How this IIT Guwahati student developed Letter, India’s first-ever privacy-focused email provider

Email companies type the spine of business-related communication on the Internet. It is a platform-independent service which implies that individuals utilizing one email provider can simply ship emails to these utilizing different email suppliers.

However, the fundamental privateness challenge that individuals face with emails is that huge email internet hosting suppliers mine or gather information from buyer emails after which promote it to 3rd events. This is as a result of profiling email conversations is an easy approach to perceive a person’s utilization of services and their preferences.

In the case of enterprise emails, the chance is even greater as email communications maintain delicate information of shoppers, leads, mental property, and commerce secrets and techniques.

To sort out this drawback, 26-year-old IIT Guwahati student and serial entrepreneur, Sunit Nandi, developed his personal privacy-oriented email service provider referred to as Letter. This is India’s first such privateness centered email provider.

We acquired speaking to Sunit to know extra about his journey as a younger entrepreneur and perceive why he felt the necessity to develop Letter.

IIT Guwahati student Sunit Nandi delivering a chat at PyCon, a coding convention.

Sunit’s entrepreneurial journey

Sunit’s entrepreneurial journey began in 2012 when the 18-year-old launched an e-magazine named Techno FAQ that covers unconventional subjects in science, expertise, computing, enterprise and training.

“I spent my time writing articles and discovering subjects to cowl. That used to eat all of my free time again in my school days, to the purpose I used to be awake 20 out of the 24 hours of my day,” he says.

By 2014, the attain of his e-magazine had grown sufficient that he was getting commercials and advertorial campaigns on the e-magazine from companies that required gross sales and publicity.

He began to generate extra funds and by 2019, acquired two extra e-publications, Tekh Decoded, specializing in client electronics, and LinuxBin, now nixFAQ, specializing in Unix-family working techniques, their internals, apps, and {hardware} working Unix-family OSes.

With his small crew of 5 individuals now, Sunit has extra time to concentrate on what he actually needs to work on now — growing and working privacy-oriented companies on the Internet for public use.

What made Sunit resolve to develop his personal email provider?

As he developed his personal enterprise ventures, Sunit began to get annoyed with the state of email-hosting. “I self-hosted my very own work emails for a number of years, and spent numerous days bettering the safety of my setup and optimizing email deliverability,” he says.

He defined that he had usually suffered as a result of lack of enterprise email options that correctly implements the fundamentals akin to email deliverability, contact sync, calendars, search, and so forth., and in addition respects person privateness and proper to their information.

Apart from promoting person information to 3rd events, some email suppliers don’t enable prospects to import or export email information, and a few even lock prospects to their very own apps.

“On the opposite hand, privacy-oriented email suppliers don’t implement industry-standard email entry protocols and in addition don’t implement search performance,” says the PhD student from IIT Guwahati.

Sunit knew that if he needed to conduct his companies securely, he wanted to develop his personal email provider to serve him and his crew.

How did Sunit develop the Made in India privacy-oriented email provider?

Dealing along with his three digital publications, Sunit used a number of completely different platforms for day by day operations and enterprise emails.

“By 2015, we discovered that none met the necessities and requirements we needed. The emails weren’t securely saved, phrases and circumstances usually said that conversations could possibly be out there to 3rd events, had issues with spam, with email deliverability, and with how and what options you might entry in your mailbox,” he explains.

Over the following two years, he used all his data from his Bachelor’s and Master’s levels, internships and impartial work contracts to begin creating what would later grow to be Letter.

“I arrange and optimized a scalable non-public cloud with naked metallic servers owned or leased by me in numerous places on the earth and moved everything of my enterprise infrastructure on to it,” Sunit says.

“In this method, whereas self-hosting Techno FAQ’s enterprise email, I discovered methods to effectively supply email companies and guarantee state-of-the-art safety whereas not compromising on options, and in addition present nice efficiency and stellar deliverability of emails to the recipient’s inbox,” he provides.

Sunit’s crew was fairly excited along with his setup and it went on to serve them nicely for a number of years whereas they dealt with over 10k emails per day.

“Then, one tremendous morning in September 2020, I used to be speaking with my teammate Manish who prompt that the email infrastructure that we had been utilizing could possibly be became a industrial providing and there’s a vital curiosity amongst individuals in search of a privacy-oriented email resolution,” says Sunit.

Since he felt the identical method, the IIT Guwahati student sat down and prolonged his platform right into a public email internet hosting resolution. By the next week, he had the blueprint for Letter.

“With this email providing enterprise customers ought to not must sacrifice comfort for information privateness!” he says.

Letter secures information and makes the host unable to learn any emails until they explicitly have the person’s password. It additionally provides a further encryption layer over and above email encryption that not solely secures emails but in addition the infrastructure from cyberattacks.

Letter is now out there for Indian people, companies and organizations, and email internet hosting plans could be bought immediately from the website. Plans begin from as little as 1320 per yr for 4GB storage.

We want Sunit Nandi all the very best in his new enterprise!

Read: This 17-year-old won the CSIR Innovation Award for his mobile app that helps the poor get micro loans

Read: These students made the world’s first 100% eco-friendly vehicle – a bamboo car that runs on electrical energy

Read: These engineering students created India’s first district-wise Covid-19 tracker

Related Posts