Understanding why your mail provider isn't supported by Black Pearl Mail
This document provides a list of the current mail providers that can be configured for Black Pearl Mail, why these mail providers are supported, and why other mail providers are not supported.
What is a mail provider?
A mail provider is essentially the company that supplies you with a platform to host your email. At a basic level, this allows you to send, receive, and store emails, although some providers may also provide you with additional mail features. There are many different mail providers in the game. In this document, we will be breaking the mail providers down into 3 categories:
- Free mail providers
- Entry level mail providers
- Advanced mail providers
Free mail providers
- A free mail provider will provide you with the service at no cost. They are primarily suited for personal use and are not recommended for business use.
Benefits of free mail providers
- No cost
- Easy to setup with no technical knowledge
- Low administration
Constraints of free mail providers
- Does not support custom domains i.e. your email address has a fixed domain such as @gmail.com
- Restrictions on available addresses
- Feature restrictions
- Lack of custom configuration options
- Mailbox size restrictions
- Not suitable for business use
Examples of free mail providers
- Gmail.com (not to be confused with Google Workspace)
- Yahoo.com
- Outlook.com (not to be confused with Microsoft 365)
Entry level mail providers
An entry level mail provider is the next steps up from a free mail provider. They have similar restrictions to a free mail provider; except they allow you to use a custom domain (such as your business domain). They are usually provided by domain registrars (the provider that you purchase your business domain from).
Examples of entry level mail providers
- GoDaddy (not to be confused with GoDaddy Microsoft 365)
- Rackspace
Benefits of entry level mail providers
- Low cost
- Easy to setup
- Low administration
- More address availability and customizations e.g., firstname.lastname@companydomain.com
- Centrally managed
Constraints of entry level mail providers
- Feature restrictions
- Mailbox size restrictions
- Lack of custom configuration options
- Lack of support with mail clients
Advanced mail providers
Advanced mail providers are the ideal solution for business environments due to their centralized management and advanced configuration options. This helps ensure that your mail environment suits your business requirements.
Examples of advanced mail providers
- Microsoft 365 (formally Office 365)
- Google Workspace (formally G Suite)
Benefits of advanced mail providers
- Ideal for business use
- Highly configurable
- More address availability and customizations e.g., firstname.lastname@companydomain.com
- Centrally managed
- Advanced feature
- Larger mailbox sizes
- Security
Constraints of advanced mail providers
- Requires a technical understanding of configuration/administration
Which mail providers are supported by Black Pearl Mail?
Currently, Black Pearl Mail supports the 2 advanced mail providers: Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.
Although on-premise solutions such as Microsoft Exchange do share some of the same characteristics as an advanced mail provider, on-premise solutions are not supported by Black Pearl Mail. There are several reasons for this, but mostly comes down to the complexity, security, and features that may not exist on your on-premise server.
Why are other mail providers not supported by Black Pearl Mail?
Simply put, other mail providers do not have the option to customize their environment to meet the requirements to configure Black Pearl Mail.
During the onboarding process, Black Pearl Mail will configure your mail provider to route your email through our service to allow us to brand and send back to you for delivery.
Free and entry level mail providers do not allow users to make these routing configuration changes.
What do I do if I am using a mail provider that isn’t supported by Black Pearl Mail?
If you are not using Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 and you still wish to use Black Pearl Mail, then you will need migrate your service to either Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
If you wish to carry out this yourself, this requires a technical understanding of mail migrations. If you don’t have an understanding of the mail migration process, then our recommendation would be to contact a local IT provider to carry out the work on your behalf. Simply link them to this documentation so they can grasp a better understanding of your requirements.
Once the migration is complete, you can then contact Black Pearl Mail to make the required configuration changes to onboard you.
If you have any questions regarding the above, please contact support@blackpearlmail.com.
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