Bundle City Finds Relief with Rackspace Email

Rackspace Email, Distribution & Retail, 10-50

Bundle City, Inc. is an importer and distributor of consumer electronics products, including TV Wall Mounts, LCD and Plasma TVs, and General Electronics.

• Challenge
  More feature-rich email interface with IMAP access
• Solution
  Rackspace Email fits their functionality and budgetary requirements
• Results
  An affordable, easy-to-manage email solution to support their business objectives

Frustration with Free Email

Bundle City is exclusively driven by online communication. All of their components live in a web-based marketplace where speed and reliability of communication can make the difference between repeat customers, word-of-mouth sales, and bad press. The site serves direct online retail consumers and offers drop ship service for other online retailers.

To maintain email communications, Pez Elias, Owner/Founder of Bundle City and other Internet businesses, used the free email service included with his web hosting package. However, as his business grew into multiple website holdings, the inefficiencies and frustration with the email service also grew. “We had a really, really bad POP-based email service with no extra features,” says Pez.

Each of his employees has an email account for business use, in addition to multiple aliases. According to Pez, “About 70% of our communication is through email.” They use email to field customer inquiries for sales, respond to customer service requests, and to communicate internally. Coming from an IT background, Pez was familiar with his businesses’ technical needs as he began the search for a new email provider. He needed a business email provider that offered IMAP support and a more robust feature set.

Reliable Email at a Surprising Low Price

Back in 2005, when he signed up with us, he had problems finding a business email provider that offered IMAP service. “I looked at a lot of other providers before choosing Rackspace. At the time, most providers only offered POP service, but we knew we needed something more powerful,” recalls Pez. Aside from being one of the few providers offering IMAP at the time, the Rackspace Email platform was more affordable and robust than the competition. “Rackspace Email had the best stack of features. It’s a full-featured email service, and the price was so low, I thought it was scam,” says Pez.

Once he had a chance to use Rackspace Email, he was sold, “I loved it. It’s perfect.” His email communications are safe and reliable on Rackspace’s solid infrastructure. With Rackspace Email, he gets premium spam and virus protection, free mobile sync, and an application suite that includes a calendar, contact list, task list, and notes for just $1 per mailbox, per month. “It’s extremely affordable for a small business,” says Pez.

After successfully implementing Rackspace Email for Bundle City, he signed up all of his other sites. He now hosts about a dozen domains with Rackspace.

Rackspace Email Delivers Value

Even with the availability of free email hosting with his web host, Pez prefers the ease of use and reliability of Rackspace Email and uses it for all of his ventures. “When web hosts offer us free mailboxes, we still opt to change our MX records over to Rackspace.” And with IMAP access, he can configure his MobileMe to receive email on his iPhone so he can stay in touch when he’s on the go. Unlike POP service, IMAP ensures that regardless of where you log in, your mail data is up-to-date.

After almost five years of using Rackspace Email, Pez identifies his favorite features as alias creation, out-of-office replies, and message filtering. The alias feature helps the organization better manage email and ensure fast resolution of customer inquiries. He likes our smart out-of-office reply feature because it turns off automatically so users don’t have to remember to manually turn it off and it only replies once to a sender. The message filtering capabilities, “allow us to set filters for certain senders that automatically go to certain folders or forward to certain accounts. I have email from our most profitable customers filtered directly to me to so I can stay on top of their needs.”

And, our email services are steadily growing. We recently added Rackspace Archiving to arm our email customers with secure, unlimited email retention. “With so many emails, it would be nice to archive them all,” says Pez, expressing interest in the archiving product. Email archiving provides an easy mechanism to retrieve, export, and restore deleted emails and messages requested for legal or regulatory purposes.

His experience with Fanatical Support^®, according to Pez, has been limited as, “I rarely have problems with the service. On the few occasions I’ve had to contact support, they’ve always been very responsive.” Overall, Pez reports the biggest benefit of his Rackspace service is value. At an attractive price point for businesses of all sizes, the features and reliability of Rackspace Email rival those of bigger name, more expensive email services.