Dear customers, business partners, and shareholders,
Following the Annual General Meeting in Runbox Solutions for the fiscal year 2022 we take the opportunity to review our company’s status in line with our commitment to transparency.
During last year there was a gradual return to normalcy with respect to the Covid-19 pandemic, but the global financial situation and environmental crises continued to cause tumultuous conditions for businesses and individuals.
2022 marked the 50-year anniversary of the groundbreaking book The Limits to Growth, which was among the first to model our planet’s interconnected systems and express that the continued growth in population,, consumption, and pollution would lead to humanity exceeding the carrying capacity of Earth.
These are concerns that form the context in which Runbox seek to grow our service and company sustainably in accordance with our core values, and during 2022 we continued steadily to improve the Runbox 7 app and our service as a whole in order to better support privacy, security, and our environment.
Service development
The development of the Runbox service continues to focus on the Runbox 7 webmail application, which is gradually forming the core of our services. During 2022 we continued to build and improve on Runbox 7, which features search functionality that runs in the browser and provides immediate searching and listing of email in an account. This is made possible through the custom database-accelerated Runbox architecture combined with cutting-edge technologies such as WebAssembly, HTML 5 Canvas, and Progressive Web Apps that together create an immediate email experience.
Based on customer feedback we made a large number of improvements that make the Runbox 7 app more streamlined in everyday use. Through a series of Quality Milestones and a thorough review of Runbox 7 feedback along with diverse support requests we made over 70 improvements to:
- The overall performance and reliability of the app.
- Folder and message list displays.
- Compose and the Draft Desk, including attachment handling.
- Message view including the display of HTML and images.
- Settings including Identities and Account Security.
- Contacts and Calendar interfaces.
- Product and payment pages.
The development of Runbox 7 can be tracked on our Runbox 7 Roadmap in the Runbox Forum. 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, which aims to solve the growing challenges of email interfaces and bringing forth the future of email.
Environmental Engagement
As custodians of Earth’s resources we recognize that our actions, whether as individuals or as representatives of businesses and organizations, impact the planet’s environments, natural process cycles, and our cohabiting species.
2022 was the 6th warmest year in recorded history, and it is becoming increasingly unquestionable that this global warming trend is caused by growing greenhouse gas emissions from human activities. These emission levels have now returned to their pre-pandemic levels and are reflected in growing extreme weather events across the globe.
We all share a responsibility to minimize our resource consumption and reduce overpopulation, thereby decreasing our collective impact on our planet. At Runbox we continue our ethical commitment to minimize our ecological footprint and increase the positive environmental impacts that may result from our business.
As examples of this, the Runbox email service is hosted in a 100% hydro-powered data center, we telecommute extensively, and rely on remote work for all standard operations of our company. In 2022 we further reinforced our commitment to having a positive ecological impact by extending our partnership with the Norwegian tree-planting organization Trefadder, which creates and nurtures climate forests in Norway. This results in a double negative CO2 footprint from the minor emissions that are produced by our company’s activities.
Privacy and Security
During 2022 we have renewed our commitment to email privacy and security, and we continue to enforce and monitor the implmentation of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
As a Norwegian company our service and our customers benefit from our country’s strong privacy protections, and we continue to focus on all privacy related aspects of digital communication with a blog post series on the GDPR.
Future prospects
After continued consolidation in a challenging economic climate we are conducting a thorough review of the Runbox architecture in order to establish a new roadmap for further development of our services.
Together with our system management partner Copyleft Solutions and software development partner Shadowcat Systems we form a diverse team with members from several countries. Our background from diverse geographical locations, and collective diversity is combined with a solid anchoring in the ethics and policies of our company. This comprises the core of our business and our resolve to continue working to improve the email experience of email users worldwide.
In addition to increasing the development rate of Runbox 7 alongside Shadowcat Systems we are working with Copyleft Solutions to perform upgrades, strengthen the security, and further scale our email service infrastructure with a distributed system architecture to support the continued growth of our customer base.
The contributions from our open source community on the development platform Github and the Runbox Community Forum help increase the security and speed of Runbox 7 development further, and we are excited to continue our quest to revolutionize email.