Smarsh

The best part by far was when we left and no longer had to deal with them.

I would never have started. It was days and days of frustration. Avoid them or enjoy the pain!

We signed up for Smarsh email archiving services for $8 per month per user. This is considered expensive, but we wanted a good service. We had about 26 users, so Smarsh should have been charging us bout $208 monthly. It started fine and we were charged this amount, but slowly, after the first few months, Smarsh started charging for other services. These services were NOT agreed to at any time and they were not in our contract. The monthly amount ballooned to nearly triple the $208. Note that we never requested any change, any additional services. Smarsh on their own, and despite the contract started charging more. At $8/month, Smarsh was already one of the most expensive options for archiving, but at almost $24/month, it was like charging $50 for an ice cream cone. We terminated our agreement and started with another provider. Smarsh at that time still had our archived emails. They were only willing to give them to us for $1,500 as a ransom payment. There was nothing in our contract about a fee to receive our own emails back once our relationship with Smarsh ended. We could have downloaded those emails from them via FTP at no cost to them (which is the way most firms in this space do it). Even mailing them to us on an external drive would have cost no more than a few hundred $. There were other problems as well, but I cannot discourage you enough from using Smarsh. Avoid at all costs unless you want to overpay for poor service, support, and having your content held at ransom. What they are doing is likely illegal. They cannot charge fees that are not on the agreed upon and signed contract. This is a class action waiting to happen.