“Email” is one word for two completely different jobs. Most businesses end up with one product trying to do both, and the result is mediocre at both. We use two purpose-built tools: one for each side.
Fastmail for staff inboxes
Your team needs mailboxes. They need an inbox at name@yourcompany.com, calendar invites that work, contacts that sync to their phone, a webmail interface that doesn’t ship telemetry to advertisers.
For that, we set clients up on Fastmail. They’re paid, Australian, privacy-respecting, and they’ve been doing one thing (hosted email) for two decades. No ads. No content scanning. A real Reply-To works. DKIM signs correctly. Multi-factor is sane. The clients we onboard are typically migrating from Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 and are surprised at how much friction disappears.
DNS for Fastmail is configured on every client zone:
- MX records pointing to Fastmail’s mail servers
- SPF record authorizing Fastmail to send on the domain’s behalf
- DKIM CNAMEs for signature validation
- DMARC record for reporting and policy enforcement
These records stay grey-cloud (DNS only) in Cloudflare; MX records can’t be proxied.
Outsend for system mail
Your applications send email too. Receipts. Password resets. Account confirmations. Newsletters. Notifications. That’s not the same problem as a staff mailbox; it’s about high-volume sending with rock-solid deliverability.
For that we operate Outsend, Martin Business Consultants’ own platform built on AWS SES. It signs every outbound message with DKIM specific to the sending domain, manages bounce and complaint handling, monitors sender reputation, and provides a first-class newsletter experience for marketing sends. Your subscriber list, your sender reputation, and the audit trail of every sent message stay yours.
Why not Gmail or Microsoft?
Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 try to do both jobs in one product, with mixed results:
- Per-seat pricing scales with headcount. A growing team is a growing line item, indefinitely.
- Data sits with the vendor, including the metadata: who emails whom, when, from where.
- Deliverability is opaque, when transactional sends start failing, you’re filing tickets with a support team that can’t tell you exactly what’s happening.
- Migration is expensive, moving thousands of mailboxes off later is a project.
Fastmail + Outsend is two products instead of one, but each one does its job well. The total cost is usually lower than what clients were paying for Workspace at the same headcount.
What we don’t run for you
We don’t operate your own email server. Self-hosted mail (Postfix + Dovecot + a long suffix of anti-spam software) is one of the harder things to keep running in 2026, IP reputation, DNSBLs, and the major providers’ deliverability heuristics make it more trouble than it’s worth for the typical SMB.
Fastmail’s deal is “let someone who only does email do email.” That fits our principles: open source where it counts, but we don’t insist on self-hosting things where self-hosting is a net loss for the client.