After my earlier post inviting customers who read this blog to try out the new version of the control panel, we had a few requests.  I felt bad at the time that the note about the new control panel was hidden in among a slew of other new features and updates we had in the works.

In case anyone missed it the first time: drop a line to support@webmail.us if you'd like a chance to test drive the beta of our new control panel.

In addition to a completely revamped interface, here are a few of the features you'll find:

Improved security- with password expirations for administrative accounts, IP address restrictions, better session timeouts and protection against brute force password cracking.

Improved browser compatibility- the existing control panel works with Firefox and Netscape, but never officially supported those browsers.  The new control fully supports these alternatives to Internet Explorer.

Private label website provisioning for resellers- now you resellers can set up your own private label webmail sites.  SSL-enabled sites still have to go through support for now.  But this is a very useful tool for our resellers- set up a new PL site when it is convenient to you, and copy formatting from an existing customer's private label site.

There are many other additions, big and small: high-speed interfaces, RSS feed manager, upgrade request form, new support page, and more.

Give it a try and let us know how you think!

-Kirk

I just wanted to take a few minutes in the blog to say thank you for the many great suggestions you've passed our way and to show you a few of them. One weakness in the way we handle suggestions now is that while we have a way for everyone in our company to see the suggestions and add follow up ideas, we don't yet have a method for opening up that process to you as our customers.

So I'm going to use this blog post to lay out for you 10 of the customer-given ideas currently in our Basecamp site over at the excellent 37signals. Please post your comments about these ideas to the blog and you can help us refine them.

Fair warning: this blog post will be long and the ideas are in no particular order. ;)

Ten Ideas

Improve mail filter controls for users. Our current mail filters work by searching all or part of a message for a keyword and, when the keyword is found, the message is moved to a folder or deleted, etc. There are more powerful filtering capabilities out there that allow for more complex searches and handling. Our customer referred us to: http://www.cyrusoft.com/sieve/.

Draft messages in the webmail client. When a message is being composed, if the close button is clicked and the message wasn't saved, a window should pop up asking, "Do you want to save this as a draft?".

Password expirations. Some email administrators would like the ability to set time limits on the age of a password. Users would be prompted to change their password after X many months.

Trust sender added functionality. One customer pointed out that while "Report spam" marks a message as read, moves it to the spam folder, and submits the offending message to spam-learning system, "Trust sender" only adds the sender to a safelist. It was suggested that the message should instead be moved from the spam folder (in the case of a false positive-- rare, but it does happen) and marked as unread to mirror the "Report spam" functionality and save a few clicks.

Sort messages by size in webmail. This has been an oft-requested feature. I am happy to report to you that our recent Hackathon saw this feature created and the testing began. It may be a few more weeks before we can put this feature on the main webmail servers, but it's coming soon!

Make more email addresses clickable inside webmail. Right now, if you use webmail to view an email that was composed in plain text and that message has an email address inside, that address is clickable and a new webmail compose window pops up (this is good). But if you use webmail to view an email composed using HTML, the computer that composed the message has already made the address clickable, but as a "mailto:" link that opens up your default desktop email client like Outlook. The suggestion is to hijack that "mailto:" link and make it pop up a new webmail compose window instead.

Improve spell checking inside webmail. I'm going to cheat and put a couple of suggestions under this one heading. A customer suggested that we allow user-specific dictionaries that can be added to dynamically-- the way a word processor program does. That way you type your email and add your sig line that includes "ACME Corporation", and when the spell checker chokes on ACME you could add it to your dictionary and never be warned about it again. Several customers have pointed out that we can improve spell checking when composing using HTML, and support for more languages could be added.

HTML signatures in webmail. This one should be simple to implement: make it easy for customers to make HTML signatures for webmail. Colors, links, bold, etc. can all make a sig line more eye-catching.

Sort the address book and frequent contacts by last name. This one is pretty much self-explanatory. I saw the development code for this working just the other day so I think we're only a few more weeks away from seeing this in your webmail.

Time limits on the vacation auto-responder. Some customers would like to define a time range for their vacation auto-responder (like I'm on vacation August 23rd through 26th, so automatically start and stop my vacation message for that time period). I'm sneaking in a second vacation item here, too: some customers would like to be able to check a box to select whether their coworkers and friends get the vacation response only the first time they send to the vacationer or if the sender will get the auto-response every time.

Better tools for suggestion tracking

We looking into ways to better expose this process to you. We love the idea of having an open system that is easy to use for (1) customers to put in ideas, (2) customers to comment on each other's ideas, (3) our staff to add editorial comments, and (4) our staff to keep customers informed about which suggestions are being actively developed.

Hey, if you have an idea of a tool we could use to do this: suggest it to us! Drop a comment to the blog or email me at kirkblog@webmail.us.

Thanks!

-Kirk

Competing as an email hosting company, especially one focused on the needs of businesses, means making new features available. This weekend we held a hackathon-- a very long day where developers pushed hard to code up new features, test them, and put them onto the main development servers.

From everything I hear, it was a big success (although I see a couple of tired developers walking around the office). Want so see what our development team worked on? Pat wrote it up on his blog. Congrats to the team for the good work!

-Kirk

Two days a customer, Jim, added a comment to a post asking for a small improvment to our webmail interface. I responded yesterday to tell him we would put it in front of our developers and today it's up and working.

Now, I really can't promise that all of the suggestions you give us will be implemented that quickly. ;) But I'm glad that we were able to this time.

"Tooltip" full email address

The new mini-feature is that the full email address of the sender will pop up in a small tooltip when your cursor is placed over the sender's name in the message list. It helps when you're not quite sure who the sender is.

Lots of suggestions today!

Between our last couple of blog posts and an email I sent to a few customers today, the suggestions are just pouring in today. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I've responded to everyone personally to let you know that a number of the features are in active development or at least have a defined spot on our schedule. And the new ideas are down for us to pursue a little later.

Again, thank you! Keep the suggestions coming.

-Kirk

I mentioned a while back that we had some great products and enhancements in the development pipeline. Our CEO, Pat Matthews, has decided it.s time to let the world in on a few secrets. You can read all the gory details in his blog. Here.s a short overview:

* RSS reader built into webmail will launch next week: subscribe to blogs and other RSS content from inside webmail and updates are delivered to a folder in the webmail interface. Email administrators can decide whether to make this available for their domain and can pre-subscribe users to certain feeds that the company wants seen.

* Webmail Lite Beta has launched this week: ad-free, and user-friendly access to 3rd-party email services plus our RSS Reader integration. We.ll use Lite to do final test features destined for our paying customers.

* We.re finishing our system upgrade over the next several weeks. It has taken longer than we originally anticipated, but we.ve completely moved several key pieces of our services and have only a few more to go.

* New version of the Control Panel due out in September. It will sport a new interface with more convenient features and better performance for customers with many domains and mailboxes.

* Calendaring, company-wide address books, and other huge Webmail features are coming in the 4th quarter. Again, check out Pat.s blog for more of the details.exciting stuff!

Even more support

On the Service & Support side of things we.ve created a tool that will automatically configure quite a few Windows email client programs.Outlook, Thunderbird, and the like. It has all the default settings for our servers and will set up your email program to use secure POP3 to download messages off our servers.

We find that we get quite a few issues each day that boil down to changing email program settings. This tool only asks for an email address, a name, and one click. I haven.t seen another email hosting company build anything nearly as robust and it.s a great feeling to lead the pack. The source code for the tool has also been released under an open source license. It's a part of our new website section for open source code we've developed and are sharing with the world.

We.re finishing the testing of another tool we built (thanks, Doug!) to decipher the often-mysterious email message headers included with every email message. It untangles the message.s winding path through the Internet and draws a simple diagram. Most importantly, it can usually show if and/or where a delay occurred in transmission. I learned all sorts of interesting things about how another email provider processes messages by using this thing. ;) When it.s a little more polished in a month or two, you.ll see a note in this blog about how to access it.

And our support staff now has access to advanced analysis tools that greatly simplify troubleshooting of common issues. As we work to improve these tools, I hope to see them integrated into our customers. control panels.to save you time in keeping your users up and running.

Busy

In case you couldn.t tell from this huge blog post, we.ve been really busy over here! We have accomplished a lot, but know that there.s more to do this year. Please let us know if there are other things you think we ought to be looking at.suggestions are always welcome!

-Kirk

We learned recently that there was an issue with using the Safari web browser with our Webmail client's Check External Email feature. The fix is now in place.

Support for multiple email accounts in Webmail

Many people have more than one email account hosted with more than one email provider: their home, their business, an old alumni address, and so on. I use 4 email accounts, myself! One work address, one that I use for product registrations, and two other personal email accounts.

Because so many of our customers like our clean Webmail interface, some time ago we added the ability to use Webmail to download messages from other email providers. If that sounds like something you'd like to do, here's how:

Go to your Account Options, then click External Mail (POP3) Settings, then click New Account. A new window pops up. You'll have to know some simple information like the name of the email server, your username, and your password. Mail from the external account can go to any folder or you can create a new folder for that email account. Finally, choose whether to remove those messages from the remote server, or leave a copy there just in case.

Once this is configured, you will see your email delivered to your folder when you Check Mail in the Webmail client. We're working now to add even more flexibility to the External Mail tool.

Improved Spanish translations

Thanks to some feedback from a potential customer and some hard work on the part of one of our developers, Ellen, we have updated a number of Spanish translations inside the Webmail client. Here are a couple of samples of the new translations:

"Request a Read Receipt"
"Solicitar confirmacióe lectura"

"Yes, place the signature below the message"
"Si, incluir la firma al final del mensaje"

"Use signature when forwarding messages"
"Incluir firma al reenviar mensajes"

Keep the ideas coming!

We appreciate all of the feedback we can get!

-Kirk