Rohan Jayasekera, Director of Tucows E-Mail Service

With a new and evangelistic director of e-mail, Tucows is focusing on perfecting the basics of e-mail.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [May 12, 2008]

Toronto-based Tucows has a new director of the Tucows E-mail Service (TES), Rohan Jayasekera. On his blog, Jayasekera wrote that he wants to make e-mail reliable again:

When I first used email about 35 years ago, it was much better than it is now: if I sent an email, I could be sure that it would reach its recipients (unless they were avoiding their email of course!), and there was nothing annoying about email either. Plus I could retract emails that I had already sent. Now, email is more important than ever, but it’s deteriorated. I will do what I can to help make email great again.

Jayasekera also wrote that web-based e-mail should be as good as PC-based. Whereas it used to be the service you'd only use if you had to, Google showed, with GMail, that web-based mail can be as good as anything on the desktop.

"Our focus is not on e-mail features, but reliability," Jayasekera says. "We're focusing on making everything just work."

Tucows has two data centers. The main data center is at Q9 in Toronto. The U.S. data center is in Ashburn, Va. (one of the MAE-East cities).

Jayasekera says the company has e-mail clusters in each data center that can scale to millions of mailboxes.

So business is doing well? "Our sales pipeline is bigger than it's ever been," he says, referring to sales to Tucows' ISP and hosting resellers.

E-mail evangelism
Jayasekera believes that e-mail can be better. The most important aspect of that, he says, is spam detection. The company uses a variety of anti-spam solutions (he doesn't want to divulge specifics) such as RBLs, heuristic solutions, and filtering (plus guaranteed uptime) to distinguish its solution from competitors'.

He also believes that IMAP is a key technology that any ISP should take advantage of. "I'm a big believer in IMAP. Not everyone wants to use webmail, and IMAP is a way for people to keep using their e-mail client. People want to use webmail so that if their disk drive fails, there's no loss of e-mail. And they cannot access their spam folders through POP."

There are other advantages of IMAP. The user's sorting rules are stored on the server, and for anyone on a slow connection, downloading just the header of the e-mail can save a lot of time. "Everyone has a story of having to download their uncle's holiday photograph over dialup before they could get to that small but critical e-mail," says Jayasekera.

Jayasekera points out that RIM Blackberry is popular in part because of its push e-mail feature. In an e-mail after the interview, he writes to us:

Well, IMAP provides "push" email too. So any mobile device that has an IMAP-supporting email program can be "just like a BlackBerry". Also, the BlackBerry's built-in email program supports IMAP, so it works very nicely with the Tucows Email Service—no need for an expensive BlackBerry-oriented email service.

TES requires other skills too. Building a successful outsourced e-mail business, Jayasekera says, requires skill at migrating an ISP's e-mail service from anything to Tucows. "Migration is important. It's important that it happen smoothly and reliability. With experience, we're quite good at it now."

Personal names
Jayasekera has another area of responsibility: he's running the personal name serivce portion of Tucows' domain name portfolio. Tucows now has about 40,000 surname-based domain names. "We see this as an attractive offer to ISPs' customers. It can be forwarded to an existing e-mail address or they can use the TES service that's provided with the domain name."

Tucows charges the ISP $0.75 per user per month for the personal name service, and the ISP can charge anything they like (perhaps Tucows is expecting ISPs to charge users about $1 per month for the service).

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