Amazon Wants to Power Your Work Email

Amazon has launched a work email service aimed at undermining Microsoft’s dominance in office messaging.

The e-commerce giant is introducing WorkMail, allowing users to send and receive emails, and manage contacts and share calendars all stored on Amazon’s cloud servers.

WorkMail won’t replace Microsoft Outlook’s software interface for businesses that make the switch. Instead, it changes the background technology that powers corporate email. It will push messages through Amazon’s encrypted computer networks at a monthly cost of $4 per inbox.

Amazon said that with WorkMail customers won’t have to buy servers or manage software, upgrades, or patches. Instead, they just have to pay for each inbox.

“Customers have repeatedly asked us for a business email and calendaring service that is more cost-effective and simpler to manage than their on-premises solution,” said Peter De Santis, vice president of AWS Compute Services, said in a press release. “We built Amazon WorkMail to address these requests.”

An analyst with Baird Equity Research, Colin Sebastian told the Wall Street Journal that email services could bring Amazon $1 billion each year, based on estimate of sales for Google’s business software.