e-tapaal is an email and instant messaging service and solutions provider for individuals as well as companies, governments and other organisations. "Tapaal" is an Indian word for mail or post. Its web address is www.e-tapaal.com.

Crossing the language barrier
As a Kaveri initiative to bridge the emerging divide between the digital haves and have-nots, this service specifically addresses the issue of the language barrier. It will enable the poorer and more remote and rural sections to use and benefit from the IT and Web revolution. This will be true not only in the area of governance but also in business, civil society and the private lives of individuals.

The service has been launched first in Kannada and English in January 02. The Malayalam service was launched in November of that year. Besides email, the service will feature a bilingual instant messenger for live chat and discussion in the near future.

The service will be launched in Telugu shortly. Eventually, it will be launched in 8 other major Indian languages - Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali, Oriya and Assamese.

Bilingual, Indian language and English, facility will be available for each user and within each email.

Business email outsourcing
e-tapaal's email outsourcing solution for businesses, organisations and governments is essentially a dial-a-business-email service. It enables an organisation to own, control and customise its email on e-tapaal infrastructure, software and management.

The organisation can have its name in its email IDs - that is, it can own its email.

It can manage its email through an administrator control panel - that is, it can add and delete IDs, allocate storage space, features, etc.

It can also customise its email - that is, e-tapaal can provide it with features like filing and archiving solutions of diverse kinds, routing and re-routing of emails from different IDs, different levels of permissions to different users, triggers from ERP systems, linking to document management systems, and a range of other features needed by organisations.

Organisations also have the option of availing of two additional services provided by e-tapaal:

in-tapaal enables an organisation to have its own email software and server within its LAN or Intranet. This inside-office solution enables users to compose, format, save, send, etc. as well as receive emails within the Intranet. Whenever the users in that particular organisation want to send and receive emails from and to others through the Internet, the network administrators have to connect to the Internet and synchronise with the e-tapaal servers located in the Internet Data Centre. The chief advantage is that the organisation does not have to have its staff and email server connected to the Internet at all times.

e-tapaal Direct is a group or mass email sending software which enables an organisation to send one email with personalisation features to a large number of persons at the same time. This feature is of use for direct email marketing and for organisations which may want to send circulars and other correspondence to members, employees, marketing partners, customers, or anyone else internally or externally.

e-tapaal provides all this and more without having to invest time, effort, manpower and money on putting up its own infrastructure. The e-tapaal servers with email software are located in the data centre of an Internet Service Provider or ISP for maximum bandwidth, connectivity and redundancy.

In short, this service enables a company to focus on its core business.

By using an inexpensive email software package developed wholly in India and based on the Linux operating system and other freeware, e-tapaal will offer individuals and organisations a very cost-effective solution.