Email, since before it was fashionable
Redmail has been carrying people’s email since 1996 — eight years before Gmail existed, and long before anyone called it “the cloud”. Nearly three decades later it is still doing the same job, for many of the same people.
That longevity is the point, not a nostalgia note. An email address is one of the few pieces of digital infrastructure that genuinely has to outlast the company that sold it to you. It is your password reset for everything else you own. Redmail has been a stable place to keep one since the year the first webmail services appeared.
What it actually is
Hosted email for people and businesses who would rather not hand their correspondence to an advertising company. Webmail, IMAP and POP3, with anti-virus and anti-spam filtering applied before anything reaches your inbox — running on Zimbra, a mature open-source collaboration platform, on infrastructure we run ourselves in the UK.
No mailbox scanning for ad targeting. No feature that exists to keep you logged in rather than to help you read your mail.
Where it came from
Redmail is one thread in a longer story about moving messages around. Its founder, Jon Morby, has been doing that since 1985 — first on FidoNet, hauling netmail and echomail between bulletin boards over dial-up, then at Demon Internet from 1992 as Britain was getting online for the first time.
Redmail followed in 1996. Fido.net came the year before and became a business in 2001. The same thread runs through FXRM, Tula Networks and Amperlo today. Forty years of keeping mail and packets moving, and Redmail is the longest-running piece of it.
This blog
Notes on email that are actually useful: deliverability, authentication, spam, the practical differences between mail platforms, and the occasional piece of history from someone who was there for most of it.
Redmail is a brand of FXRM Services Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 16676788.