What Managed Email Covers for a Small Firm

A Gmail address on a law firm’s business card tells a prospective client something you probably didn’t mean to say. So does an address at whatever internet provider the office signed up with years ago. Managed email fixes both: every mailbox on your own domain, run by someone whose job it is to keep it working.

Mailboxes on your own domain

Everyone at the firm gets an address at yourfirm.com, on Microsoft’s mail platform. We set up the mailboxes, publish the DNS records that route mail to them, and add people when you hire. Addresses like info@ or sales@ are included at no charge on every plan. They route into a real mailbox rather than being separate accounts anyone signs in to, so you pay per person, not per address.

A shared mailbox, such as intake@, doesn’t need a paid seat either. Several people open it alongside their own inbox, each with their own sign-in.

What it costs

Managed email starts at $6 per user, per month, with Exchange Online Plan 1, which covers email in the browser. Microsoft Business Basic is $8 per user, per month, and adds Teams along with Word, Excel and PowerPoint in the browser. Microsoft 365 Business Standard is $16 per user, per month, and adds the installed desktop apps.

It’s billed per mailbox with no minimum, so a solo practitioner pays for one mailbox and a six-person office pays for six. Email isn’t folded into a website hosting plan; it’s its own line on the bill.

The records that show mail is really yours

Anyone can type your firm’s name into the From line of an email. What lets a receiving mail server tell your real mail from an impersonation is a set of DNS records called SPF, DKIM and DMARC. We publish them on your domain when the mailboxes go live, and our monitoring re-checks them every day, because they tend to drift when someone signs the firm up for a new tool that sends mail.

DMARC earns its place, within limits. Published at enforcement, it tells receiving servers to quarantine or reject mail that forges your exact domain. A lookalike domain one letter off yours gets past it, and so does a real account someone has broken into. Before acting on new payment instructions, confirm them by phone on a number you already had.

Sign-in protection

We switch on multi-factor authentication when we set the mailboxes up, so a stolen password on its own isn’t enough to open one. Our post on two-factor authentication explains how that works and why email is the first account that needs it.

Moving in, and moving people out

Whether the firm is on Gmail, on another Microsoft account, or on something a previous vendor set up and never explained, the move runs in the same order. We build the new mailboxes first, move the existing mail across, and change the DNS records last, so mail keeps arriving throughout. If your addresses are already on your own domain, you keep them. If you’re on a gmail.com or internet provider address, everyone gets a new one at yourfirm.com, and the old mail comes across wherever it sits on a server we can reach.

When someone leaves, you decide what happens to their mail: keep the account receiving, forward it to a colleague, set an auto-reply, or close it. Closing it is never a quiet default, because once the license comes off, Microsoft gives you thirty days before the contents are gone.

What it doesn’t cover

Better to say this here than on a call:

• Archiving, litigation hold and Purview retention policies. Those need Microsoft licensing above the plans we sell, so we can’t switch them on for you. If your firm needs them, raise it early.
• Compliance. We configure the mail platform. What your firm is required to do with client information is the firm’s to read and follow, and we don’t guarantee compliance with professional or regulatory obligations.
• Protecting a document once it’s in someone else’s inbox. For sensitive files, a secure upload link from your document or tax software beats email.
• The rest of your IT. We don’t run a help desk, manage laptops or look after an office network.

Is it worth it for a small office?

Small offices are who it’s for. A two-person firm and a twelve-person firm want the same things from email, and without someone to own it, the job lands on whoever is least busy that week. The firm-specific detail is on our pages for Microsoft 365 for law firms and Microsoft 365 for accounting firms, and every plan sits on our pricing page.

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