Amazon Takes On Microsoft, Google With WorkMail For Businesses

alphadogg writes Amazon Web Services today launched a new product to its expansive service catalog in the cloud: WorkMail is a hosted email platform for enterprises that could wind up as a replacement for Microsoft and Google messaging systems. The service is expected to cost $4 per user per month for a 50GB email inbox. It's integrated with many of AWS's other cloud services too, including its Zocalo file synchronization and sharing platform. The combination will allow IT shops to set up a hosted email platform and link it to a file sharing system.

Comments

Spam filtering, unlimited aliases, search, rules

[Eustace Tilley]

My top priorities for email service are quality of spam filtering, support for unlimited aliases, search, and rules. I think labels work better than folders for categorization. I have not found any Amazon documentation which addresses these issues.

Privacy

[Okian Warrior]

My top priorities for email service are quality of spam filtering, support for unlimited aliases, search, and rules. I think labels work better than folders for categorization. I have not found any Amazon documentation which addresses these issues.

My top priority is privacy.

Does their service have built-in encryption, such that they cannot decrypt the message contents?

I can do spam filtering, searching, and other rule-based operations on my home system. What I *can't* do locally is prevent others from sticking their noses in my business.

Whether it be my ISP adding ads to the data stream for goods and services I might be interested in, or the website provider tailoring ads for goods and services that might be of interest to me, or my home country looking for perceived criminal activity, or someone *else's* country looking to steal corporate secrets or leverage me into forced compliance, or any of a number of other reasons.

Of late I'm actually pretty interested in the privacy aspect.

How high up on your list of priorities is privacy?

Re:Privacy

[hawguy]

My top priorities for email service are quality of spam filtering, support for unlimited aliases, search, and rules. I think labels work better than folders for categorization. I have not found any Amazon documentation which addresses these issues.

My top priority is privacy.

Does their service have built-in encryption, such that they cannot decrypt the message contents?

Not if you want server side search. Though you have to trust AWS with the plain text at some time since every mail server and client has to hand the message over in plain text (it may come in over an encrypted tunnel, but it needs to be decrypted by their mailservers).

If you really don't trust anyone with your email, tell everyone that emails you to encrypt everything with your public key, then you can decrypt the messages on an airgapped computer when you're ready to read them.

Re:Privacy

[swillden]

Though you have to trust AWS with the plain text at some time since every mail server and client has to hand the message over in plain text (it may come in over an encrypted tunnel, but it needs to be decrypted by their mailservers).

No, it doesn't. S/MIME, PGP-mail, etc. Of course that only works if the party you're e-mailing can also use client-side e-mail encryption.

Google is working on enabling OpenPGP-encrypted e-mail for Gmail with a Chrome extension: https://github.com/google/end-...

Re:Privacy

[HTMLSpinnr]

Amazon's Press Release (well, blog post rather) suggests that data is encrypted at-rest. Excerpt from https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/a...

WorkMail Security Controls Let’s talk about security for a bit. WorkMail includes a number of security features and controls that will allow it to meet the needs of many types of organizations. Here’s an overview of some of the most important features and controls:

Location Control – The WorkMail administrator can choose to create mailboxes in any supported AWS region. All mail and other data will be stored within the region and will not be transferred to any other region. During the Preview, WorkMail will be supported in the US East (Northern Virginia) and Europe (Ireland) regions, with more to follow over time.

S/MIME – Data in transit to and from Outlook clients and certain iPhone and iPad apps is encrypted using S/MIME. Data in transit to other clients is encrypted using SSL.

Stored Data Encryption – Data at rest (messages, contacts, attachments, and metadata) is encrypted using keys supplied and managed by KMS ( https://aws.amazon.com/kms/ ).

Message Scanning – Incoming and outgoing email messages and attachments are scanned for malware, viruses, and spam.

Mobile Device Policies & Actions – The WorkMail administrator can selectively require encryption, password protection, and automatic screen locking for mobile devices. The administrator can also remotely wipe a lost or mislaid mobile device if necessary.

Sounds like it has the makings of a usable service.

Re:Privacy

[swb]

I had nobody to exchange encrypted email with, so I no longer have it installed.

This is the biggest problem. I have two friends, both technology savvy (one works in IT, in healthcare, so is very familiar with encryption) and both are conspiracy savvy, too.

I got both of them using PGP at one point, fully integrated with whatever email client they were using but couldn't get either one to sustain use of it, despite both of them fully aware of the NSA, surveillance, etc.

Maybe they just don't like me, but if getting these two to use encryption on a consistent basis is hard, getting ordinary people to do it is impossible.

Re:Finally

[hawguy]

Another Kloud Service. At last my company can have its email scanned and delivered to my competitors. Just what I needed.

Most small businesses are better off entrusting their mail to a cloud provider than to try to run their own email service and trying to keep it secure and highly available.

Link to Amazon's official announcement

[cetialphav]

Here is the link to Amazon's official announcement so you don't have to go through the networkworld article.

It is notable that this is not just about email as it also supports many of the other features offered by Outlook like calendaring, tasks, etc. It also works with existing Outlook and ActiveSync clients so it is easy for an enterprise to start using it.

As I'm not an administrator of mail systems, I would like to hear from some experts about how the features Amazon has introduced today compare to the existing enterprise offerings.

Re:When is it going to turn profit?

[lucm]

This is actually by design. Their model is not profit, it's growth and innovation. It's a new economy where the balance sheet is becoming less and less a key factor for large corporations, and for the most part shareholders are ok with it because investments are made in the short term and the skyrocketing share price is more attractive than actual equity or dividends.

I'm not saying I agree, just that this is not by mistake that they don't make a profit.

Amazon would do anything for your love

[smittyoneeach]

Amazon would do anything for your love, but it won't do that.