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Lots of secure email providers come from dedicated organizations that commit to email and privacy, but Zoho’s option emerges from a much larger business.
Zoho’s exhaustive list of products includes this mail service, a comprehensive CRM platform, accounting tools, unified cloud services, helpdesk management tools, and dozens more.
In short, then, there’s lots going on with Zoho’s secure email product and its wider offering. While that may raise concerns about Zoho’s email effectiveness when compared to dedicated products, it also means this may be a great choice if you already use Zoho products in other areas of your organization.
Zoho Mail: Plans and pricing
Zoho’s pricing gets off to a surprising start: there’s a free product available. It’s generous, too, with support for up to five users, each with 5GB of space and a 25MB attachment limit. You can use web access and Android and iOS apps with the free plan, and it includes email hosting for a single domain – but not IMAP, POP or ActiveSync support.
The most affordable paid plan, Mail Lite, costs €0.90/$0.94/£0.80 per user per month and includes Zoho’s standard business email capability alongside tools like SecurePass password-protected mail, IMAP, POP and ActiveSync support and a calendar. Mail Lite’s default option includes 5GB of storage per user and a tiny price bump boosts that to 10GB.
The Mail Premium option costs €3.60/$3.74/£3.20 per month per user. It takes the Mail Lite package and adds 1GB attachments, retention, email backup, white labelling for customization and S-MIME security services. Mail Premium is available with a 15-day free trial.
The Workplace package costs €2.70/$2.81/£2.40 per user per month and becomes more expensive if you add features beyond email, with this product designed specifically for larger organizations.
It includes everything from the first two tiers alongside cloud file storage, online word processing, spreadsheet and presentation apps, comms tools, meeting software and collaboration utilities, so it’s more akin to a fully-fledged working suite, like something from Google or Microsoft.
Large organizations can contact Zoho’s sales team for enterprise deals, and flexible pricing means different plans for different users in your business.
Zoho Mail: Features
Zoho is GDPR and HIPAA compliant, which is a good start for any secure email product, and Zoho Mail has ISO 22301, 9001 and 27001 certifications.
Emails within the Zoho system are encrypted at rest and in transit. SSL/TLS connections encrypt emails in transit, S/MIME is used to encrypt message contents, and PGP adds another layer of protection.
Elsewhere, Zoho supports OAuth 2.0 authentication two-factor authentication and single sign-on, and Zoho monitors your accounts for unusual activity.
Zoho’s data centers are distributed throughout the US, Europe, China and India at data centers with security teams, biometric access and impressive levels of physical security. Still, those locations could be a red flag for some who may prefer their data to be physically stored in single locations with more robust privacy laws.
This product supports custom domains, POP, IMAP and ActiveSync and it’s available with Windows, Mac and Linux clients – that latter option is scarce among secure email providers. On mobile, there are mail, administration, collaboration and cloud storage apps available for Android and iOS devices, further bolstering Zoho’s credentials as a fully-featured productivity and business suite.
There are loads of other features that make Zoho a useful corporate option, too. Offline inboxes and automatic sending are supported alongside templates.
Zoho has also recently rolled out Zia, an AI assistant powered by OpenAI. Your mileage may vary on its usefulness, and there are concerns around privacy and sustainability with OpenAI’s products and those from other products, but Zia has auto-completion and writing, summarizing, tone alteration, content length adjustment and more.
Beyond email, Zoho offers a calendar, to-do list and notepad app, sleek contact organization, and its office tools at higher payment tiers. And, of course, there’s the wider integration with the entire Zoho system of business tools, with hundreds of options available throughout the ecosystem.
That’s great, but be aware that integrations with third-party tools will be limited – no surprise as Zoho wants to keep users within its system. There’s little from Google, Microsoft, Adobe or Apple, for instance.
Zoho Mail: Interface and in-use
Zoho Mail has an excellent interface, with a three-pane design weighted towards the contents of your emails – handy because it means your messages don’t feel uncomfortably cramped. Handy tabs at the top of the primary mail window hold messages and drafts, and a toolbar along the left edge serves up links to your calendar, contacts, to-do list and other email modules.
When composing emails there are useful buttons to record audio and secure emails with passwords and expiration dates, and on the right-hand side of the window you can access other parts of the Zoho ecosystem, like your word processor, cloud storage, meeting tool and CRM. Click a button in the top-right and you can access every other Zoho tool you’ve got in your account.
Visually it’s attractive, with light and dark modes that can sync to those settings on your main computer. You can change themes and colors, customize your font and font size, and dive into hundreds of settings to tweak the client’s functionality.
Zoho Mail: Support
Zoho offers 24/7 email-based technical support and, impressively, 24/7 phone support in twenty countries. There’s an extensive knowledge base, loads of guides available on Zoho’s website, and a broad FAQ section.
This is one of the best support offerings we’ve seen from this slate of secure email tools. However, it would have been good to see a live chat option – especially as Zoho is competing at a broader level with huge corporations by offering a full suite of business and office products.
Zoho Mail: The competition
Indeed, Zoho’s status as a full-service business and office provider means that it outstrips virtually every rival in terms of features, especially at its higher pricing tiers. The nearest competitors are Proton Mail, which offers a VPN, cloud storage and password management, and Mailbox.org, which has a word processor and spreadsheet tool.
Neither offer the same breadth of service as Zoho, though, and if you want to truly see who competes with Zoho then it’s worth looking at Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and GoDaddy.
It’s complex and does need some research and comparison before taking the plunge. Zoho does an excellent job with security, but some other business suites will go further in other areas – which might be more important for your organization.
Zoho Mail: Final verdict
There’s no doubt that Zoho is a very secure and effective email product, though, and it pairs that with great features and design – it’s packed with functionality and easy to use. The pricing is decent, too, with per-user and per-monthly costs that undercut many rivals.
This product is packed with more features than individuals will likely need, though, and Zoho Mail is at its best if you’re already locked into the Zoho ecosystem.
If not, then you need to weigh up Zoho against its other corporate rivals to see which one will work best for your organization.
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