SHALINI SAKSENA chats up 26-year-old IIT Guwahati student, SUNIT NANDI, the man behind Letter, an email hosting provider, about how the idea hit him, the safety and privacy that it has to offer and the subscription plans available
It goes without saying that there is no bound to our young talent. A case in point is the 26-year-old IIT Guwahati student Sunit Nandi, who realised the need for a secure work email provider. He merge his expertise and experience to launch Letter, a powerful email hosting provider packed with an array of advanced features.
It offers an intuitive user interface, impressive performance and global standard security which boasts on sharing strongest data privacy and encrypted storage for emails.
“I have often suffered due to the lack of business email solutions that properly implements the basics such as email deliverability, contact sync, calendars, search and also respects user privacy and right to their data,” Nandi says.
Devising a solution to these issues, Nandi self-hosted his work emails for several years before finally launching Letter. “I was so frustrated with the state of email hosting that I self-hosted my own work emails for several years, and spent countless days improving the security and optimising email deliverability. I spent almost three years on the infrastructure. I was optimising on three things security, usability and availability. As for security, whatever data and conversations you have stays on the server in an encrypted form. It is not accessible by anyone outside of the server. It is safe from any cyber attacks as well,” Nandi, who is also a serial entrepreneur and started when he was 18, explains.
He adds that the email hosting provider doesn’t restrict the usage to any particular client. “One can use it with his choice of clients. Take for example BlueMail or even KMail,” he says.
If one wants to try this Made In India email provider, all one has to do is to visit Letter.is and choose the preferred plan and check out. “We will then call the customer to give him an administrative account. You can add your domains to it and then add your mail boxes to it. It works just like any of the regular email providers,” he tells you.
The most basic plan that is on offer right now is a 4GB yearly one for `1,320. This 4GB storage can be split into four different domains and one can add as many different emails in each of them.
“The highest plan that we have right now is `3,520 plan which offer 50GB of storage. It follows the same strategy as the basic plan and one can split it into 50 different domains. We also offer customised big plans for organisations,” he tells you.
Given the rise in cyber crimes and how technology is misused worldwide, Nandi says, anything can be misused and that his product is not an exception. “When you think about weakening privacy, you need to take some data out of the user. If any privacy solution has a back door, it does not remain private anymore. But with that being said, if a few people are trying to misuse something it doesn’t mean that the rest of the world shouldn’t benefit from it. One either have bullet proof security or nothing at all,” he says.
Before launching it commercially a month ago, the service saw at least 20 people who practiced during the private beta version. “After the launch, we have about 46 customers using this service,” Nandi, who have been operating the beta phase since October, says.
The service, he says, is witnessing a couple of new signups every day. “I hope in the coming few years we will become a significant player in this market,” he opines. He adds that the service has at least 15 international users.
To make sure the server meets the growing demands, he says, that they have their inbuilt cloud where all the data gets backed up and will also make sure the servers never get down. “The data is backed up at least four times a day on our system. But this doesn’t mean the data can leak out of the system. Your password is the key and as long as we don’t know your password, we don’t know how to access your mails or data. Also, when the data is updated on our system, it gets converted into a gibberish form and only when the third party logs in with the password, the data gets converted into its original form. So if by any chance the data gets leaked then also it will require a lot of efforts to get it in the form of plain text,” Nandi, who for the next one year wants to solely focus on Letter before opting for a new venture, tells you.