Why build? Doesn't anybody buy anymore? Most of your competitors have had the fucntionality you speak of for a while, a few of them for several years. Why not just license the tech and be done with it to gain parity. Allows you to concentrate less on catching up and more on getting ahead.

Should we build or buy is always a good question and one we always look at before making a major decision. But the reality is we have our own vision for our product. We're not looking to copy or catch up to a competitor. Likewise, we want all of the components of our platform to work together seamlessly. We also want them to evolve over time. None of this is easy if you buy someone else’s product. And lastly, even if we were to buy something, even though I don't know what we'd buy, it would still take a lot of work on the integration side. Nothing great is easy!

The holy grail of productivity applications for the many independent mobile professionals with Treos, Palms, Windows CE PDA, is a unified calendar and address book that can SYNC the data between there "desktop" storage and their PDA. In my case, I would give up my "offline" Thunderbird email client in exchange for: 1. a fast webmail client (I understand this is coming soon), 2. Google Quality Email search (I understand this is also in the works), and 3. Solid integration with my PDA (address book, calendar and email) for out of the office use.

Since IMAP provides the email access, all we need is calendar and address book SYNC of some type.

Irv Shapiro

All good points. Our aim is to build the webmail piece first, then look at SYNC options down the road. Everything we build will have open APIs so the possibilities will be there.

I totally agree with Irv. As Webmail.us develops, Group collaboration (shared calendars and contacts) are vital to those of us who either have or will be supporting mobile devices. I understand why Outlook integration would be down the line.... getting the core product to do Collaboration and IMAP email would cause many to leave Outlook/Thunderbird/etc. One area I would love to see is better WAP or HTML support to mobile devices... although I bet that's on it's way also!

Definitely.

After seeing that your company allows your employees to endorse your services here:
http://viewfromthemountain.typepad.com/applepeels/2006/03/lingering_regre.html

while slamming other companies, I certainly don't want to purchase your services.

What an incredibly unprofessional blog there. An ex-employee of a company obsesses about their ex-employer, taking every opportunity to put the company down, and in the process endorses webmail.us? Perhaps you could turn this into a series. All of your employees could post about ways in which their former employers sucked, and talk about ways that webmail.us is better. What great marketing!

I encourage our employees to blog freely at Webmail. That blog is a personal blog, not at all endorsed by our company or anyone other than the author of that respective blog.

I am glad to see that collaboration features are in the pipeline and that email client integration is on the radar screen as well. Collaboration has become essential to our organization (and I imagine to most every other). While I am no fan of Outlook, no one can deny the convenience of its unification of shared calendaring, shared contact management and email in one application. While webmail software with this feature set may be an option for some, I (and I suspect many others) have users familiar and comfortable with Outlook. It would require considerable cost and energy and weathering a period of substantially decreased productivity to transition them to another interface. Unfortunately, the demand for collaboration has resulted in pressure to move to an Exchange server.

In the short term, the ability to create one or more "shared contacts" directory (not unlike the "company directory" concept) that was also made accessibl by email clients via LDAP would go a long way to bridging the gap.

Thank you for all of your hard work.

Just wanted to say that I am looking forward to shared contacts. I am new to webmail.us, so far I've been very impressed with the overall functionality and responsiveness of the webmail system. Keep it up!