·By David & Ai
Historical Summary: The Pioneering Shift in MSP Email Delivery
#clearemail#email#msp#managed email security
In 2006, an innovative Managed Service Provider (MSP) founded in Australia (and later operating out of the UK) named Cleartext became the first vendor to go to market with an all-in-one cloud email ecosystem.
1. The Innovation: ClearEmail
The company launched ClearEmail, a service that pioneered the convergence of corporate inbox hosting and defensive perimeter security into a single multi-tenant stack. The product unified two key features:
- Hosted Mailboxes: Delivering the actual remote communication infrastructure to run corporate mailboxes.
- Managed Email Security: Layering automated perimeter filters over the mailboxes to stop viruses, spam, and malware before they reached end-user devices.
2. The Competitive Landscape in 2005
At the time of ClearEmail's release, the broader IT market was highly fragmented, requiring companies to piece their systems together using separate vendors:
- Pure-Play Security Gateways: Prominent industry titans like Postini, FrontBridge Technologies, and MessageLabs focused strictly on cloud-filtering security gateways. They did not host mailboxes and required on-premises servers to route traffic through their scrubbing filters first.
- Siloed Mailbox Providers: Early Hosted Exchange providers (such as Intermedia or AppRiver) gave businesses multi-tenant mailboxes, but lacked deeply integrated, enterprise-grade edge defenses. IT teams frequently had to pay for independent secondary security subscriptions.
- Early Suite Alternatives: Providers like Mimecast were just starting to gain traction, but their early focus was providing a security, archiving, and business continuity umbrella for on-premises Microsoft Exchange infrastructure, rather than hosting the primary user mailbox itself.
By combining enterprise-grade security filtering natively with fully hosted business mailboxes, Cleartext through ClearEmail successfully established the converged, single-vendor security and communication blueprint used by modern cloud platforms today.
Here are some of the files from that time.
📎 flyer_CT_ClearEmail.pdf.
📎 flyer_CT_ClearEmail.pdf.