In the details, the $206/month "value" for only $40 really depends on how much of their services you use. For example the $99 for media storage... YouTube let's you do that for free, plus you can always store it on your own website. Their "video email" is just a LINK to the video on their website, the video is NOT in the email, and the video's link is not to your site even, it's to your page on their site. You can use their website, but from what I could see, it doesn't look like you get your own domain. They're not clear about that, probably deliberately.  They leave out a lot of things.

The email templates, etc, sound good but you have to see how many are useful compared to many other places that offer templates too. It doesn't look like you can preview them until you join, no mention of how many, just "lots". I've seen template sites that have "lots" before... but very few would be suitable for a professional organization to use. They don't say if you can import other templates, just that you can make your own, which I bet means you cannot. They have website, analytics, etc, all nice & good to have, integration is nice but you can only use what they give you. Sometimes "integration" works better for people, sometimes choosing independent "best of breed" works better.

BUT - a big issue in my mind - the "Web Of Trust" public rating system on their site is all RED danger ratings, not even Yellow - a very poor showing. Some comments at W.O.T. about them to the effect that, it's a good idea and there's nothing wrong with the site itself (i.e. McAfee SiteAdvisor rates it ok) but there's a high amount of spam from the actual users... i.e. a lot of spammers use it. Compare it with someplace that has most of the same functionality like Aweber - the WOT rating is actually Green for Aweber.

The big problem I see is that whenever I get an email from SomeCompany but that instead claims to be from ABANK, it IMMEDIATELY gets marked as SPAM/ATTACK email.  No way I will take a chance on a phishing attack, even though they may be using a legitimate marketing company.  I haven gotten that before, probably actually from my bank. Stupid move for them, because I refused to trust it.

I asked my teenage daughter would she would do with a fancy email from some place called comF5 claiming to be from some place she trusted: "I'd delete it". Me too, at best. At lot of people even hit the "spam" button. Even if they do read email from ComF5 for awhile, they could get tired of getting your email and hit the "spam" button, or they might forget who ComF5 is.

That's a major problem with any of these types of services. Technically speaking, email actually could be marked as coming from your site, but none of these services want to do it - they want to have their own service show up because a) it's easier and b) it's more branded advertising for the marketing company. As it is, at best, your email gets deleted, at worst, it frequently gets blocked by users.

Here's the biggest problem: If there's a lot of people (say, a bunch of your customers on Hotmail or Yahoo mail or Cogeco or Bell) mark email from anyone who is using ComF5 as spam, then EVERYTHING from ComF5 usually gets marked as spam for EVERYBODY at that site (e.g. maybe nobody on Hotmail will get any ComF5 email, at any time). And there's no way to tell that your site has been added to the spam list until the day you somehow figure out that a large chunk of your users (e.g. everyone on Hotmail) seem to be ignoring your emails. And places like Hotmail will refuse to even consider doing anything about it for you either.

In the case of a client of mine, the ISP (MNSI here in Windsor) was blocking all email from a certain website because of the spam levels from someone else at the same address. It wasn't even anything that the sender had done!

Services like third-party email services or even all-in-one services sound good, look good, and may even be good - for you - but they could out to be a very costly tool.

Last changed: Mar 04 2011 at 2:39 PM

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