What does it cost to host an e-mail account? It seems like a simple question, but a remarkable number of enterprises surveyed by Forrester had no idea of how to answer that question. A new report by the research company has taken a look under the hood of both in-house and commercial e-mail services, and put some numbers on the per-user costs associated with a variety of options. The surprise result was not so much that Google's corporate services come out ahead, but rather how large a lead it has on every other option.

The title of the report, "Should Your e-mail Live In The Cloud? A Comparative Cost Analysis," is actually somewhat misleading. The cloud implies a diffuse network of servers that hold partially redundant copies of information. Some of the services examined by the report don't necessarily offer that sort of setup, although the report frequently refers to any off-site service as "the cloud."

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