Amazon.com is launching a web-based corporate email service, ratcheting up its competition with Google and Microsoft.

Amazon.com is launching a web-based corporate email service, ratcheting up its competition with Google and Microsoft.

The company is set to launch WorkMail, an email and calendaring service that will be offered through its Amazon Web Services unit. WorkMail will be offering as part of AWS's business renting computing storage and services to businesses.

In a statement, AWS promised access to the cloud service from any device.

"For desktop users, Amazon WorkMail works with Microsoft Outlook or can be accessed through a feature-rich web client on the most popular browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer," it said.

It will also work "with any mobile device that supports the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol, including iPad, iPhone, Kindle Fire, Fire Phone, Android, and Windows Phone".Amazon will launch the product in the second quarter of this year.

In the US it will cost $US4 per user per month for a mailbox that has 50 gigabytes of storage. If customers bundle it with Zocalo, the AWS file storage service, it will cost $US6 per user per month for 50 gigabytes of mail storage and 200 gigabytes of file storage.

The company said clients would only pay for the mailboxes they create. Australian pricing was not available at time of writing.

For many companies, email remains a core business process, a place where workers store information as well as plan business strategy. AWS is clearly hoping to tie those functions into its broader offerings, while hoping to steal from of the corporate business from GMail, Microsoft Exchange and Office 365.

Amazon is the pioneer in the business of providing infrastructure computing as a service, and continues to lead in that market. But Google and Microsoft are keen to make inroads there, and they are using their position as email providers as a way to target customers interested in shifting more of their computing to the web.