vqME or vqNow? Which is better for a small office?

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Question: Can I use vqME to protect a small office?

We get this question a lot. vqME allows you to protect up to 5 ISP addresses, but only 2 addresses may belong to a custom domain (such as mycompany.com, mychurch.com, or myfamily.com). That's because our personal product is not suited to business use.

Still, it's tempting to stretch one account to cover a small workgroup or even purchase separate vqME accounts for each user or department. But in most cases, vqNow, our small business platform offers a better approach. We're not grabbing for revenue. It's about value, features and the ability to personalize the lists, security configuration, and even the branding of each address within a business.

Both services have the same look & feel and they use the same technology to separate Spam from desirable mail while protecting you from viruses and identity theft. A comparison checklist is here. vqME is a personal security service. It is designed to protect an individual or family that uses standard ISP addresses (Comcast, Verizon, Cox, Earthlink, etc). There are solid reasons to choose vqNow for a home office, workgroup or even a family domain. Let's dig deeper on the reasons for choosing vqNow.

With the personal product, you (and anyone working with you) are forced to wear a single hat. And mini-workgroup price, vqNow is clearly the better option. vqNow routes mail for an entire domain to our security center before it gets to your ISP or mail server. Although you can bypass any addresses that you wish, it is capable of protecting your entire domain or a group of domains.

Let's explore the different approaches used by these two services...

vqME is designed for individuals and families. It supports addresses at regular ISPs while vqNow only works addresses that belong to domains that you own. vqNow supports all of the regular email programs that vqME works with, but it additionally works with Microsoft Exchange, Groupwise, Lotus Notes or any proprietary server or application.

Although vqME allows you to direct mail to separate clean mailboxes if the protected addresses are for different people, you still share the same password, Allow/Block lists, preferences, and confirmation identity (the way in which you are presented to mail that is challenged). With vqNow these things are separate for every user and every address, unless you intentionally "alias" two addresses together for a single user.

For these reasons (and now because of the mini-workgroup pricing), we recommend that small businesses use vqNow instead of vqME.

What else is different between vqME and vqNow?
The services route mail in the exactly opposite ways! With vqME, incoming mail is sent to your ISP or hosted provider and then re-directed to our server. After your mail is cleansed of Spam, viruses and phishing scams, your PC retrieves it from a clean mailbox on our server. [More details]. But vqNow and vqSA are true SMTP gateways. Mail sent to your domain begins at our servers, is cleaned, and then deposited into your existing mailboxes! Your individual users needn't alter their individual email settings to retrieve mail from us.

Additionally, vqNow has higher limits for total amount of email traffic and the limits are pooled amongst all users on a contract.

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