Dear customers, business partners, and shareholders,
Upon the completion of the Annual General Meeting in Runbox Solutions for the fiscal year 2020 we take the opportunity to review our company’s status in accordance with our commitment to transparency.
Although 2020 was in general a difficult and challenging year due to the corona pandemic and the worsening climate change, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Runbox email service in October with special subscription offers to our loyal customers. This, together with continued growth in our customer base and favorable currency exchange rates, resulted in a record year for Runbox financially.
Through the year we made significant progress on Runbox 7 development, and reinforced our commitment to privacy, security, and the environment.
Runbox 7 Developments
During 2020 we continued to improve and expand the groundbreaking Runbox 7 webmail application, which features search capabilities in the browser that provides immediate searching and listing of email. Runbox 7 combines the unique database-accelerated Runbox architecture with cutting-edge technologies such as WebAssembly, HTML 5 Canvas, and Progressive Web Apps to create an immediate email experience.
Developments have focused on expanding Runbox 7 toward a complete web application, and numerous enhancements have been made to Mail, Contacts, and Calendar. Additionally we have added innovative new features such as the Mail Overview and Popular Recipients, which provide a new level of message overviews based on sender and recipient data.
Runbox 7 development can be followed on our Runbox 7 Roadmap in the Runbox Forum and aims to solve the growing challenges of email interfaces and bringing forth the future of email.
The project is partially funded by the Research Council of Norway as a research and development (R&D) project in support of the innovative aspects of the solution.
Environmental Engagement
The operation of all business continues to depend on the foundation of our natural environment, which is under increasing pressure from human activity. In 2020 the world has seen a continued growth in greenhouse gas emissions with subsequent increases in extreme weather, wildfires, and droughts around the globe.
As inhabitants of Earth we all share the responsibility to decrease our negative impact on our environment. Runbox is built with a strong ethical foundation and we are dedicated to decreasing our ecological footprint and other environmental impacts that result from our operations.
The environment is a primary consideration when developing our services, and in 2020 we continued strengthening our commitment to having a positive ecological impact.
The data center where our email servers are located is 100% hydro-powered, and the electricity powering our email architecture is utilized exclusively by the Runbox email service.
In 2020 we achieved CO2 double negative operations by implementing our Environmental Policy and supporting the organization World Land Trust. In 2021 we have extended our commitment by partnering with the Norwegian tree-planting organization Trefadder, which creates and nurtures climate forests in Norway.
Renewed Commitment to Privacy and Security
Through the year we renewed our commitment to privacy and security, and the GDPR in particular. Our GDPR implementation has continued with reinforced policies, procedures, and technologies, and as a company located in Norway our service can rely on the strong Norwegian privacy protections.
All user data processed through the Runbox email service is stored on our own physical servers in Norway, and last year we completed the transition to encrypted SSD storage for all email account data.
We have continued our blog post series outlining our road towards GDPR compliance, and made further progress with privacy and security improvements to our services.
Growing our operations
We are working closely with our system management partner Copyleft Solutions to scale our email service infrastructure with a distributed system architecture to support the continued growth of our customer base.
Together with our development partners Shadowcat Systems and Peregrine Computer Consultants Corporation, our diverse team includes members from Norway, the UK, Poland, Brazil, and the US. The background, geographical location, and diversity of our team combined with a steadfast commitment to the ethics and policies of our company forms the core of our organization.
The contributions from our open source community on Github increase the security and speed of Runbox 7 development further, and we are excited to continue the race to revolutionize email in 2021.