Nice read... I've subscribed to this blog now so I'll get them all in my RSS reader.

Ben

I've gotten a number of these scams in the mail. I find it amusing because the scams often want you to pay more for domain re-registration than what your registrar charges.

Another way to protect oneself from other forms of fraud: buy a shredder. Any piece of paper that I don't want to keep that has account numbers on them I shred. It's scary the amount of information you can find out about someone by going through their garbage (not that I've ever done it =).

Good point about the shredder, Vince. Along those same lines, I've heard it said that homeowners shouldn't put their trash out the night before trash pickup; put it out the morning-of as a way to discourage potential trash stalkers.

BTW, still no word from ILSCorp.net in response to my email.

Well, I promised that I would come back and let everyone know about my response from ILSCorp.

I sent my email to them on 2/16. Today is 2/23, one week later. I still have no response. So maybe they meant that it might take up to 2 weeks to respond to email requests, not 2 days.

Today marks 3 weeks from the day I sent my email to ILSCorp. I have not received a reply of any kind from them. I rest my case: they run a scam.

ILSCorp sent me this rather anemic response yesterday, March 13th. So with almost a full month of time to craft a reply, here is what they sent:

"ILS is a search engine ranking and submission services firm. We do not provide domain name, web hosting or email services. We apologize for any confusion."

Sorry, in my original posting I indicated that the demo was live with 3.1, but we haven't switched it yet. I expect it to be switched before about 6pm EST and I'll update the blog with the link then, or you can just go to http://www.webmail.us tonight and click on the big button.

-Kirk

Is there any chance of webmail.us implementing greylisting?

Here is a link about it:
http://projects.puremagic.com/greylisting/whitepaper.html

I have yet to see a downside....

Thanks,

Zachary Miller

Zachary,

I put up a whole post about greylisting: http://betteremail.typepad.com/blog/2005/04/greylisting.html
Thanks for the question!

-Kirk

Awesome job, guys. Keep up the great work.

I started using David Allen's "Getting Things Done" approach and love it. It's totally transformed the way I do email and the rest of my life too. I love the satisfaction of seeing my inbox empty at the end of each day, and it helps me be so much more productive. I highly recommend the book. You an get an insight into the system at his website, http://www.davidco.com/. Here's a workflow diagram that gives you the outline of the process: http://www.davidco.com/tips_tools/tip32.html.

Looks great Steve!

Hello Kirk,

Thanks for the informative writing about pop mail, it feeds my knowledge :)

OOT, I'm a university student from Indonesia. To get my degree in Public Relations, I'm doing a survey about corporate blog for internal & external communication. I took sample from list of corporate blogs in www.thenewpr.com, and your blog is one of them. So I need your help to spare a little of your precious time taking the survey. I will send you the invitation letter for the survey by mail to blog@webmail.us cc kirkblog@webmail.us . Pls check it out and thanks in advance for your kind help!

Regards,
Nuniek Tirta
www.nuniek.com (a weblog in bahasa Indonesia)

Sometimes mail arrives in my inbox, but I'm just not sure if it is spam, or mail that I am simply not interested in reading.

Part of the problem is that the 'from' line often displays only a sender's name, like John Smith. Well, I may want to read Mr. Smith's message, but I don't know a Mr. Smith. So, I stare at it this mysterious new sender, wondering if I should open the message or not.

In other webmail services, I can simply hover my mouse pointer over the sender's name and a yellow screen-tip will open and display the actual email address.

SO, here I have this message from Mr. Smith, and I hover my mouse pointer over his name and the email address displayed in the tip-box is 445bbx890@yahoo.com - that's when I know I don't want to open Mr. Smith's message. BUT, if I hover over sender John Smith and I see the email address is from my client's domain name, then I for sure would want to open that message.

I would like to see this feature in Webmail.

This is a great idea! Thank you for sharing it. I will make sure that it gets in front of our developers. We're doing a "hackathon" soon-- a day dedicated to making, testing, and deploying small program enhancements-- and this seems like a very good fit.

-Kirk

You did it! It works! Wow that was fast. Thank you. Thank you. I love it!

-Jim

Logging out of Webmail from a small business owner's perspective - an issue of continuity (and maybe a little pride)...

I sent in a "feature request" to Webmail.us regarding logging out of Webmail and how the user's browser automatically redirects to the Webmail.us web site. In my email I stated the following argument:

**QUOTING ME**
Consider this: An employee logs into their webmail from their company web site; when they log out wouldn't it make more sense if they were automatically redirected back to THEIR web site and not Webmail.us - ?
**END QUOTE**

This is the response from Webmail.us:

**QUOTING WEBMAIL.US**
I see what you mean, however, that API code was designed to send users back to the Webmail.us log in page. That is one of the reasons that we provide this as a free* service.

As an upgradeable feature, we can provision a "Private Label" login page for you which would be something like mail or webmail.[your-domain].com where you can add your company's logo, add headers/footers and you have complete control of the website colors... basically it would look like your company's website without any Webmail.us taglines anywhere on the site.
**END QUOTE**

But here's my problem: I don't need "Private Label" features(other than the ability to auto-link back to MY site after logging out of Webmail); It would be silly in my case as a small business owner to "hide" that I use Webmail.us as my email service provider. In fact, I think it shows good business sense that I partner/outsource my email to Webmail.us.

*I was a little irked by the following statement from Webmail.us, "...that API code was designed to send users back to the Webmail.us log in page. That is one of the reasons that we provide this as a free service." I never really thought of the login API code as a "free service" before; Instead, I thought it was a useful tool for accessing the services that I am paying for.

A generic logout screen (like when you log out of the administrative control panel) would be ten times better.

BOTTOM LINE: If I login at website "A", I shouldn't end up at website "B" when I logout. It looks bad; and it doesn't make any sense. Am I being too picky? I don't know; let me think about that while I go and color coordinate the push-pins on my bulletin board.

Jim, thanks for the feedback!

-Kirk

I believe it would be incredibly valuable to have shared mailing lists available on a "group" or "account" basis. I am a consultant working with small businesses and any business with more than 15 employees NEEDs to be able to communicate to groups of people on a regular basis. Barring that ability, you should define a CSV/vCARD format and allow people to email mailing lists into each account. That way they could be centrally maintained, distributed by email and imported periodically. I would pay a bit extra for this capability and I think other clients would too.

Thanks.

I'm very interested in the dspam project, and am very impressed with its potential. However, unless I'm not understanding the process, it involves the user teaching the system the difference between good emails and spam to achieve such amazing numbers.

What does this mean for us, the end users? Do we have to help teach dspam?

The short answer is no, you won't have to help train it, but that is a fair question.

The great thing is, we already have a very good anti-spam system and users can click the report spam option any time we might have missed one. That system and existing user feedback loop can be used to train dspam or a similar system-- dspam can take such info and learn from it even though it's not the main anti-spam system.

Once we think it is "well trained", we can run the same messages through dspam and our current system and see which is better at finding spam. If Jonathan and others are right, dspam should do better because it will have learned subtle things missed by our current system. That's the theory.

None of this requires any additional effort from users.

-Kirk

My browser is Mozilla 1.7.11. Will I continue to receive my emails with Nepturn as I now do?

Hi Brent. Yes, we support the browswers listed above and all releases after those versions.

The webmail login API also was removed after the new website launch. Will the webmail login API also be included in the Control Panel? (When it comes back?)

No, we'll put it on the website, probably in the Resources section. I'll blog about it once it is back on line. Thanks for the patience on this one!

Neptune is a great improvement! I found one thing missing and that is a single delete link. There is a Delete and Next and a Delete and Prev link but no single delete link. I have to manually move
the last email to the trash by using the Move link
all the time. But, other than that Neptune is GREAT!

Pat,

Your new corporate strategy for blogs makes sense. I'll look forward to seeing new content here on a regular basis. As someone who is also one of your customers, I'll be especially interested in seeing how this works as a focal point for customer dialogue.

Good point. We'll take a look at that.

I agree - I too miss the Delete icon/button. Often I just want to delete an open message, without opening a "next" or "previous" message. The original Delete icon was also in a handy spot. It's the little things..

I confirmed with my development staff today that this was an oversight. The DELETE button will be back shortly and I'll blog about it once we get it back in there.

Thank you for the feedback. Keep it coming.

I see ya'll removed the Delete and Next/Delete and Prev links. Can those be kept? I did not mean for them to be removed I just wanted the single delete link to be added.

Thanks, Charlie

Both functions will be back soon. They were buggy so we disabled them... for now.

Thanks for pointing this out.

My chesley@webmail.us changed to Neptune, but chesley@webmail.us did not. Is there a reason?

Hmmm... what is the difference between the two accounts?

I love it.
Thanks! Guys, This is working great even in Safari on Mac OS X. Keep up the good work.

i want to subscribe to your blog. how do i
'log in to webmail"

Hi Neil,

Just go to www.webmail.us and enter your email address and password in the Log-In box in the upper left corner. Then follow the instructions we laid out earlier. Here are those instructions:

http://www.webmail.us/subscribe-instructions

I hope this helps.

Re: Rolling select.

Is this feature in yet? It works in Firefox nor IE6.

What do we do in the meantime for a webmail login API? I know what the purpose of a wiki is, but I don't know if I'm supposed to use the code examples, or if I'm supposed to wait for a "final" version. I'm so confused.

Jim,

The Webmail Log-in API will be back soon. I'll email you personally when it is back online.

Whew! I thought I was going to have to put it together myself using all the code examples and info at the wiki. Thanks for clearing this up.

Thanks for moving this outside the control panel, which I do not access every day; so this is great. There was a system status notice not too long ago regarding SPF settings, but unfortunately, it's no longer out there, and I still need that info. With that said, will this new method archive posts so that useful information - such as the SPF "post" - remain accessible?

Good question. We'll make sure that anything that needs to be indexed also gets posted on the blog. I'll talk to Kirk about making this happen and we'll get the SPF stuff up here ASAP.

I am very impressed with Webmail's new features. These features and outstanding past performance were instrumental in renewing our continued use of Webmail's services!

Although probably on their way, here are some additional thoughts:

1) Ability to delete and instantly move to next or prior message;
2) Calendar Alarm email sent to preselectable addresses (SMS or other outside webmail email in drop down menu). SMS messages to format accordingly;
3) "Briefcase" type file storage area (continually behind SSL web interface); and,
4) Collaboration.

These additions will complete an already outstanding interface!

T

These are indeed great ideas. And you're correct, in some variation, they are on our list. But don't let that stop you (or anyone else) from suggesting improvements. We will prioritize the more we hear stuff like this.

Thanks for the compliments! They are great to hear.

Happy New Year, We 'll keep it in mind

regards
Amit

However you use SPEWS it doesn't make for a satisfactory anti-spam solution for me. I moved our accounts to Webmail in December. On every other point I think you're fantastic. But your spam handling seems diabolical - it is letting through messages that are such obvious spam (pharmaceuticals, 'doctor's'; stock reports, all manner of rubbish, and all from obviously fake addresses, some with the same subject line time after time). Worse, there's nothing I can do to tackle them myself because your filters don't work once your system has labelled mail spam. In other words you actually protect spam from being deleted by my own custom filters (instead of running filters BEFORE the spam filtering as most other systems appear to do).
To be honest I am at the end of my tether with this subject. My last email provider was a small two man outfit with minimal support but very low costs. Its anti spam system - which included filters that acted on spam and a greylisting feature too - was a hundred times more effective than yours. Can you not learn something from people like Mailsnare? Greylisting is an option that won't appeal to all people (it makes mail from unknown senders get sent twice, which rules out most fake addresses, and kills most spam, but introduce a slight mail delay). But it would be nice to have it as an option.
As things stand at the moment I either have to change email addresses or change email provider if I want to get less spam. That would be a shame.

Hi David. It was nice talking to you through Support earlier today. As we discussed, by "it is letting through messages that are such obvious spam", you mean that we are delivering more spam than you would like to you Spam folder rather than flat out rejecting it during the SMTP session. So we are identifying it as spam, but you don't want to see it at all - and I can understand that.

About half of the spam that we block is at the SMTP level, and the other half is in the filters after the SMTP level. If we increased the strength of the SMTP-level filters much beyond its current level, there would be an unacceptable level of false positives, which creates a bigger problem for companies.

In most cases, our customers prefer us to error on the side of caution and deliver tagged spam to the Spam folder rather than flat out reject it... that way the customer can still get to the messages if there was a false-positive.

For situations where a Webmail.us, Inc. user does not want to see spam at all, even mail we identify as spam, there is an option in the “Spam Filtering Preferences� section of the “Account Options� section of the Webmail interface in which a user can opt to have mail we flag as spam deleted automatically.

I don’t suggest this because however rare it is, there always will exist the possibility for a false positive. If you never want to view the spam, I suggest you choose the option to deliver mail we flag as spam to your Webmail spam folder, and that folder can be configured to automatically delete mail ever X number of days, where the user can determine the value of X.

This way the user never has to open the folder and never see the spam. If ever you expect an email that does not arrive you can open this Web based spam folder see if the mail is waiting for you there.

If you would like instructions on how to configure your account this way, simply contact our support team… you can email them at support@webmail.us and we’ll be more than eager to help.

I requested information about the "company directory" service but I was advised I could only request this service to be turned on through the administration control panel...I am having difficulty locating where within the control panle I can request for this service...please advise, thank you

Go ahead and email neptune[at]webmail.us and we'll activate it for you ASAP.

but the alt+click feature still works.

http://www.webmail.us/blog/a/2006/01/unknown_webmail_features

I wonder if any of that talent could be put toward making the Web interface support Japanese and other double-byte character sets. The gee-whiz features are nice enough, but I can't even read most of the messages on the Web because they are in Japanese.

wataru

Bravo!

That is a great suggestion. In fact, language localization is something we're going to pursue very soon. We've just engaged a translation partner that will be able to help us support all of the different languages our customers demand. In other words, double byte characters are on the list and coming soon. I can't say when yet because I don't know, but I will be blogging more on this subject soon.

Good to know you are working on it. Translating the interface is one thing, but the more urgent issue is character set encoding.

I've seen Web email interfaces that were translated into dozens of languages but still couldn't display Japanese email correctly. Even Yahoo has trouble with this, whereas Google does an excellent job with Gmail. Maybe you could study these examples to figure out why.

Note that Unicode support is not enough; it's also important to support charsets that use 7 bits plus escape, notably iso-2022-xx.

The service as a whole is excellent, by the way. We're into our second year with you.

wataru

This is a nice feature - providing the kind of flexibility we thought we had to give up when we stopped running our own e-mail services and outsourced it to you guys.

An even nicer one would be the ability to restrict the IP address specific users would be able to get their e-mail from.

I bet I'm not the only administrator who's worried about users pulling their e-mail onto their insecure PCs and having our confidential customer information splurged all over the internet by a virus...

We have a policy to prevent people from using their e-mail outside the company unless we're satisfied that their PCs are secure, but it would be nice to be able to enforce it...

Interesting idea. We'll put that one on the list of ideas to discuss in the future.

What about those of us that want the same thing but do not have our own email servers.

You can secure the communication between any two servers by using the method described above. If you don't own the server that you are trying to establish secure communications with, then you can talk to the owner of that server and point them to this URL.

Also, you can secure the communication between your computer and our servers by using TLS/SSL as described in our setup guides.

I hope that helps.

In the Alias "Show All" list, I hope you can add the field to show which email address is the "Alias" currently point to.

We have more than 30 "alias" created and it is not easy to remember the setting of all of them.

If you list the destination all within 1 screen shot, that will be great for the Admin to manage these effectively.

Right now, I have to click into each Alias to find out what is the current setting and then make adjustment.

This is a great idea. I will pass it onto development. In the meantime you can go into the control panel and go to the menu:

Email Accounts -> Tools -> Export Mailbox Aliases

This should help.

Thanks for the comment.

How about HelpSpot?

Take a look at salesnexus.com

Try www.norada.com, smb focused crm app.

SugarCRM.com
I believe they have both an opensource version and an enterprise/supported version.

We use ZeeWise. Has a SalesForce feel but at the fraction of the cost.

After trying several email hosting companies, I gave one try to Webmail.us. Now I am not having to switch over to any other.

Try this..
very simple to use and the methodology developed by someone who was once top salesman for Apple.

http://www.SalesLookASP.com

regards
Andy

We use Sales Junction; salesjunction.com is the URL. Cost effective, Simple, Easy to Use. I have had great support from them thus far. We have used them for about 18 mos. now. Good Luck!

What about the old standby, ACT! ?

http://www.act.com/

I haven't used it personally, but way back in 1999 when I was a web development consultant, I was flown out to Denver for a week by Fiserv Correspondent Services to help work on a user interface for a trading application. Their sales guys used ACT! and they liked it. At the time it seemed to be dead simple and the right tool for the job. That may have changed in six years, but the ACT web site demo looks very promising.

Sean

We too use Salesforce. We thought it was going to be overkill for us when we first started with it 3 years ago, but we continue to build on it. The case management tool is essential for our business of supporting professional end users. It is not a low-cost solution, though.

Why build? Doesn't anybody buy anymore? Most of your competitors have had the fucntionality you speak of for a while, a few of them for several years. Why not just license the tech and be done with it to gain parity. Allows you to concentrate less on catching up and more on getting ahead.

Should we build or buy is always a good question and one we always look at before making a major decision. But the reality is we have our own vision for our product. We're not looking to copy or catch up to a competitor. Likewise, we want all of the components of our platform to work together seamlessly. We also want them to evolve over time. None of this is easy if you buy someone else’s product. And lastly, even if we were to buy something, even though I don't know what we'd buy, it would still take a lot of work on the integration side. Nothing great is easy!

The holy grail of productivity applications for the many independent mobile professionals with Treos, Palms, Windows CE PDA, is a unified calendar and address book that can SYNC the data between there "desktop" storage and their PDA. In my case, I would give up my "offline" Thunderbird email client in exchange for: 1. a fast webmail client (I understand this is coming soon), 2. Google Quality Email search (I understand this is also in the works), and 3. Solid integration with my PDA (address book, calendar and email) for out of the office use.

Since IMAP provides the email access, all we need is calendar and address book SYNC of some type.

Irv Shapiro

All good points. Our aim is to build the webmail piece first, then look at SYNC options down the road. Everything we build will have open APIs so the possibilities will be there.

I totally agree with Irv. As Webmail.us develops, Group collaboration (shared calendars and contacts) are vital to those of us who either have or will be supporting mobile devices. I understand why Outlook integration would be down the line.... getting the core product to do Collaboration and IMAP email would cause many to leave Outlook/Thunderbird/etc. One area I would love to see is better WAP or HTML support to mobile devices... although I bet that's on it's way also!

Definitely.

After seeing that your company allows your employees to endorse your services here:
http://viewfromthemountain.typepad.com/applepeels/2006/03/lingering_regre.html

while slamming other companies, I certainly don't want to purchase your services.

What an incredibly unprofessional blog there. An ex-employee of a company obsesses about their ex-employer, taking every opportunity to put the company down, and in the process endorses webmail.us? Perhaps you could turn this into a series. All of your employees could post about ways in which their former employers sucked, and talk about ways that webmail.us is better. What great marketing!

I encourage our employees to blog freely at Webmail. That blog is a personal blog, not at all endorsed by our company or anyone other than the author of that respective blog.

Either 37S is [Getting Real]ly big... or they just happen to appeal to likeminded folks. Although I feel 37S's shine is beginning to dull, I found Webmail.us around 4-5 months ago and besides helping me in a pinch, I've found the service to be excellent. (Just added our 7th domain today.)

Maybe it was the icons, I don't know, but webmail.us stood out in the overcrowded sea of mail hosts. Interestingly, your site is very Un37S, in the sense that the design is really tight (which is good.) Sometimes you need to look enterprise-y. If webmail.us had the 37S aesthetic, I probably would have kept looking.

So do you guys read John Gruber's Daring Fireball too? What about Siracusa? I need to do a six degrees experiment one of these days...

Just found your blog (ironically it was the Getting Real in quotes that made me look,) but I'm subscribed now, so I'll be reading. Keep up the good work. Looking forward to all of the scheduled improvements.

Thanks!

Yes, I don't agree with everything they say or do but we're all about the "keep it simple" mantra that they preach. Sometimes you just have to take the good, leave the bad, and then do your own thing. Design is important to us and I don't like most of their designs... but they do keep them simple.

I am glad to see that collaboration features are in the pipeline and that email client integration is on the radar screen as well. Collaboration has become essential to our organization (and I imagine to most every other). While I am no fan of Outlook, no one can deny the convenience of its unification of shared calendaring, shared contact management and email in one application. While webmail software with this feature set may be an option for some, I (and I suspect many others) have users familiar and comfortable with Outlook. It would require considerable cost and energy and weathering a period of substantially decreased productivity to transition them to another interface. Unfortunately, the demand for collaboration has resulted in pressure to move to an Exchange server.

In the short term, the ability to create one or more "shared contacts" directory (not unlike the "company directory" concept) that was also made accessibl by email clients via LDAP would go a long way to bridging the gap.

Thank you for all of your hard work.

I think it makes more sense to outsource the part of the business which is not our speciality and someone else can to do it more efficiently at a better price.

I agree 100% with this article.

Hi Ellen,

Thanks for such nice feature.
If you can add few more fonts, than it would be really more easier to compose.

Regards,
Anil Panwar

Anil,

We will be adding more fonts... but not for a few months. We have a big project on the horizon that will make the entire compose page MUCH better.

Thanks!

Pat

Not sure why you feel sf.com is not simple. We've been using it for years and it does a nice job of tracking opportunities and rolling up into a management level forecast. Over time, our biggest problem comes from poorly structured data because it is not rigid enough for diverse team of sales people. This leads to duplicates and such. My warning on 'simple' systems is that if they are structured too loosely you'll need to focus on a rigid naming convention for your data that you can enforce.

Thanks for all the continuing work on improving webmail... we are absolutely delighted customers.

Off topic and likely a separate blog entry (but couldn't find a place to post a non-support related question):

Would you comment in your blog about Webmail.us' position regarding Microsoft and Yahoo spam email authentication technologies as discussed here: http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11388/1

I see Kirk had an entry about SPF here (http://www.webmail.us/blog/a/2005/03/ ), which is related, but, I don't believe, exactly the same.

Thanks!
ken

Yes, I will talk to our team about this and hopefully we can get something up here soon.

Thanks for asking and I'm glad you're a happy customer!

I have noticed speed problems in my IMAP clients in the past few days, and I'm wondering if it's due to Dovecot... Thoughts?

Derek, I'm not sure. I will ask support and have someone contact you ASAP.

Thanks for the heads up.

Hello Team Webmail.us

Hope your team can put the following in place :

1. 24 x 7 support ...this will help people especially in India / Asia, who otherwise have to wait a whole 10-12 hours till our problems gets to your support team and then resolved. I do not know how many Indian / Asian sites you host.

2. Control on "Aliases" should be given to us. We should be able to manage to add / delete "aliases" and also allow/restrict permission to send emails to defined "aliases"

3. Auto-reply should be a feature. VAR sends out a reply only once to the sender, all subsequent emails do not get the auto-reply.

Would appreciate if your team can put these basic things in place.

Regards
Savio

Savio, let me address your requests below:

1. 24x7 is coming soon. I can't quite say when yet, but we're working hard at putting it in place.

2. You can control aliases in your control panel.

3. We provide vacation messages which are kind of like auto responders but they only respond one time. Auto responders are bad because they can cause infinite loops with other mail servers. Will the vacation message help you to accomplish what you're looking to do?

This may not be an ideal solution, but you might get to thinking about how you can create a component that would separate the attachment from the email and store it on an 'attachment server'. Inside the email would be some form of password along with a web link to the file to be downloaded. The reader would click on a link, and after supplying the password would be able to download the file via http. Then the file could be made available for a certain period of time before being destroyed. You could even host the files on an SSL server. Personally I think too many confidential files get tossed around the internet and people aren't aware of how long those files may be sitting around on mail servers as bounces and so on.

Sean

It is NOT hard to pronounce! It's pronounce like it reads .... in Japanese :D

That is fantastic news. Thanks for staying on top of this.

Wonderful news! Definitely noticed an increase in spam getting through over the past couple months -- but only because your filters were so proficient previously.

Thanks for the honest post and the corrective action.
ken

P.S. Feature request: If it is valuable for Webmail.us to get the message headers of spam that gets through, I'd love to see a Thunderbird extension to create a "Report Spam" button for those using Pop3/IMAP in Thunderbird rather than using the webmail browser.

Ken,

I'm with you. I'm going to push for that soon.

When we first signed up a new customer (80 mailboxes), it was requested that something be put in place that would remind users (possibly force them) to change their passwords on a quarterly basis. Has anything been initiated towards this end?

FYI: I tried using the beta the first day because our campus could certainly use more speed (not your fault necessarily!).

One of the emails had a word document attached; when I tried to download I got a couple of error messages and wasn't able to.

However I was through the "old" system.

Thanks.

When you start using the Bayesian component of SA so that SA can learn each individula user's mail/SPAM patterns, or you switch to a better Bayesian solution like DSPAM, you may actually stand a chance of keeping abreast in the SPAM fight.

Put Webmail lite on a faster server! It's been going way slow lately.

I think this is what you are looking for. This is Blackberry Internet Services site for Verizon. This will let you have email sent to your blackberry from an imap or pop account (including ones that use TLS or SSL) without setting up any forwarding.

This also automatically sets up your blackberry so that when you reply to an email that comes in from that account it will use the correct address in the From field. Also, you can send emails from that account, which will also set the From address correctly. All of this works side by side with a BES account (if you have one) and with multiple pop/imap boxes.

I believe that most carriers have this tool available though via a different URL.

https://bis.na.blackberry.com/html?brand=vzw

Josh

What is the point of having a 5G quota when you are advised to not have more than 1000 messages per mailbox and "not too many" mailboxes?

Our new webmail platform and IMAP server will solve any problems caused by large mailboxes and folders with lots of email data in them. Please let me know if you find this not to be the case.

Great job guys!

Would love to have right-click options, like flag, save as new...

looks good!

Just wanted to say that I am looking forward to shared contacts. I am new to webmail.us, so far I've been very impressed with the overall functionality and responsiveness of the webmail system. Keep it up!

I've noticed the performance improvements. Thank you very much! Keep up the great work.

This is pretty much the best news I've heard in a while. You guys absolutely rock. Thank you for working so hard to constantly improve the backend technology, rather than sitting still and stagnating with a working product.

Thank you!

I would like to suggest that you consider removing the Flash-based headers; it causes brief flashing (no punning intended) in the browser window as it loads in Gecko-based browsers under Linux. Flash under Linux also grabs scrolling events from both the keyboard and mouse if the mouse is hovering over the Flash object. Thus, while using the scrollwheel, the page will suddenly stop scrolling and you have to move the mouse to a different location to resume scrolling. :(

sIFR is a pretty novelty, but significantly detracts from the browsing experience under Linux. (This from a rabid feed fanatic!) Thank you for at least considering.

Cool!

This is good news.

Keep up the good work!

Thank you.

Bill

Wonderful! Thanks for the work on this.

i ordered proactive, just one set. it was mailed to my family in florida. then i was mailed to more sets and was charged. i only purchased one set those sets were mailed to me in iraq were i am currently and one box said i will be sent another on 8/28/2006. i do not want that box and ask it no be sent to my family. so i ask u to cut my account and no more sets be sent to me. my account number is 46-335-166162438. i would like to be notified if there is any problem and notified once the account has been canceled. thank you very much.

Congratulations! You really deserve it.

Feature request:

Regarding vacation messages, the biggest problem we have is that if someone is also set up to receive a message via an alias, the vacation message is not only sent to people sending direct messages to the email address, but also people sending messages to an alias (sales, support, etc).

For instance, john@company.com is on vacation. sales@company.com is an alias and is forwarded to various salespeople, including John. Prospective customer sends an email to sales@company.com. Prospective customer then receives an auto-reply email saying that John is on vacation.

This makes it look like the "sales department" is on vacation -- and it is a pain to take people off of these alias' each time they go on vacation.

Something to consider... thanks for the great work,
ken

Definitely a good point. We will discuss this.

Thank you for your input.

YES I ORDER PROACTIVE FOR MY DAUGHTER LAST MONTH, ALL I WANT IS TO CANCEL ANYMORE COMING HERE , I NO LONGER WANT ANYMORE OF THE PRODUCTS,
THANK YOU
ELLEN NICHOLAS
814 W7TH ST.
ANTIOCH,CA. 94509

Yeah, your upgrade is great. I have 1mb pictures that load as fast as it takes me to scroll down with my mouse!

It would be great to add an option to set the reply-to header on a group list. I know there are different schools of thoughts on this, but for me I like to setup lists so that replies go to the group by default.

Serge - We have a list of ideas to implement in the future and I'll be sure to add yours to that list. Thanks for the idea!

Can I upgrade just my e-mail account to the new version of webmail (pre-test before my clients) or do I have to upgrade all the e-mails in my account?

Giving the harbinger upgrade a dry run is as easy as logging into a new URL. Just go to https://beta.webmail.us and use your full email address and password to log in. It even has an SSL certificate so you can rest assured that everything is encrypted. Let us know what you think!

Is there a list of all features upgraded with the new version available anywhere?

The search feature is VERY well done.

I have a very, very tiny nit to pick. If the word "wine" appears in the subject, and the word "pinot" in the body, the email will not show up in a search for "wine pinot" (without the quote marks).

It searches the body, and the subject, but not both at once.

I am guess you are probably indexing each field of the email separately within Lucene -- subject, body, from, etc. It might be wise to create an "everything" field where you concatenate all your other fields together (separated by newlines or something), and make this compound field the default search field.

Great job though, overall.

This is a great, responsive Webmail system.

I like the AJAX autocomplete stuff. To get this working, I've been adding people to my address book (as required), and noticed that it would be a lot easier if I there were an "Add to contacts" button on emails viewed in preview mode, either next to the name of the sender or next to the Blacklist/Whitelist options.

Good call using Lucene. We've been using the .NET port for two years now at EvolvePoint and have had tremendous success with it.

The webmail interface is much faster than the slower/older version. But I still see that beta.webmail.us taking it's time to load misc css/image/js files on many requests and not really serving static content all that fast. Have you guys tried some alternative and even-driven web servers like litespeed?

@Diego: We do have a set of servers that are dedicated to serving static content. As for various files:

css: this is an area we are currently improving.

js: you should only see js files requested one time per version. after that they should be cached. there are exceptions on a few popup pages, but they will be converted in the near future.

images: we set a fairly high expire time on images, so they should be caching. if they are not, i tend to lean towards a browser issue.

We have not tried litespeed, but we are constantly working to server static content faster and more efficiently, so it is a possibility sometime in the future.

I love this feature! Woohoo!

In case it's not intuitive enough (I had to ask Matt):

To sort by flag, click the flag icon at the top of the message list (the header bar).

To sort by new messages, click the mail envelope at the top of the message list (header bar).

Before being customer at Webmail.us, mail was a headache. Today I reach the mail from anywhere without confusion and spam, and with better speed after Harbinger went live. Yet what I love the most about Webmail.us, is the extraordinary service of which I have never experienced elsewhere.

Tom Olav Bruaas
Norway

Before reading this entry, I did notice that a few weeks ago my daily spams dropped from 15 to 2 or 3. Suspecting greylisting, I did some tests against your MXs that confirmed it.

It seems to work great already, but keep up the tuning!

Do you use much RBL checking as well? Before moving to webmail.us, my own system filtered 150 spams a day using SpamAssassin, when moving to webmail.us, the amount making it into my spam folder drop tenfold. I can only guess it must be RBL checks...

Hi Bas,

Yes we do also use RBL checks to reject mail. But we do it smartly by using combo-rules, such as the sending server must be listed in multiple blacklists or must fail one or two other non-blacklist based checks before we will reject the message. We found that flat out rejecting mail based on any individual blacklist is very error-prone, so we don't do that. Almost everything is a combo-rule in one form or another. We do lots of tuning as you can imagine.

Some registration companies are already taking 'pre-registrations' for .eu domains. While this new domain space for the European Union and its member states has been approved by the European Parliament and ICANN, no details have yet been finalised.

Great idea, and it looks like users are already using it. Very nice.

Some unscrupulous companies are running various domain name scams intended to mislead or frighten you into transferring your domain name to them or to register an alternative domain name with them.

How come you don't purchase and colocate your servers in Virginia? There's tons of high qualify datacenters in VA and you would have pretty quick access to all servers if you need to do anything to them.

Rackspace is pretty good, but they overcharge way too much for what you get. They can get away with this because of their reputation, but there are other providers that can provide the same level of service for less.

But it seems to be working - I've had no problems with my Webmail.us account since February, and I'll be renewing it again come time :) Thanks for the service!

Rob,

We don't want to colocate. We are not a fan of that model - maybe one day, but we'd try to negotiate with Rackspace, first. They bring a lot of value to the table over and above what any colo facilities do.

Also, you pretty much answered your own question. ;-)

111

We evaulated Rackspace (and moved our sites there) after we moved to Webmail (from Exchange). We are trying to take off hats, such as e-mail management. Rackspace is certainly expensive for a few static sites, but you have to weigh the importance of availability and proactive support and uptime. NO vendor is ever perfect so you have to find the right relationship for when things go wrong.

I think Rackspace undercharge. The scope of the support they provide is huge, they keep our servers online ALL the time. We dont have to employ 10 guys to watch our servers 24/7, instead we pay rackspace and they do it for us :)

Please add the ability to use aliases as "from" address when sending/replying to e-mails. The reason I use aliases with online vendors is to be able to quickly shut down an alias if I start to get spam on it. However, when I need to contact and on-line vendor, I want to be able to send from that alias address and not expose my "real" email address.

How does one download the Harbinger update?

Regarding the fixes,

I've been on Harbinger for quite awhile. Is there any action I need to take to upgrade to the version with the fixes and enhancements?

Wayne Mandrus

Wayne: no, you will automatically receive all fixes and enhancements. I will try to make that more clear from now on.

Ed, as an @webmail.us user, you have Harbinger update. If you're referring to another domain name you host with us, let me know.

Well, that's very nice. Now if you could just fix the bug you introduced with Harbinger where you can't add more names than fit on a single page, I'll be impressed.

John, are you referring to Contacts? Please elaborate if possible.

I have to say this is an improvement, in that at least within the Webmail managed system the lists now seem to work. I still haven't been able to send to a list from the specified external senders.

Matt, thanks... and if you're having trouble, let us know about it. Feel free to email me or our Customer Care team so we can help.

Looking forward to learning about how the reseller program works.

Is that a little bottle of Vodka on Steve's desk? :)

You guys look like you have a good time. Glad to be a part of your company.

Glad to be SERVICED by Webmail.us. Not part of it. Sorry

Maybe you can setup m.webmail.us to redirect to mobile.webmail.us as well? It's not a big deal; but some people like me have a Smartphone without a QWERTY keyboard (such as the Audiovox SMT5600) and it would be less keys needed to type :)

Sadly, as with your Web interface, there's no support for double-byte character sets, so almost none of my messages are readable. How far down the list of cool features is this basic functionality, which all the popular Web mail services (Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail etc.) have had all along?

Why not use the .mobi extension, you have the domain?

Rob: Good idea, I'm sure we can do that.

Tenga: You're right, not yet, but we will support them soon.

Nic: Webmail.mobi works too.

tool no longer works.

I don know but why i don find such informative and profitable blogs so often,I suspect blogging world is becoming so small that we cant find such lucrative blogs like this one.

Thanks and need help on how to setup our mail server to receive all emails

I can not add attachments to my webmail

what do i need to do to upgrade our storage plan?

We use this company for work. And I have never ever had any issues. I highly recommend Webmail.us Keep up the good work!

Your message states that "Existing customers can upgrade storage plans today, for free, from the My Account section of the control panel". What exactly is free? Selecting any storage upgrade appears to be chargeable.

Sorry for any confusion... you can upgrade to the next highest plan. So if you were on the 100MB plan before, you can upgrade to the 1GB. If you were on the 1GB before, you can upgrade to the 5GB. If you were on the 5GB before, you can upgrade to the 10GB.

I hope that helps.

If you have any more questions, please contact our customer care team and we'll help you out.

I'm with David here. I received your email and went to upgrade. Then I checked here, and saw the comment. Since we are on the 1GB plan, I tried to upgrade to the 5GB plan per your comment above. Upon changing from 1GB to 5GB, the system wanted to charge me almost $40 for the upgrade. When I saw that I did not continue with the upgrade.

So how exactly do we do this for free?

Denis,

I will have someone from our customer care team contact you to help you with the upgrade.

The only caveat here would be if you are a new customer and already have the new pricing plan.

Sorry for the confusion but we'll get it worked out.

Thanks, Pat

I went to upgrade to the 1GB plan and found that the 1GB plan was already selected as the Storage plan but it still says 100 mb/mailbox to the side and when I look at an account via webmail it still says the quota is 100mb. What do I need to do to get the larger quota to take effect?

Sorry about that. Should have been obvious. I left it at 1GB and then clicked "upgrade" and now it looks correct. Thanks for the increased storage. Most helpful.

Thanks Dennis, I was just about to write you back. ;-) You're welcome.

Would love to see what remote data backup product you guys can develop using S3. Sign us up.

Jason

Thanks for your item on email ports. Never heard of them until first Earthlink - after 4 or so years - blocked port 25 with neither explanation or remidy. (What the heck is the meaning of "timed out," anyway?) So, with several emails I couldn't send for love or money, I fired Earthlink & opted for DSLEXtreme, which suckered me in for a couple of days then blocked 25 and three more with triple-digit numbers. Mindful that I couldn't fire DSLEX without paying a $250 penalty, I turned to Yahoo for mail. So far OK, except recently it stopped transmitting photo attachments in the clear (I have a Mac, which evidently offends them.) But now I know more than I did and you've suggested remedies. Thanks.

I am also a customer and big fan of Amazon's new web services.

As a service provider you are obviously always working to improve service availability, business continuity, data loss prevention etc. Amazon’s (non-existent) service levels probably aren’t a concern if you're only using S3 for backups as the chance of both Amazon and Webmail experiencing data issue at the same time very unlikely.

I'm wondering though, if you experienced a catastrophic failure - using a traditional definition where your internal safeguards also failed - how long would it take to restore an entire snapshot of your production environment from Amazon back to Rackspace? Or is there some magic-in-the-middle? At 1GB - 10GB per user account that’s a truckload of data.

Right, the SLA for the backups system is not much of a concern. It is acceptable to us if Amazon S3/EC2/SQS has moments of downtime, since it is needed only to push and retrieve backup data. If we were using Amazon's web services for our production mail system, not backup system, then their SLA would definitely be a concern.

If we experienced a catastrophic failure, ignoring the time it would take to diagnose what happened and rebuild the broken server(s), and focusing just on the data restore time... It would take about 30 hours to restore an entire server worth of data when using one S3 connection. However we have the ability to quickly redistribute users from a failed server to many other servers. And we can make many simultaneous connections to S3. So, say we distributed the failed server's users to 30 other servers. Each of those 30 server could make it's own connection to S3. So 30 hours divided by 30 connections = one hour to restore an entire server's worth of data. We have about 200 of such servers, so as you can see this work can be distributed and parallelized nicely.

Also, since S3 is external to our data center, we could easily redistribute the users to an alternate data center and restore their mail to servers there. Or even do restores from S3 to multiple data centers in parallel. Right now we host our system at just one Rackspace data center, but shh... don't tell anyone... another data center is coming :)

could this be why that yesterday we lost the ability to send email we are getting the message
: host mailstore1.secureserver.net[64.202.166.11] said:
554 refused mailfrom because of SPF policy (in reply to MAIL FROM command)

We do use the port 8025 for our vpn connection if that makes any sense to you.

No, that looks like the recipient's server is rejecting the message because your domain has an SPF record that does not permit mail to be sent from the SMTP server you are using. If you are indeed using a Webmail.us SMTP server (on any port) your SPF record should alias the SPF record for emailsrvr.com such as we do for webmail.us:

webmail.us. IN TXT "v=spf1 include:emailsrvr.com ~all"

Hope this helps.

SMTP is a problem for one of my clients.They are using a bellsouth DSL connection, and their outgoing is atrocious and unreliable.
Can we use the webmail smtp reliably,
by that i mean will outlook not be bothered on the bellsouth line and let webmail be the smtp?

Your customers should be able to use our SMTP servers while connected to Bellsouth. To verify this, have them open a command prompt and telnet to our SMTP system on the alternate port:

telnet smtp.emailsrvr.com 8025

If you see our greeting, then they should have no problem using the Webmail SMTP system:

220 relay3.r3.iad.emailsrvr.com ESMTP - VA Code Section 18.2-152.3:1 forbids use of this system for unsolicited bulk electronic mail (Spam)

Happy Birthday Webmail! It's nice to see a company that is highly Customer Oriented and so well organized. May each of your birthdays be greater than the last!

We are one of Webmail.us's newest customers (going live Monday morning next week). Your service is going provide our small company with big company technology at a very low cost and administrative burden. We are going live on the beta version so we can roll out the shared calendar and train employees using the new tab based menu. Keep those new features coming in 2007!

Dana Stetson, Stetson Real Estate

I'll tell you what I want...

Mac support and a webmail support staff that knows what Macs are and how to properly configure the mail client.

I'm happy that your business has been running for 7 years. We have been using your service for several months now. I suspect that you have made other customers happy but we have not been happy with your support.

I see that you have removed mentioned of Mac support on your webpages for some reason. Why?

When I contact your support department, teh answer I usually get about any question, Mac or Windows, is 'I don't know' or we'll look into it.

On other fronts, the web viewer has been slow lately taking up to 1 minute to load.

That being said, as long as we don't need to contact your support department, we're happy. It's just when we talk to anyone there we seem to get nowhere.

It's a shame.

The Mac business community has been touting Fastmail as a quality Mac service provider. I wanted talk about webmail in the same light but I really can't.

Anyway, congrats on your seven years.

Jose,

Thank you, I appreciate your candid comments. I will do some digging to figure out what problems you're encountering and work towards fixing them.

Thanks again,

Pat

Congrats, Webmail.us. Coming from the service industry, it's great to have a vendor that's as concerned about service as we are.

Congratulations on the birthday and your company's accomplishments. I'm a relatively new customer (been one for a little over 12 hours now!) and have been very happy with the service and value you provide. I even had an email response to a question at 2am you local time.

The one suggestion I would have is providing a way for new customers to migrate their email from their old system to you. I have 4 years of email archived that I want to move to you, but you don't provide any self-service methods to do this. Being able to upload a .pst file from outlook or a tarball of my IMAP server folder would be a huge usability step forward for new customers. And I'm sure you can figure out more ways than that...

Otherwise, keep up the good work!

I've bounced back and forth from using an e-mail hosting provider to hosting it myself, trying several different companies over the last 5 years. Thank you for ending my search! I've been so pleased with your services and the continued improvements, clean Web interface (what a concept!) and generous storage space for a reasonable price. This upgrade to the DNS management system only reconfirms that I've found my e-mail hosting home. Keep it up guys!

Congrats! That's exciting news for Webmail.us (and a smart choice for PGA of America). I'm just a pee-wee customer compared to PGA, but I'm glad to see the continued success of one of my favorite tech companies. Keep up the terrific work!

Pat,

I'm looking for a similar solution. So far in my searches, www.pipelinedeals.com seems to have come the closest. It appears to be more deal-centric to me, but I think it'll suit my needs. It looks dead simple to use. Almost inspiring.

Have you had any luck identifying a solution for your problem?

Best,
Bill

Thank you for the new features. So far so good. Few comments - the top part of the page looks a bit cluttered now. Would be nice to have an option to turn those three buttons into icons, for example. I got a feeling that the design was "lighter", not just because of the addition of the tabs. Also, I'd appreciate adding Notes as well, not just Calendar and Tasks. Kudos!

I did not see the changes on the regular site that is on the beta. What time will the changes be made?

Daniel,

The change has been made. Are you logging into www.webmail.us? If so, do you see tabs at the top now?

Pat

I have a a private label account and still see no way to upgrade via the control panel. Not sure if this has been delayed for us private label accounts are not.

David,

Just until tomorrow. We will announce it as soon as you can go into the control panel and