I'll keep this one briefer than some of my other posts about the meetings I had at HostingCon, mostly because we covered part of the conversation - regarding the basic facts of the launch of AtMail's "clustered edition" - in a news story we posted from the show. But also because of the rather lengthy phone conversation I had with Corey Bissaillon a while back, which ought to produce a feature for the site within the next week.
So look for that - there is more to come about AtMail.
I met up with Bissaillon at the show to discuss the company's platform - an email server and groupware server platform that AtMail delivers most commonly in the form of an appliance running the software.
As in most of these "discussing a product" type blog entries, listing the AtMail features would be mostly redundant, given the fairly exhaustive approach taken on the company's own website. So I figured instead I'd talk about some of the technology the company seems most excited about.
Bissaillon was keen on the MySQL server engineering that has gone into the clustered edition. He says that while standard MySQL clustering practices use a "master-slave" relationship between clustered machines that makes the architecture scalable, they are only somewhat more reliable because in the case of an outage on the master server, a slave must manually be made the master. The AtMail clustered edition enables a "master-master" sort of clustering relationship (or master-master-master, or master-master-master-master, etc.) that makes the system both highly scalable and much more reliable.
Another interesting facet of the company's more recent efforts is the release of a free and open version of its webmail interface.
Being as the free webmail interface is the general premise of the upcoming feature, I won't go into such great detail here. But the basic idea is that the company has released an open version of its much-admired webmail interface, trusting in the product's ability to create back-end systems customers down the road out of users who simply want to deploy a free webmail interface today. That is, Bissaillon says he's confident customers using the webmail interface will appreciate the way AtMail operates enough to come talk to the company when they're looking to build out their back-end systems.
On top of that, it's a good way for the company to give a project back to the open source community, many of the best efforts of which (Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL) are incorporated into the operation of its own products.
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