Webmail leaves Windows for open source platform

Webmail.us, which provides hosted e-mail service for small and medium-size businesses, will announce next week a raft of improvements to its service, including a major migration of its core e-mail platform from Microsoft Windows to an open source platform.

Webmail.us, whose outsourced e-mail service is aimed at companies that have between five and 500 employees, adopted open source software to gain scalability, said Patrick Matthews, co-founder and CEO of Webmail.us and of its parent company Excedent Technologies in Blacksburg, Va.

"Using open source software allows us to tap into the open source community and move faster than with commercial manufacturers," Matthews said. "It helps us with long-term scalability, which is important because we're growing rapidly."

Excedent, founded in 1999, launched Webmail.us about a year ago. The subsidiary sells the service directly to customers and already has about 3,500 companies as clients.

From a platform based on Windows running in-house applications, Webmail.us has moved to Red Hat's Linux operating system with open-source e-mail applications such as PostFix, SquirrelMail, Courier, and Clam A/V. Coupled with infrastructure enhancements to its data center, Webmail.us now offers clients a guaranteed uptime of 99.99%, Matthews said. Webmail.us also supports Internet Message Access Protocol Version 4 and Post Office Protocol 3 and features anti-virus protection.

Along with this platform revamp, Webmail.us now has a new Web mail interface designed to resemble Microsoft's familiar Outlook; options of larger mailboxes (100M bytes or 1G byte); a message-preview pane; improved search capabilities; an advanced HTML editor; multilingual support for the spell-checker; expanded ability for importing and exporting addresses; and an auto-complete address feature.

While the new Web interface and the guaranteed uptime are fine features, Chicago Internet Inc. sticks with Webmail.us primarily because of its spam filtering and blocking capabilities, said Mike Biersma, Chicago Internet president. "Webmail.us is right on the leading edge of blocking spam," Biersma said.

When Chicago Internet, a Web and print design firm, switched to Webmail.us in mid-May, about 97% of the e-mail that Biersma received was spam, and he estimates he spent about an hour each day cleaning out his inbox of unsolicited messages. His employees also were affected by a daily spam avalanche. "We were getting buried with spam," he said.

Since the eight-person company began using Webmail.us, the spam problem has become a minor nuisance. "The occasional spam gets through, but now mostly I only get good e-mail. I've gained about an hour a day. It has been a huge difference in my business and for my employees," said Biersma, who has begun referring clients to Webmail.us.

Webmail.us also offers a control panel for clients to manage their accounts, add and delete mailboxes, change passwords, view statistics and configure spam filter settings.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.