You've got Workmail —

Amazon goes after Office 365 with WorkMail hosted e-mail service

New service pits Amazon head-to-head with Google, Microsoft on cloud services.

Amazon is preparing to unveil a new cloud-hosted e-mail and calendar service today that will compete directly with Microsoft’s Office 365 and Google’s Apps for Business services. Called WorkMail, the service will be the latest in a series of new offerings that increasingly target end users rather than service providers and developers.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon will offer WorkMail for $4 per month for a 50 gigabyte mailbox, a price that is competitive with Microsoft’s and Google’s cloud-hosted business e-mail services. The main difference is that Amazon will allow customers to manage the encryption keys used to encrypt stored and sent messages using Amazon’s Key Management Service (KMS) unless the customer opts to use an Amazon Web Services-provided key. Keys can be used to secure e-mail server to server with the TLS protocol and to encrypt inboxes at rest.

Another notable feature of WorkMail is that users can specify what Amazon region their e-mail is stored in. Customers can choose a specific, relatively close data center to reduce latency in retrieving e-mail or for compliance purposes—such as European privacy regulations. The feature means that users won’t get the benefit of failover to another data center in the event of an outage, but Amazon may offer mirroring services later.

WorkMail is especially targeted at Microsoft’s installed Exchange Server base. The service will work with existing mail and calendar tools, including Outlook on Windows and Mac OS X, as well as existing mobile clients. The new service will become available this spring, and it will also be also be bundled with Amazon’s Zocalo file storage service, giving users 50 gigabytes of mail and 200 gigabytes of online storage for $6 per user.

Channel Ars Technica