A local council has gone live with what is believed to be the UK's largest open source email system for schools.

Carmarthenshire County Council revealed last week that it had appointed European IT services group Sirius Corporation to build a bilingual email portal for use by all the schools in the region, some 40,000 children.

The council chose to build the email system using open source software because it believes that the components will be secure, customisable and scalable.

Sirius won the contract in late 2006 and pupils and teachers now have access to three different versions of the system depending on age group.

Primary school children use email through a simple interface, while secondary school pupils use more advanced features. All users have access to webmail in English and Welsh.

Mark Taylor, chief executive at Sirius Corporation, said: "One of the advantages of open source software is its internationalisation capability. In this case, schoolchildren and staff had to have email in English and Welsh.

"We have fed the new features developed for Carmarthenshire back into open source projects such as Gosa."