What may be the world's largest provider of own-branded e-mail services announced a major upgrade at ISPCON.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [June 8, 2006]

At ISPCON, international e-mail hosting company Outblaze announced that its service has been upgraded with AJAX.

Asked whether this was Web 2.0, Stef Bensi, managing director of Outblaze for the US and Europe, carefully defined the term. "From our perspective, Web 2.0, in contrast to the first generation, gives users a more desktop-like experience than was possible with static web pages. AJAX is one of the most popular techniques available to do that."

Bensi says that upgrades and features are added in response to customer requests. Outblaze's customers have 40 million mailboxes and the company provides anti-spam and anti-virus for 25 million more (the company's anti-spam and anti-virus service is run out of Madras by noted anti-spam expert Suresh Ramasubramanian). The company has customers in 117 countries. Bensi says that Outblaze's economies of scale allow it to defray the cost of innovation across many customers.

And ISPs benefit from that, he says.

"ISPs want to retain users," Bensi says. "ISPs need to differentiate their product and increase revenues per user." Offering a service that can be customized increases customer stickyness.

The demo
Bensi turns on a remote demo and I can see what he sees on his screen. He's showing me what AJAX does for webmail. It looks like any other e-mail client. Bensi says that the text of each e-mail is downloaded and rendered as the e-mail arrives.

He shows how you can drag a message to a folder, rename or delete any folder, view a split pane while replying so that you can scroll to one part of a message while writing in another. He shows how you can format the text color, size, and font. He points out that while many webmail clients have one click delete of an e-mail, Outblaze will prompt you before discarding an e-mail that has not been sent or saved as a draft.

The choice
Bensi says that Outblaze's ISP customers can choose whether to upgrade to AJAX or stay with the old system. He notes that some people dislike change. Others serve an ad every time a page is loaded, and since AJAX doesn't reload pages, it delivers fewer ads. Finally, there are some custom built features that aren't ready for AJAX. For example, one customer has a feature that allows users to post composed e-mails to a blog, and this feature is not yet ready in AJAX.

Nevertheless, Bensi expects all customers to eventually adopt AJAX, starting with corporate and ISP customers.

—End