We’re pleased to announce a new, better version of the Hosted Atmail program. The new pricing matrix and order page can be found here:

http://atmail.com/order/hosted/

What’s New:

• Hosted Appliance - we now offer the Atmail Appliance to hosted customers whose needs include a dedicated server, hosted by Atmail.
• Billing Terms - Choose billing per month or on a yearly cycle. A 20% discount is included for pre-purchases of one year.
• Custom User License - Specify your own license for the number of users you expect to support.
• Push Support - Enable iPhone, Windows Mobile and Activesync devices to push and synchronize mail and address-book data.

For further details, please see the Hosted Atmail order page, or email our sales team via the online form

Ben Duncan, the founder of Atmail has embarked on a 6 month journey around the entire of Australia, in a specially modified 4WD Land Rover to demonstrate the ability to work online and maintain a virtual presence using the latest technologies.
The trip will take the Atmail mobile office into the far reaching parts of the Australian desert, across the coastline of Australia, into the red-center and across to the lush rainforests of tropical North-Queensland. The Atmail mobile office will be online using the latest BGAN Satellite and NextG mobile internet, to keep the pulse alive.

Using a custom version of the Atmail mail-server for remote connections, the 4WD runs it’s own SMTP server, with delivery of messages via an SMTP smarthost. The technology in the 4WD includes:

• Linux eeePC used for the car Atmail server, SMTP and Web proxy
• Telstra NextG mobile router
• Linksys Wifi device
• 60W solar panel connected to a 100ah battery
• Dual battery isolator for charging the battery bank, and solar regulator to charge the battery when the 4WD is off.
• Live streaming CarCam, updates an image every 5 minutes from the mobile-office “eye” embedded on the roof
• Uniden GPS for navigation
• Roof tent for sleeping
• Macbook Pro and VMware used for development and SVN environments
• Full kitchen, gas and storage within car

From within the 4WD mobile office, Ben Duncan will help co-ordinate the new Atmail 6 release and upcoming products for the company into 2009. The car includes a full development environment and SVN snapshots.

Australia provides breathtaking scenery and wide open-spaces to find inspiration and product R&D ideas you would normally struggle to find at a regular city office, no matter how much coffee!

With over 16,000km’s left on the journey, keep tuned to http://atmailmobileoffice.com/ for a soon to be released web-site and gallery showcasing the trip, blog, and technology behind the adventure!

We are proud to announce the third update to the AtMail Open-source edition, version 1.03. The open-source edition has received a welcomed response from the community seeking an improved Ajax Webmail client, and we value all our user feedback since we released the first edition in May 08.

Download the new release at: http://atmail.org/download.php

The new 1.03 release includes;

• The addition of the FCKeditor for composing HTML email.
• Better filtering of control characters in email headers
• Improved handly of unquoted or badly formatted email addresses.
• An improved spellchecker
• Additional plugin hooks
• Added script to upgrade the database to Atmail commercial structure
• Call to localtime() now uses correct arguments in GetMail.php
• Added hostname argument when creating Net_SMTP object; avoids possible mail rejection
  due to use of default ‘localhost’
• Quota display when mail server supports it and account has quota set
• Alert when over specific percentage of quota used
• Use IMAP sort extension rather than client side sort if server supports it
• Display LDAP addresses in Addressbook rather than Search->Import->Add
• Use LDAP addresses in auto complete
• Remove rogue save button on edit group page which made groups into users
• Firefox always display scrollbars (no shifts to the left on scrollable pages)
• When adding entries from LDAP server, use first and last name correctly

Thanks goes to many members of the Atmail Open Forums for addtional changes and fixes.

We welcome the feedback, to find out more about the project visit http://atmail.org/ and view the online demo.

With the new year ahead, the Atmail development team have been hard at work designing the next generation user-interface for Atmail.

We are publishing the latest screenshots of the new interface, and welcome any user feedback for our designs. Currently the user-interface is migrated into the new PHP branch as a skeleton, more development is still required for a live beta.

All new purchases of the current Atmail 5, will have a free upgrade to the new Atmail version once launched.

Our general aims for the new UI include:

• A feature rich UI for IE6, IE7+, Safari and Firefox
• A single unified interface for the Webmail interface
• Mail, Calendar, Addressbook in an easy to use interface
• CSS skinning available, allow the admin to easily skin Atmail into their own look

Read Message Panel:

• View the entire screenshot
• Mail threading view
• More simple HTML message editor
• Thumbnails for attachments ( PDFs, MS word, show inline images, etc )
• Quick reply view
• Open message in a new window option

View messages:

• View the entire screenshot
• Drag and Drop messages to folders inbuilt
• Quick view of the message conversation available
• Number of attachments available on preview, click attachment icon to download attachments directly
• All messages actions ( Reply, Reply All, Forward, Trash, Spam ) available in the top toolbar
• 2 Pane, or 3 pane toggle available to view messages inline, or in the entire window

We welcome any user feedback on our new user-interface mocks, our ETA for a beta of the new Atmail 6 is early March 2009.