MailCentro offers a highly flexible and customizable hosted webmail and e-mail service, with a focus on serving the needs of small businesses, clubs and similar organizations.

by Jeff Goldman [February 20, 2008]

MailCentro was launched in 2002 by the California-based venture development company CP Software Group, following CP Software's acquisition of Commtouch's e-mail service offering. The Commtouch service, combined with Uniplex Software (acquired by CP Software in 1994, with a focus on e-mail for corporate clients), then became MailCentro.

According to company founder and CEO David Saykally, what makes MailCentro unique in the marketplace is its ZapZone branded group mail offering. ZapZone, which is targeted at small businesses, clubs, and similar organizations, makes it easy for those groups to build and launch their own branded webmail and e-mail solutions—with everything from blogging interfaces to group news feeds.

Using ZapZone
For ISPs, Saykally says, ZapZone can therefore be an attractive standalone offering to resell to their small business customers. "If you go sign up at ZapZone, you will have a private label e-mail service," he says. "For an ISP, we'll take the name ZapZone off it and we'll put their name on it, and you'll then be able to go to their service and sign up your company. So it becomes a facility for their customers as well."

MailCentro (916) 985-4445 Support

ZapZone can also, of course, provide an easy way for smaller ISPs to offer e-mail and webmail to their subscribers (MailCentro offers a fully brandable solution for larger ISPs as well). "I would say the most attractive offering for an ISP is when we private label the whole platform to them, so they can go in and manage their user base," Saykally says.

Regardless, Saykally suggests that e-mail and webmail are often no more than an annoyance for the average ISP—and so most are just happy to have a straightforward solution with which to fulfill that need. "Frankly, most of the ISPs are simply trying to get rid of the problem of e-mail," he says.

A different pricing scheme
Pricing for the service is based on resource utilization, not on the number of mailboxes. "We do a lot of B2C service—people who are giving away e-mail to their clients—and in that context they're really secondary e-mail boxes, not primary e-mail boxes, so you get a lot of signups and maybe not so much utilization," Saykally says.

As a result, it's often much more reasonable to pay for usage rather than per user. "We have people who give away gigabyte mailboxes—but on average, people are using a couple of megs," Saykally says. "So it turns out pricing by actual utilization is a lot more cost effective for our clients…people can get into a full service for as little as $25.00 a month."

The service is entirely hosted by MailCentro, and it's compatible with all browsers and operating systems. "Our web interface will run on anything that's out there," Saykally says. POP and IMAP support are available at all levels, though Saykally says many clients prefer to keep users accessing their e-mail via their website.

Carrier class service
MailCentro also offers APIs for ISPs that want to integrate the solution directly with their existing systems. Saykally says the scripts are generally used either to tie e-mail activation into the ISP's registration process, to manage advertising on the webmail interface itself, or to manage payment for webmail or e-mail as a premium service.

Saykally says the offering as a whole has proved to be very popular: it's now being used in 180 countries, and the interface has been translated into 25 languages. "We actually have a fairly large Spanish-speaking contingent—and we have a fairly large Japanese contingent as well," he says.

And most importantly, Saykally says, it's rock solid. "It's a carrier class service," he says. "We've got great spam detection, we've got backup and archiving, good virus protection: operationally, it's really sound stuff. What people like about it is that the interface is really easy for them to brand—and when you launch it, you can have all kinds of bells and whistles."

— End

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