up with our e-mail addiction and supporting new interfaces and end devices, like smart phones. So I thought it would be interesting to talk to the CEO of a company hosting over 3 million e-mail accounts and handling over 4.5 billion messages per month.

Michael Rose, CEO of Everyone.net, focuses on two parts of the e-mail world. First, he provides services to ISPs and large enterprise customers, usually putting their name on the e-mail service. That gives Everyone.net the volume handling capabilities to control billions of messages per month. You may be using them and not know it, since they claim to be the leader in that area.

On the other end of the market, the company provides hosted e-mail services for SMBs.

Thousands of service providers offer “hosted Exchange services” (search on that phrase and get 9,100 results), but Everyone.net doesn't go the Microsoft Exchange route. It uses Linux systems, standards-based browsers and clients, and cites that decision as one of the ways it can keep prices low.

Ah, the price question. Every small business has to have e-mail, but where do they get it and how much does it really cost? When you sign up for Web hosting, you get e-mail hosting as well. You can brand that with your domain name (joe@companydomain.com) and provide employee mail for no real out of pocket expense. Easy to set up, easy to manage for (the most part), and cheap.

Yet the urge for many companies to host their own e-mail and Web servers, often created by Microsoft resellers pushing Small Business Server, takes e-mail service in a new direction. Unfortunately, that direction is not always easy to set up, manage or afford. Administrators will tell you managing e-mail servers of any kind can be difficult, time intensive, and filled with security concerns. That's why I recommend small companies avoid hosting their own servers until they have a security-trained network manager on staff or a close relationship with a trusted support group.