The biggest headaches are found in companies with multiple email solutions. Many of these companies could handle it internally, but because they lack the proper staff never can get a handle on the situation.
My business is helping these organizations with multiple email systems find a solution until they are readu to consolidate. At that point some do outsource.
Outsourcing has good and bad points. It is all good until a server or service fails. Then people question their choices.
Would internal staff have you up and running fatser? If you had staff that could fix it, but are not allowed by contract to do so and have to wait hours for something to get done, is this in your companies bets interest?

We saved one organization an estimated $1Million a week lost in email system failures which their outsourcer could not udnerstand to remedy.

Like anything else, caveat emptor when choosing your outsourcing company.

I agree that e-mail has become a commodity. As such, outsourcing the function reveals many benefits from operational cost savings to better service levels. However, it is also certainly a mission-critical application and needs to be treated in that manner.

Even though Unisys has not been mentioned in the article, we are also one of the leading hosted Exchange service providers with additional value-add services attached to it if customers so desire; such as OWA, Blackberry, MS Mobile, Spam management, identity integration, etc. We provide these services at costs that are hard to attain by individual corporations due to the fact that we are able to focus our expertise, maintain and continuously improve process and procedures and remain flexible to meet customers' changing needs at any time.

The challenge for corporations and governments is entrusting their communications to an outsider. For one of the largest customers, we host over 67,000 active e-mail accounts, process over 8M messages each week and manage over 20 TB of e-mail data, while maintaining the service levels above 99.95% at a significantly lower cost than they could do themselves.

We are able to do so, mainly because of our proven security management, the personal attention we give to our customers and remaining flexible towards changing business needs. I think any business that is considering outsourcing their primary communications method should pay close attention to those details before being dazzled with the promises of tough-to-sustain cost savings.

It is interesting to see almost all examples mentioned were or are using exchange (not the best MTA to put it nicely). It may very well be that the source of most headaches is exchange. Not whether things are being outsourced or not. Choosing the right tool is a big step towards having a stable environment which works.

In other words, management's incapability in making the right choices has as much or more to do with how well their systems run. Blaming it on your in house IT staff kind of stinks.

Bossi and Brunner were both canned as a result of gross mismanagement of the environment and poorly chosen (or maybe not so poorly chosen $$$$$) technologies that created lots of disruption and wasted money and time.