3 Minutes with Dirk Marski, atmail’s Director of Engineering Operations [Video]

If you’d like to meet the atmailer leading our global team of software engineers, we invite you to grab a coffee and spend three minutes with Dirk Marski. Originally hailing from Europe, Dirk has been at HQ in Australia for two years, and loves it.

 

 

 

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Dirk Marski. I work at atmail, leading the Engineering Operations team, looking after our cloud services and on-premise offerings.

 

Tell us about atmail?

So, atmail started out really as a very strong technology company, and there’s a lot of legacy in the products we build. Over the time, it has become much more of a service company, oriented into looking at providing cloud services, professional services, and various other things.

 

Where are your cloud platforms?

With clouds in three continents at this stage, we’re looking to expand further as our customers’ needs come through. We will always build a new cloud local to where our customers are because, email, it’s a very personal product at the end of the day, and people like knowing that their data is close. They like the connectivity and they want fast connectivity, and that’s best achieved by having a local cloud service.

 

Do you use technology partners?

atmail is absolutely focussed on email, and there’s more to it, and that’s where we use our technology partners to work with us to create the next level of solution. So, we use best of breed antispam, antivirus solutions, antiphishing solutions, and integrating them. We’re not just reselling them; we’re actually integrating them to our own technology, so that we can deliver a seamless experience to our customers.

 

Is email a challenge?

Yes, every day, everybody takes for granted that you hit send on an email, it actually gets delivered. We’ve got to deliver that day-in, day-out, and that in itself is actually a big challenge.

 

What’s changing?

Like, there’s some really interesting pieces of technology coming up like content filtering. People want to know… Where’s all my notifications for my social media? I don’t want to see that in my Inbox, I want to see that somewhere separate. How can I start tying together everything from a single person? Like, I want to know, you know, I interact with my colleague on a daily basis, I want to know… Where/what is all the attachments he sent me? When do I have my next meeting with him? What was the other correspondence I’ve had? Just bringing it all together into a unified experience, that’s where we’re going. It’s not just about the flat email that’s sent, it’s how does it enrich your life and make it easier for you to be connected to the outside world.

 

How do you make it work?

So, following on from that, key ingredients to making that work, is obviously redundant services. So, you want always clusters of everything; clusters of inbound email, clusters of outbound email, clusters of email access. Because that means if one of them goes down, the others will just take over. Worst case scenario, you’ll have a minor blip in your connection, but all modern clients are designed to cope with that because no network is 100 percent stable, and it’s just a very poor user experience if you surface those errors. So, most of them will be tried two, three, four times before anything ever gets done, so at best you have a minor lag if you even perceive it.

 

What does this mean?

So, building on that we can build our back end services to just seamlessly failover, and just on the next connection we’ll deliver the content that the client was asking for.

 

 

New to atmail?

atmail is an email solutions company with 22 years of global, email expertise. You can trust us to deliver an email hosting platform that is secure, stable and scalable. We power more than 170 million mailboxes worldwide and offer modern, white-labelled, cloud hosted email with your choice of US or (GDPR compliant) EU data centres. We also offer on-premises webmail and/or mail server options. To find out more, we invite you to enquire here.