As mentioned in our CEO's recent blog post, we have just completed a project in development for some time -- a dynamic help system for our Webmail clients.  Since I was the coder on this project, I'm here to attempt to explain what it is, and why this is a perfect example of the direction Webmail.us is going.  If you don't have an email account with us (or your reseller hasn't enabled the help system on their version), you can check out the new help system at our one-click demo.

Click on the gray question mark at the top right corner of the Webmail application, and you can start navigating through the help system.  Actually, 'navigating' is a bad choice of words, because it always makes me think of weathering choppy waters in a run-down skiff... perhaps 'teleporting' is more appropriate.  Play around a bit and you'll notice that there's no more reloading of the webpage and waiting while the link you clicked on takes you to the right place.  Now, it happens almost instantaneously.

The recently-coined name for this technique is 'AJAX', and it's an abbreviation for 'make Steve jump through a lot of hoops so the user's experience is faster and smoother than ever before'.  I think it's an apt description, and what is truly incredible is that we can use this programming style on every part of our application, speeding it up and making it more responsive.  So long as our users have a fairly up-to-date browser (a must-have in these days of security concerns), they can take advantage of this.

Of course, this help system isn't just designed as a vehicle to show off AJAX, but rather to improve user experience by giving quick answers to questions.  Certain pages in our system, like the Inbox, link to the main page of the help system.  Other pages (try 'Account Options', or when composing a message) will actually link you to a specific help topic or set of options, depending on what you were doing.  Our technical writer and graphic designer also put in a lot of effort to make sure that it is easily usable, and the help topics are straightforward and very clear.

I encourage everyone to try it out, and look forward to seeing more of this technology in our future releases.

(If you are interested in the technical nuts-and-bolts of how AJAX works, check out this article. It gives a pretty good summary of the entire technology.)

--Steve

We've decided that we'd rather be using a URL that is more specific to the company.  So I backed up bunch of posts and comments and put them in place at the new home for this blog:

http://webmail.typepad.com

For those of you who prefer to use an RSS aggregator, if you already had the Feedburner link, I've made the update for you and you shouldn't have to change anything to keep getting new posts.  If you weren't using the Feedburner link: please switch over.  Here is the Feedburner page:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheWebmailBlog.

Thanks and sorry for putting you through this little change!

-Kirk

Mornings like this remind me why it's great to work at Webmail.us: we like to get things done!   We decided that we had to have a feature on Friday morning.  It was in testing that afternoon.  It went on our system live over the weekend.  This morning our customers have a useful new feature.

Winmail.dat - Proprietary Outlook Attachment

This weekend we updated our Webmail product to automatically decode a winmail.dat attachment and break it into an RTF document (Word compatible) and into any other attachments that may have existed inside the winmail.dat. Here's a little background info for those who want it:

When Outlook is configured to compose a message in Rich Text Format (RTF) it generates a file called winmail.dat, a specially encoded file with extra text color and formatting options.  Before HTML was widely used to compose email, RTF was the way to get nicer formatting.  But other email clients didn't know how to read the special encoding.

Even worse, normal files attached to an RTF'd email were sometimes authomatically zipped up into the winmail.dat as well.  So an email sent from Outlook to Netscape Mail, Eudora, Mac Mail, etc. had this extra, useless attachment and no way to get at any other attachments that might have been sent.  But our Webmail client will now allow our customers to get at all of the RTF information & other attachments they need.

Open Source Community

For any of you who follow our open-source doings, we are releasing this code to the community.  There are another couple of important projects that we're finishing up over the next week or two.  We're even planning a new section on our website just for projects completed in-house to be released under the GPL.  I'm excited to blog about this more, but I'd better wait until we have at least one of those projects available for you to download!

-Kirk

It has been almost 2 years since Microsoft stopped development of their Mac version of Internet Explorer (check out this news story). Because Microsoft isn't adding modern browser features to the Mac we have decided that we will not be able to officially support IE on the Mac platform in our future releases of Webmail.

For Windows users, that might sound worse than it really is: Safari, the Apple-made browser, is preferred by the vast majority of Mac users. Firefox is also supported on the Mac and will be supported by future versions of Webmail.

Progress
If you're a Webmail.us customer and have been with us very long you know that we like to innovate and improve our products. Some of our next round of product innovations are based on a web programming approach called AJAX. Lack of AJAX support in IE 5.2 on the Mac is one big reason why we won't be able to support Mac IE in the future.

AJAX is the technology behind really great sites like Google Maps. I don't mean great as in "gee whiz, the latest technology", I mean it as in "gee whiz, this makes the web a lot more usable!" It is absolutely the right next step for improving the interface in our existing webmail and adding the features that our customers ask for.

-Kirk

As I mentioned in an earlier post it.s been busy around here at Webmail.us. We.re firing on all cylinders -- hiring, growing the business, and putting a ton of resources into product R&D. But the biggest strategic initiative so far this year is one we haven.t talked much about: infrastructure improvements.

Our CTO-led engineering team has been working feverishly with our infrastructure partner, Rackspace, to deploy our next generation infrastructure platform. We.re taking our current platform and adding dozens of servers in a new configuration to improve the performance, reliability, and scalability of our system. According to Pat, our CEO, this is the biggest financial commitment we.ve ever made (he promises to blog in more detail about this soon).

Timing

The only downside to our infrastructure project has been that our timing turned out to be a couple of weeks off. The result has been less than optimal email system performance for some customers, resulting in email delivery delays during peak hours of the business day (some customers have not been affected by this but for those that have, we want you to know what we are doing behind the scenes). We.re not just working on eliminating issues with short-term fixes; we.re thinking miles down the road as we plan for the future growth of our company and achieving the highest level of email performance possible.

The Work Begins

We started bringing new servers online last week that were targeted at eliminating the bottlenecks you might have experienced at peak hours during the past week. The impact was immediate, but we still have a lot more to do. The entire infrastructure upgrade will be complete later this month and we.re committed to keeping the system.s performance as robust as possible in the meantime.

If you have experienced any type of email delays, I want to apologize on behalf of our company. Our entire senior management team and engineering staff is working together to smooth the transition to the new and improved system. If you have technical questions about the issues or our new infrastructure, drop me an email and I.ll fill you in.

-Kirk