We are thrilled to announce Atmail ( parent company Netbased Software ) has won the NSW state Export Award for Smaill Business - It’s great to receive recognition for our company efforts with exporting an Australian software product to over 4,000 clients in 75 countries. We are a 95% export based business with offices in Western Sydney, development HQ in the Sunshine Coast, and a US sales and support office.

The Atmail office in Kurrajong, Australia has just been fitted out with a new 1kW grid-invert solar array, upgradable to 2kW. With help from Glen Morris from Solarquip, the Atmail office in Kurrajong is on track to be fully sustainable for our power needs.

Glen Morris and Ben Duncan next to the new solar array

Our aim is to offset all of Atmail’s power emissions by generating our own energy on each of our offices worldwide by the end of 2009. Australia is perfect for solar electricity, burning coal is just backwards for the 21st Century.

With the event of business cutting costs in wake of a global recession, we do hope companies will commit to the environment and reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

It’s been an exhilarating 24 days on the road with the Atmail mobile office. All systems are operational, and less then 10% of the journey has been made.

Australia provides breathtaking scenery, the vastness of this country is overwhelming. From remote coastal National parks, to dense world-heritage rainforests, this country is like no other. It’s a privilege to have the opportunity to showcase the Virtual office and be connected to clients and the Atmail development team so easily.

Quick status:

• Driven approx 2,000km’s
• 60 watt solar panel and 100aH battery have proven themselves, no issues with power
• Internet coverage via NextG mobile-network is working almost everywhere visited, from National Parks, to remote coastal villages, and into “the middle of nowhere” in Northern NSW and Queensland
• The 4×4 “Carcam” eye has taken over 1,000 photos of random locations while driving - My personal favorite
• After the devastating fires that ravaged Australia, currently stuck in Northern NSW in a flood declared area. Insane.

Keep tuned, the new Atmail mobile office website will be online by the end of Feb. Till then, the open (wet) road awaits!

Ben Duncan, the founder of Atmail has embarked on a 6 month journey around the entire of Australia, in a specially modified 4WD Land Rover to demonstrate the ability to work online and maintain a virtual presence using the latest technologies.
The trip will take the Atmail mobile office into the far reaching parts of the Australian desert, across the coastline of Australia, into the red-center and across to the lush rainforests of tropical North-Queensland. The Atmail mobile office will be online using the latest BGAN Satellite and NextG mobile internet, to keep the pulse alive.

Using a custom version of the Atmail mail-server for remote connections, the 4WD runs it’s own SMTP server, with delivery of messages via an SMTP smarthost. The technology in the 4WD includes:

• Linux eeePC used for the car Atmail server, SMTP and Web proxy
• Telstra NextG mobile router
• Linksys Wifi device
• 60W solar panel connected to a 100ah battery
• Dual battery isolator for charging the battery bank, and solar regulator to charge the battery when the 4WD is off.
• Live streaming CarCam, updates an image every 5 minutes from the mobile-office “eye” embedded on the roof
• Uniden GPS for navigation
• Roof tent for sleeping
• Macbook Pro and VMware used for development and SVN environments
• Full kitchen, gas and storage within car

From within the 4WD mobile office, Ben Duncan will help co-ordinate the new Atmail 6 release and upcoming products for the company into 2009. The car includes a full development environment and SVN snapshots.

Australia provides breathtaking scenery and wide open-spaces to find inspiration and product R&D ideas you would normally struggle to find at a regular city office, no matter how much coffee!

With over 16,000km’s left on the journey, keep tuned to http://atmailmobileoffice.com/ for a soon to be released web-site and gallery showcasing the trip, blog, and technology behind the adventure!

We are happy to announce the new Atmail site is now launched! Our user-interface and usability team loved working on the new site to reflect Atmail growing and our exposure to the market increase.

The site has been designed with easier navigation on the Atmail Webmail, Mail Server and Appliance product-lines, and a clearer description of the added-value services we offer such as onsite training and support services.

You can also see the face of Atmail via the new contact page with photos of our offices, with our staff profiles soon to be online for the new about us page.

Please post any feedback on our new site design below, we are keen to optimize as per user feedback!

Cheers,

~ Atmail UI/Graphics team ( Back to the Atmail 6 user-interface development now! )

We are welcoming new case-studies for Atmail, do you have an installation you’d like to show off and have published on the Atmail portfolio page?

If you have an active Atmail installation, a custom Webmail template, or an interesting real-world usage of Atmail you’d like to share? We are welcoming submissions for new Atmail case-studies. Have your install published on atmail.com and show your stuff!

Corey and I spent the better part of this week in beautiful downtown Chicago for HostingCon.  Overall I think the show was a great success for us individually and as a company.  Getting out to mingle and network with such a focused group of people is such a wonderful way to grasp the pulse of the industry.  It was also a wonderful way to get to know some of our existing customers that also attended the show and hear how they have deployed AtMail first hand.  We received excellent feedback on what people really liked about the software as well as what people would like to see in the next versions.

Above: Jason Brown fine tunes the AtMail Cluster.

Hopefully we’ll get to see everyone again next year in Washington DC for HostingCon 2009!!!

Hi all.

My Name is Allan, I have just joined the AtMail team.

I am based at the Peregian Beach office, and soon everyone at AtMail will be coming together here to brainstorm the next generation of AtMail.

Over the next few weeks and months I will be on the team writing the next generation of the AtMail software.

Please send us your wishes or recommendations for the next version so that we can include them in our brainstorming.

Regards

Allan Wrethman

Apple’s announcement at the WWDC was mainly of the 3G iPhone - an announcement that met somewhat lukewarm reception by fans and critics alike. Somewhat unexpected given Jobs’ ability to sell, perhaps it is open for dissection.

While a lot of people welcomed cloud computing capabilities, along with push email, addressbook and calendar features, common points of contention include:

• The price of the service. At 8.95 a month on top of the fees with the 2 year contract attached to the 199 USD iPhone, it seems a bit steep. Perhaps even counteracting the price drop announced.

• The wrapping of applications via the controversial FairPlay scheme, coupled with a centralized gateway to acquire the aforementioned is also a hot topic. With the slow but sure demise of DRM technologies, this may be a step in the wrong direction.

• While welcome to end users, enterprise implementations may be hindered by the fact that data is stored via Apple; some lament the lack of an implementation divorced from me.com.

It is not all for the worse, however. The MobileMe service has so far looked elegant, with features that are highly useful and intuitive - a stamp of Apple’s dedication to human interface guidelines, and implementations that just work.

This might also turn the gears towards a computing feature that is web-based. Recent developments in the IT industry suggest a return to its thin-client roots; where applications are accessed via a central mainframe, through transparent
browsers.

The hype’s temperature so far? No bangs, but large whimpers. However, critics do not doubt that the newly-announced MobileMe service will in fact sell; after all, we are all familiar with Apple’s track record at making products a commodity.

June 1, 2008 will bring a close to the support and availability of the AtMail Server for the Windows platform. We will honor any existing support contract for the most recent Windows version of AtMail (currently AtMail 4.51 perl) to the end of it’s term. The online documentation and support pages will continue to be available for our customers that wish to continue to use the Windows version without support contracts.

After a great deal of consideration, the AtMail team has decided to focus it’s development efforts on the Linux platform and it’s appliance offering. Our support staff will be available to assist in any existing clients that are interested in migrating to the Linux build and we will be running a promotion on our appliance as we phase this out.

We will continue to develop and release the client version of AtMail for Windows and encourage anyone interested in using AtMail Server in a windows environment to contact our sales and support staff to discuss how AtMail can be implemented in your environment.