Created by a security consulting company, Pop3Now offers ISPs a secure webmail solution.

by Jeff Goldman [September 1, 2004]

The security consulting company behind Pop3Now, secureFront, was founded back in 1998. "The security industry was pretty young then and not too many people knew about it, so we though at first it was going to be a more specialized, niche market," says Albert C. Lee, secureFront's Chief Technology Officer. "At this point, the industry has grown to be much larger than we first envisioned."

Soon after the founding of the company, Lee says, they decided to create a secure webmail solution. "We had a need internally to communicate securely from our client sites, and we weren't happy with any of the commercial solutions—so we engineered the Pop3Now service," he says. "We showed it to a couple of clients of ours and they were impressed, so we made the decision to make it a marketable product."

Pop3Now partners@pop3now.com

Pop3Now's greatest strength, Lee says, lies in its security. "There really isn't anything else that fills the markets we fill," he says. "We're developed as a security solution from the ground up. A lot of the current solutions, such as Microsoft Outlook Web Access, were designed as an application first and then they built security on top of it. We took a different approach."

David Gershon, secureFront's President and Chief Operating Officer, says the company is able to be flexible in working with ISP clients. "Typically, the ISP will contact us and explain their needs," he says. "Usually, they haven't found the right webmail solution, and we'll customize the application to them."

Outsourced webmail
In most cases, Pop3Now is set up as an entirely outsourced solution. "We set up everything on our end," Lee says. "We provision a server for them and a domain name, and we give them a URL to send to their users when they want to access their e-mail. Then they link to it off their website, or they give it out as part of the starter kit for their service."

As part of the setup process, the offering is branded to match the ISP's look and feel. "We do require them to do some minimal co-branding— our copyrights, of course, and things like that—but really it's up to them to tell us what their users expect to see, and then we rework the application to fit their expectations," Lee says.

The fact that Pop3Now is completely outsourced, Lee says, is a strong selling point for most ISPs. "There's really nothing for them to do on their end," he says. "We handle the support for them for the product, we handle the hosting, we handle the server, the bandwidth—so they're not allocating any additional resources. I think most ISPs are pretty happy with that."

Support for the service is entirely e-mail based, allowing the end user to contact secureFront directly with any questions. "They send webmail inquires to us, and we field them," Lee says. "It's available within the application. They'll see, if they have any support questions, to contact us as opposed to contacting their ISP."

ISP partnerships
While secureFront will work with any size of ISP, Lee says small to medium sized ISPs are the company's most frequent customers. "They're the ones that are most interested, because they don't want to have another system to maintain," he says. "They don't want more users calling in with problems with their webmail, so this is very attractive for them."

Individuals can access the service through the web site for $5 per year (soon to be $10). For ISPs, partnerships cost between $1 and $5 per user per month, depending on volume—but that's for simultaneous users. "We'd like to think that maybe a third or a quarter of their users might access it simultaneously, and bill them according to that," Lee says.

Most clients, Gershon says, inquire about the service after using it themselves on a personal level. "Oftentimes, a customer will have used our service and seen the benefits, and will contact the ISP and say, 'Why don't you use this solution?'—or someone who runs the ISP will have seen the service personally," he says.

Focused on security
Karl Mendez is the Managing Director of CWCS Managed Hosting, a hosting company based in Nottingham, England which offers managed solutions for small to medium size companies. According to Mendez, CWCS began using Pop3Now about four years ago. "Our clients wanted to be checking their e-mail securely online, and we found Pop3Now to be a secure service," he says.

Mendez says CWCS does offer other webmail solutions to its clients in addition to Pop3Now, depending on the package the client selects. "On our shared hosting packages, we mainly use Pop3Now for our webmail solution," he says. "But for our dedicated hosting, the control panel used comes with a webmail service."

Pop3Now's greatest strength, Mendez says, lies in its security—though the product's ease of use and the company's flexibility were also key selling points. "They modified the application to fit our needs—it has a template at the bottom with our company name on it," he says. "But the security was the most important thing."

— End

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