Telenet, one of the largest internet providers in Belgium, recently announced the rollout of a new webmail platform developed in collaboration with Zimbra. Since April 2010, Telenet has been providing access to the new system for over 1 million residential internet subscribers and will continue the migration through August 1st. The updated email suite – which is free to Telenet customers – provides 5 GB of storage, a built-in calendar and address book, many advanced tools like sharing, automated importing of external mail accounts, plus more features to come.
Previously, Telenet internet customers had a basic mail utility and minuscule quota space of 50 MB. The new interface, powered by Zimbra, is extremely user friendly and is supported by 100x more storage. Other improved features include the ability to set up rules for filtering incoming mail and access to a mobile browser version. Several factors, including lower disk costs and the broadening availability of both virtualization and cloud applications made it possible for Telenet to make this update available to its customers. (One such distributed object storage framework is from Bizanga/Scality, who developed a connector for Zimbra, and has a video on Telenet’s strategy here.)
According to Saskia Schatterman, Executive Vice President Residential Marketing, no less than 70% of their customers use Telenet email on a regular basis and just over half report that account is their primary address. Those customers can now send mail anywhere, from any device with Internet access; putting aside the need to also use alternatives like Hotmail or Gmail. With this cutting-edge webmail architecture, Telenet can provide all of their broadband customers with a sophisticated and full featured product, that’s still simple to use.
The rollout of the advanced Telenet email platform is phased, all existing internet customers will automatically be granted access to the new communication suite and will be notified once their mailbox has been transitioned. Brand-new users will receive access to the Zimbra webmail client by default.
With this integration Zimbra continues to deliver on its promise of providing hassle-free collaboration solutions to our partners around the world. We look forward to sharing news about additional international organizations in the coming months.
I think most of my problems with Telenet webmail are due to my limited understanding of Dutch and French and the limited information available in English.
With Telenet Webmail, my major frustration is with the management of contact address lists and particularly with importing contact lists. I did manage to import a list once but with a new layout arriving I can no longer find how to import contacts. My earlier import was also not satisfactory as only the addresses, without other fields, were imported. Shortly I will be traveling and the webmail usefulness will be severely restricted without complete contact lists.
Where can I find this kind of information?
Can you help me?
Gil