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August 16, 2006

Webmail.us relaunches enterprise webmail with ajax and more

Marshall Kirkpatrick

47 comments »

webmail.us logoVirginia based Webmail.us relaunched its web email service for small businesses this morning and it’s so ajax intensive that it’s really smooth to use. It’s not for everyone and it’s got some limitations to it, but small businesses interested in inexpensive enterprise webmail may find that their users really like it. Search, ajax and lightweight RSS integration are the product’s strengths.

Webmail.us has been around since ‘99 but decided to focus on email outsourcing in 2003. The company received about a half million dollars in funding from private investors last year. Now in 2006 the company has a real Web 2.0 feel to it, with an active company blog and frequent software updates in addition to the new ajax UI.

The product is simple, ease of use is a primary aim, but it’s also got some cool features that make it interesting. Clicking on an email’s title in your inbox, for example, opens it up immediately below in an ajax box that feels like a desktop application. If you like the ajax feel of GMail you may like the Webmail platform even better, it’s got very smooth feel to it. There’s a one click demo account set up on the site so you can see for yourself.

Search can be limited to a single folder or across all of your items. Various fields can be searched easily and only items that include attachments can be searched. The spell checker has a nice feel to it and a handy revert button.

Calendering, contacts and a task list are all integrated. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds, though the feed reader is very lightweight right now. It might be appropriate for the state of small business RSS use, but I’d like to see it support OPML import and export (update: the company says this is supported) and a river of news view.

Webmail.us is also quite limited in terms of how to organize your emails. There’s no tagging or labels and it’s not even clear to me how to create new folders. Perhaps the search is aimed to full fill those needs while keeping things uncluttered.

Integration with other email systems is supported and the company says they have awesome spam filtering. I haven’t been able to test that out yet.

Standard storage plans range from 100mb up to 5GB per mailbox. Prices are low and judging from testimony around the web, the company’s product prior to relaunch satisfied the needs of many small businesses. Worth a look for sure. Richard MacManus wrote a nice overview of the webmail startup space yesterday that also included Webmail.us.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 8:24 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. tommy500

    August 16th, 2006 at 12:53 pm

  2. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Webmail.usのエンタプライズ向けウェブメール、ajaxやその他を盛り込み再登場

    August 16th, 2006 at 1:14 pm

  3. duncanriley.com » Something not right about this line

    August 16th, 2006 at 6:01 pm

  4. Webmail.us AJAXified Enterprise Webmail » Dee’s-Planet! Blog

    August 20th, 2006 at 12:21 pm

Comments

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  1. Peter

    August 16th, 2006 at 9:36 am

    I like the interface - it feels very intuitive and is a good replication of an uncomplicated, easy-to-use desktop e-mail application. Though they’re using JavaScript, it’s used quite well, I think, and the app doesn’t feel “slow” or “bloated”. Windows Live Mail could learn a thing or two!

  2. Ricardo Tohmé

    August 16th, 2006 at 9:41 am

    Sorry, but… is this just plain old advertising or what?

    TechCrunch Network seems to be growing really fast, and I’m glad for that. I’m afraid to say that editorial quality, however, seems to be suffering lately, and I wonder why.

    CrunchBoard revenue itself, let alone TechCrunch’s own cash flow, should allow to produce interesting content, but it seems to be going the other way in the last days. I sincerely hope TC can get its act together again.

  3. Some One

    August 16th, 2006 at 9:43 am

    Exactly. TechCrunch is garbage these days… I don’t even know why I visit it every day. Bad habit I guess.

  4. Some One

    August 16th, 2006 at 9:45 am

    TechCrunch’s sole purpose these days is to capitalize on the trend and “success” as much as possible and make a quick buck with tons of ads and sponsored corporate B.S.

  5. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    August 16th, 2006 at 9:46 am

    At least the legacy of nasty comments remains. Thanks for holding up your end of the deal ;)

  6. fro0ty

    August 16th, 2006 at 9:46 am

    kinda a bit like http://www.roundcube.net/ ajax email

    http://www.playpacman.net/sonic/

  7. Ricardo Tohmé

    August 16th, 2006 at 9:51 am

    Marshall,

    It really wasn’t my intention to be nasty, and I’m sorry if that’s what you feel about my comments. On a personal note, I don’t think TC is “garbage”, I really like what you’re doing here… however, I feel that posts like this one are little more than sponsored links, and I stand by my opinion. As I said before, I just hope to see quality content here again once your network sites settle down.

  8. tom

    August 16th, 2006 at 9:52 am

    Seems Michael is slowly getting out as well.. it’s been all “Marshall” making posts lately…

  9. Ryan Hagan

    August 16th, 2006 at 10:03 am

    I work in the same building as the Webmail.us guys and I can tell you that they are a hard working bunch of guys and gals. They make a great product which is constantly improving. I take every chance I get to talk with their CEO and CTO who are always willing to impart their knowledge with just about anyone that asks. Personally, I think a mention of Webmail is long overdue here. Keep up the good work.

  10. Dave

    August 16th, 2006 at 10:06 am

    I’ve used webmail about six months ago… this is exactly as it was then? whats different?

  11. anon-guy

    August 16th, 2006 at 10:08 am

    HA. webmail.us (http://www.webmail.us/features/rss) specifically says “Import or export OMPL feed lists”. I’m not sure what an OMPL is, maybe that’s why Marshall wants them to support OPML.

    For you flamers: I know it’s a typo on webmail.us’s site.

  12. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    August 16th, 2006 at 10:10 am

    anon-guy, thanks

  13. Pat Matthews

    August 16th, 2006 at 10:21 am

    Man, you guys are a tough crowd. ;-)

    Anon-guy: good catch. We just removed that bullet from our website. We had the import OPML feature inside webmail, but took it out since it’s not full-proof quite yet.

  14. Some One

    August 16th, 2006 at 10:26 am

    Don’t get me wrong - I think Webmail.us is an excellent product and a good example of a successful startup. I do, however, think that the overall quality of TechCrunch has been decreased significantly lately. Not to mention the amateur sites in the TC network…

    Greed is what drives TC nowadays…

  15. tom

    August 16th, 2006 at 10:27 am

    at any rate ive been using them since february or so and will be renewing come time again.. i have had no downtime or problems at all and they now offer 24/7 support incase you need it. although the 100mb for $60/year is kind of expensive.. with the cost of HDs these days they should bump the space up a little…

  16. Some One

    August 16th, 2006 at 10:27 am

    And one more thing - it’s pathetic how various owners of lame Web 2.0 “ventures” post comments only so that a few people will see their URL… LOL.

  17. Wait, what?

    August 16th, 2006 at 10:35 am

    Webmail.us is a fine service, but with that article, followed by these comments, why does anyone bother to visit TechCrunch?

  18. Normally a fan

    August 16th, 2006 at 10:46 am

    I agree with most of the posts here. If you go to the webmail.us one click trial you’ll se that they have the techcrunch feed as one of only three feeds listed in there. No wonder they got this write up. One hand washes the other.

  19. Ezrie

    August 16th, 2006 at 11:02 am

    I use gmail hosted and I love it. This may have potential, but gmail gets my vote.

  20. dave

    August 16th, 2006 at 11:07 am

    that’s an awesome idea for a business - take something that a giant company like microsoft offers for free already bundled and integrated with a live service offering and decades of experience, but add some ajax and try to get people to pay for it…

    btw, i’ll be watching ‘inside man’ this week and invite people to come over for 10 dollars each, byob…

  21. Some One # 2

    August 16th, 2006 at 11:21 am

    Dear Some one,
    If you really feel strongly against TC, why do you still read it?
    I think it’s really not fair to criticize TechCrunch in such manner, even if some of their posts are advertisement. In fact, major newspapers such as New York Times does this very often. So, please let’s not waste everybody’s time with these childish comments.

  22. mike

    August 16th, 2006 at 11:28 am

    @dave:

    you’re not referring to hotmail are you? since i’ll give you more credit than that, what “decades of experience” are you talking about?

  23. dumbfounder

    August 16th, 2006 at 11:34 am

    Dear Some One,

    I resemble that remark.

    http://www.searchles.com
    http://www.dumbfind.com

    sincerely,

    dumbfounder

  24. Pete

    August 16th, 2006 at 11:41 am

    Just want to say I have been using webmail.us for over a year and it sucks mostly because it’s slooow.

  25. Driver tool

    August 16th, 2006 at 11:42 am

    It looks very much like Outlook, it’s web based, and is very fast. I hope they don’t do dumb things like blocking .EXE files like GMail does. I wish I could turn that off. I really like the product.

  26. Jesper

    August 16th, 2006 at 11:43 am

    Concerning the editorial quality of TCs post lately (I’m sorry Marshal, but I really must agree with a lot of the other commenters), it would be a really nice feature to be able to exclude post by editors other than Michael himself from the RSS-feed.

    I don’t blame Michael Arrington for trying to expand the business, I would probably do the same, where I in his shoes, but his co-editor(s?) just don’t live up to Michael. Marshal isn’t bad by most standards, but also no better than what you can find everywhere else in the blogosphere, thereby removing the incentive to return to techcrunch on a regular basis.

    Sorry Marshall, if you consider this flaming…

  27. Some One

    August 16th, 2006 at 11:46 am

    LOL dumbfounder… just LOL.

  28. David Catalano

    August 16th, 2006 at 11:47 am

    Sounds like a lot of jealous people who are waiting to get their Web 2.0 app reviewed by TC. Bash’em until they give you recognition… is that it? Stupid idiots.

    Would you rather leave hosted email up to M$, Google and Yahoo!? Quit your bitchin’ and take it for what it is — an overview of a solid email hosting platform for businesses. It’s not in Private Beta or Alpha, or “stealth mode.” It’s a real-deal scaled web app. Isn’t that the focus of TechCrunch?

  29. Some One

    August 16th, 2006 at 11:48 am

    Some One 2:

    I come back here because it’s hard to get rid of bad habits. That’s why I also continue to visit GigaOM.

  30. mroonie

    August 16th, 2006 at 12:17 pm

    Seems like a great product for small businesses. Except for the fact that it lacks one very important feature….security. If the SMBs are not enforcing any type of email security along with this product, seems like there’s going to be a lot of trouble for both parties in the future.

    http://www.essentialsecurity.c.....icle17.htm

    For $60 seems pretty expensive for a product that doesn’t provide all necessary features i.e. encryption, authentication, etc….You’d think that with all the problems businesses, and especially our own gov, have been facing today with internet security issues, that products would update their product in response to recent trends….

  31. Joel

    August 16th, 2006 at 12:32 pm

    @mroonie

    SSL is used and clearly available at https://secure.webmail.us .
    Most common IMAP and POP client also support TLS/SSL as do Webmail’s servers.

  32. anon-guy

    August 16th, 2006 at 1:29 pm

    Ya know… they could have been more web 2.0 by registering for an Israel domain and made somthing like: http://web.ma.il

  33. El Guapo

    August 16th, 2006 at 4:13 pm

    Nice Advertisement!

  34. Normally a fan

    August 16th, 2006 at 5:37 pm

    you can’t register two letter domains anon-guy but that’s a pretty damn good idea.

    second I agree. I wouldn’t switch away from gmail which offers basically the exact same things for free and is 10 times faster. With gmail you can recieve POP mail and you can also set up different accounts to send the mail from.

    Sure webmail.us has a pretty cool, albeit clunky, ajax interface, but if you’re going to pay for email, even something like fastmail.fm is a much better price and probably 50 times faster, with even more features.

    It really is sad to see TC hawking this subpar product. I’d like to know what the ties are? Like I said before, they have TC listed in their RSS feeds on the demo. Is that what it takes to get on TC now?

    And just for the record I have no 2.0 web app that I am hawking but I would like to be able to rely on TC to provide me with quality info on cutting edge products. This definitely is not one of them.

    And in response to what somebody said earlier about the NYT doing it. Well, that’s why most of us come here instead of the NYT because we expect TC not to do it.

  35. Andrew

    August 16th, 2006 at 6:11 pm

    Looks like a scaled down http://www.zimbra.com/ which has way more features for the same price, they have lots of hosting providers.

    From the website…

    # Shared calendar
    # Web document authoring and sharing
    # “Over the air” sync to mobile devices
    # VoIP integration
    # Microsoft Outlook, Apple, and Linux compatibility

  36. Martey

    August 16th, 2006 at 8:09 pm

    While webmail.us’ demo account is quick to load, it would have been nice if they had seeded the inbox and other folders with a few sample messages, especially as sending messages is disabled. As it stands, the demo is useful for seeing what the user interface looks like, but not much else.

  37. anon-guy

    August 16th, 2006 at 9:04 pm

    Normally a fan,

    You can register two letter domain names. How about ny.com, aa.com, aw.com? aj.com? bk.com? bp.com?

    Or better how about one letter domain names? z.com (I love the 350!WOW!), x.com (PayPal.com)

  38. Normally a fan

    August 17th, 2006 at 4:53 am

    i’m not saying they don’t exist, i’m saying YOU, ME, etc can’t register them.

    All the two and three letter combinations in .com/.net/.org were registered many years ago and they rarely appear for registration. Also, the .org registry has decided to stop registration of new 2 letter domains which means 2 letter .org domains expire but cannot be re-registered. The .biz and .info registries only permit three letter domains and above. The .uk registry allows 2 letter combainations provided one is a number, but all of these were registered years ago.

  39. Karolin

    August 17th, 2006 at 8:11 am

    I get the e-mail newsletter, and I actually find that TC gives me the best single source for product reviews. I just don’t have time to hit several websites to compile all the data myself. I can live with the bias, as long as it’s up front. After all, every company with a new product lives for its 15 minutes.

  40. Jim R

    August 17th, 2006 at 3:50 pm

    I spent several months with Webmail.us, and I was very satisfied with their email hosting service. I moved my domains to Gmail hosted and Windows Live Domains, just to try out those *free* services, and to determine if a paid service like Webmail.us is obsolete for small businesses.

    AOL will be throwing their hat into the free email hosting ring soon as well. This means that all the big boys out there (Google, AOL, MSN) will be providing FREE email hosting for your domain.

    The average small business owner, in my experienced opinion, doesn’t give as much thought as he or she should when considering email services for their website’s domain. Now present them with the option of the 3 giants - Google (Gmail), AOL, and MSN (Hotmail/Live Mail) all of which are free - versus paying for email hosting with Webmail.us…Not a pretty picture for Webmail.us.

    My mother always proclaimed, “I don’t believe in free.” I get that; everything comes with a price, in one form or another. On the surface, one may conclude that a few banner ads taking up precious browser space may be the price to pay for hosting their email with AOL or Hotmail. But, there is so much more to consider. So, I recommend looking beyond dollars, and consider the *sense*.

    As for my current conclusions, I think Hotmail (and maybe AOL) is a great solution for your club or group. Gmail is, in my opinion, ideal for small businesses out of the 3 giants (AOL, Hotmail, & Google), and a worthy contender for Webmail.us.

    But, don’t completely dismiss Webmail.us. I haven’t. This is a great company with true leadership and vision. All they do is email. Plus, if you have a problem, they have a number you can call. None of the big boys have that kind of support…Now that’s something to really consider.

    Bottom line: We as consumers have many options now when it comes to email hosting, and the players involved are all competing for our business. It doesn’t get any better than that.

  41. Ruby on Rails

    August 18th, 2006 at 6:33 pm

    This does look like the Roundcube e-mail system that we’ve seen before. Hotmail really ought to catch up with the times too.. Msoft is really dragging their feet now. ruby @ http://rubyonrailsblog.com/

  42. SuperK

    August 25th, 2006 at 3:29 am

    I used Webmail.us for my small business (4 domains) for about 3 months, but I had to find another provider because their service was totally unreliable. I lost 5 important messages in a single day and the Webmail.us support person who handled my complaint was very rude and arrogant about the whole thing.

    On another note, Webmail.us is well known for stealing ideas from other more established providers (e.g. BlueTie, Mail2world and Everyone.net) and projects (e.g. Roundcube). They just copycat features and designs because they lack creative thinking, originality and imagination!!

    My recommendation is to use GMail Hosted Mail.

  43. AZZIEZ

    November 26th, 2006 at 1:13 pm

    HI

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