About EscSoft

Founding & Early Years

Founded in 2004 by 2 friends, EscSoft began as a hobby project with dual ambitions: to create software that would make a positive impact and generate enough revenue to cover web hosting and hardware upgrades. The company emerged during the dial-up internet era, with the founders sharing an affinity for Visual Basic 6 programming. Prior to EscSoft, one founder operated a small firm called BYTE400, which had already released several products including B4FtpServer, PlatinumFTP Server, and PlatinumFTP Client—with the latter featured on PC Pro magazine’s cover disc in December 2000.

Product Evolution

In 2004, EscSoft entered the cybersecurity market with AtomSpam, an anti-spam solution for Outlook that combined a centralized online database with Bayesian classification techniques. The software was designed to learn from user behavior, adapting its filtering capabilities based on individual preferences for email management.

The company expanded its portfolio in 2005 with the release of iDump, a freeware application developed by the team that allowed users to extract media from iPods. Written in VB6, this utility gained significant traction, achieving millions of downloads worldwide and appearing on numerous magazine cover discs.

Building on iDump’s success, the developers created iDumpPro in 2007—a comprehensive media player that leveraged iPod databases and files. This premium product offered advanced functionality including bidirectional music transfer with iPods, CD ripping and burning capabilities, network streaming, and iTunes integration. The application architecture combined VB6 for the user interface with Perl and C components. Despite challenges with Unicode support that affected the display of Asian and Arabic characters in music metadata, AudioFan achieved commercial success. The team notably received appreciative feedback from a diverse user base, including U.S. Marines, and tracked sales globally with pins on a world map in their office.

Geographic Expansion & Technical Advancement

In 2007, EscSoft expanded geographically when one member of the team relocated to Australia, establishing support operations there while the other maintained code development from the UK.

Between 2008 and 2012, the company focused on incremental updates and smaller projects. During this period, the iDump product line underwent significant modernization, being rebuilt with VB.NET, C#, and C++, with all products receiving Unicode support to address previous character display limitations.

The company further expanded its technical capabilities in 2013 by acquiring the source code for OSEN XPSuite/VistaSuite and adding SevenSuite to create escControlsActiveX—a collection of Unicode-compatible controls for VB6 that was for a time distributed through ComponentSource.com.

Recent Developments

Following a domain registration lapse in 2017 that resulted in EscSoft.com being acquired by a domain reseller, the company experienced a period of reduced visibility.

In early 2024, the remaining founder initiated a revival of EscSoft, updating and re-releasing several legacy products while establishing a product roadmap focused on Windows 10+ compatibility. As part of this renewal, the company has released an updated version of iDump to commemorate its 20th anniversary, with backward compatibility spanning Windows 7 through Windows 11. Additionally, they have made XPSuite from the escControlsActiveX product available as freeware.