Dear customers, business partners, and shareholders,

Following the Annual General Meeting in Runbox Solutions for the fiscal year 2019, and consistent with our commitment to transparency, we take the opportunity to review our company’s status here on our website.

Overview

In 2019 our next-generation webmail app Runbox 7 was officially launched for new customers, featuring a unique browser-based search capability that enables immediate searching and listing of email.

The implementation of security and privacy related improvements as well as infrastructure improvements have continued throughout the year. Our company invests the majority of its profits in further development of our services.

Through 2019 the environmental challenges facing humanity became indisputably obvious, and Runbox continued adapting our strategy accordingly by increasing our support for environmental mitigation initiatives.

In order to support further growth in our customer base, projects to further expand and improve our service’s architecture have been initiated. The expanding Runbox ecosystem now extends into the open source community as well, with the open sourcing of the Runbox 7 source code.

Our progress is the result of our hard-working and diverse team, in cooperation with our close business partners around the globe. The operating result continued to be positive in 2019, and the company experienced steady economic growth and a strengthened market position.

Launch of Runbox 7

Our innovative webmail app Runbox 7 was officially launched for new customers in the fall of 2019, while breaking new ground in the email service market.

With the Runbox 7 Webmail we have created a next-generation webmail app that enables an immediate email experience on any Internet-enabled device such as desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Runbox 7 leverages modern web technology frameworks such as WebAssembly, HTML 5 Canvas, and Progressive Web App in combination with our unique database-accelerated architecture. Development efforts have increased throughout the year with improvements toward a fully-featured modern web application.

The project is partially funded by the Norwegian Research Council as a research and development (R&D) project in support of the innovative aspects of the solution.

During the year we launched Runbox 7 Calendar, a new calendar web interface with a CalDAV compatible database storage which can be synchronized with most modern calendar apps. We also launched the Runbox 7 Contacts web interface with CardDAV and vCard compatible storage, which means that Runbox users now can synchronize their contacts with any device.

The development of Runbox 7 can be tracked on our Runbox 7 Roadmap, which is publicly available in the Runbox Forum where our community is growing steadily.

Runbox 7 forms the foundation on which we aim to solve the growing challenges with today’s email interfaces, while looking ahead to the future of email.

Improved privacy and security features

While 2018 was the big year for online privacy with the introduction of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Runbox continued to build upon several years of GDPR planning and implementation in 2019.

The groundwork we established with strengthened policies, agreements, and technologies was expanded further with continued efforts in the privacy and security realm.

Located in Norway, we are backed by one of the most privacy and consumer-friendly jurisdictions in the world to keep our customers’ data safe. All email service account information and content is stored on our own physical servers, hosted in our data center in Norway in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

Privacy is a principle for all development we undertake, and Privacy by Design is integrated in the Information Security Policy we introduced as part of our GDPR implementation.

We have also expanded our blog post series outlining our road towards GDPR compliance, which may be useful for other companies in their efforts to improve the privacy and security aspects of their own organizations and services.

Through 2019 we further hardened the security of our services by upgrading the encryption of connections on our servers, and ongoing projects to implement encryption of data at rest and support for end-to-end encryption which will add more security layers to our services.

Environmental engagement

Our natural environment forms the foundation for all human activity and thereby permeates the operations of all companies. Runbox is built on a strong ethical foundation and the environment is therefore an essential concern when further developing our services.

Runbox is dedicated to decreasing our carbon footprint and other environmental impacts that result from our operations, and in 2019 we continued strengthening this commitment.

The data center where our email servers are located is 100% hydropowered, and our email architecture is exclusively dedicated to the Runbox email service. This ensures that utilizing the Runbox email service does not involve unrelated services that consume energy for purposes other than processing our customers’ emails.

Further building upon our efforts in 2019 we have this year achieved CO2 double negative operations, including office facilities and work related travels, by implementing an Environmental Policy and supporting the organization World Land Trust.

Scaling our operations

Our growing customer base and further improvements to security, reliability, and performance have resulted in an increased need for infrastructure capacity. This effort continues in 2020 as we are developing a long term roadmap for infrastructure development where a distributed architecture is our main goal.

This entails proportionally significant investments in hardware and consequentially additional system management resources, mainly provided by our close partner Copyleft Solutions AS here in Norway.

The result of the hard work of our organization and our partners is a steadily growing customer base, and our investments will incrementally benefit our customers with better response times, higher performance, and a more reliable service.

Open source ecosystem

We believe in the exchange of both ideas and computer code, and Runbox has long utilized and supported open source software. With the open sourcing of the Runbox 7 app we have truly joined the open source community as a contributor.

The Runbox 7 source code is publicly available on Github, where everyone can review, comment on, and contribute to our code base. This not only accelerates the development of our service but improves the security of our software through public code review.

This also allowed us to establish the Runbox 7 Bug Bounty Program (BBP) where our services can benefit from contributors from the whole world.

We thank all our contributors for helping us improve Runbox 7 further, as well as all the customers who are providing valuable feedback.

Team and partnership diversity

Our advances are made possible by a diverse and growing team comprised of talented people from all parts of the world. In addition to the Runbox headquarters in Norway and our partner Copyleft Solutions AS, our team currently includes personnel from the UK, Poland, Brazil, and the US – all governed by GDPR compliant agreements.

Additionally we are continuing our relationships with Peregrine Computer Consultants Corporation (PCCC) in order to improve our spam filtering systems, and Shadowcat Systems Limited for Angular and Perl programming resources.

The background, geographical location, and personal diversity in our organization is a great strength. Our team members’ commitment to the ethics and policies of our company forms the core of our organization.