And though it's not a marketing effort per se, there's something intriguing about AtMail's (atmail.com) recent efforts at inviting new business - an offering in which the product is the pitch, in a manner of speaking.

AtMail isn't a hosting company, of course, but it deals its email platform to hosting companies. And, in the crowded email software market where just getting your product in front of potential customers can be a big marketing challenge, the company's most recent sort-of-promotional move has a kind of admirable simplicity grounded in the belief that the company has a good product.

Back in May, AtMail announced that it was releasing AtMail Open, an open source version of its webmail interface, freely downloadable from the company's website - a calculated move by the company to create an audience for its products among people who might one day become customers.

AtMail's main product is its email platform, available as a modular software solution, but distributed mostly in the form of the AtMail appliance - custom hardware with the AtMail software pre-installed. The webmail interface is part of an overall, polished commercial mail product, but it's a piece the company feels people might want on its own.

"Up until now," says vice president of sales Corey Bissaillon, "we'd been selling the webmail interface. Now we've refined it a bit and released it as an open source project into the community. By doing that, we're going to put our software in front of people who will most likely be upgrading their back-end systems in the future. And we're confident they're going to come back to us when they need to do that."

The webmail interface is AtMail with the administration tools and back-end webmail system stripped away, but Bissaillon says it's an excellent alternative to some of the more limited for-free open source webmail clients out there.

Corey Bissaillon, of AtMail, sits down with the WHIR at HostingCon 2008.

Among the main selling features of the software, he says, are the in-line spell check tool, which has become a common feature in desktop email clients, but is unusual in webmail. The client also incorporates a video mail application.

"It allows you to record a video, if you have a webcam," says Bissaillon, "a video with audio if you have a microphone, and send that in an email. It's recorded to the server, so it doesn't bloat the size of the email and it's not slow to download to someone's outlook."

Ultimately, the open source version of the webmail interface is working as an introduction to the company's products for potential customers down the road.

"We're putting our software in front of people who will most likely be upgrading their back-end systems in the future," says Bissaillon, "and we're confident they're going to come back to us when they need to do that."

The product they'll be coming back for is the full platform, which includes the web-based administration interface and modular email platform. The appliance is available in three models, the Base, Pro and Multi-Server, pricing for which is outlined on the company's website. The software's price varies based on the modules the customer intends to employ - such as spam filtering and groupware - and which they prefer to leave out.

Bissaillon says AtMail, following some recent clustering innovation, is now appears to be as scalable as the hardware and connection will allow, and is easily branded when deployed by service providers. He points to high-profile hosting implementations at NTT Verio and Hostway as examples of heavily trafficked and widely used evidence of the software's effectiveness.

The real appeal of the AtMail open edition offering is, of course, the free software. But some of the additional attractiveness in the offer comes from the company's confidence in the power of its own software to create paying customers out of free users.

And while the one-piece-for-free software offering is certainly not a new idea, it's unique enough among webmail client software to undoubtedly attract some customers to the company's products.