A lot of customers ask why we name all of our servers using hostnames that fall under a very generic domain name. Bill gave a very good explanation of this today, so if you’re interested, here is his blog post on the subject. Likewise, if you’d like to learn more about our private label email hosting offerings, this page on our website explains just about everything.

If you’d like to subscribe to this blog but don’t know how, we just posted detailed instructions on how to do so via your RSS reader inside of your webmail account. Subscribing via webmail will also allow you to access blog posts via desktop email software like Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird. The instructions will show you how to do that and can be applied to other RSS readers as well. Please go here to learn more.

As we grow our staff and form different “divisions,� with different responsibilities, we’re really hoping that our customers channel their communications properly so that we can best serve their needs. So we’re starting to put more ways to contact us on our website in an effort to properly channel that communication.

We just revamped our contact-us page with email contacts for support, billing, sales, and of course—feedback. As you’ll find throughout the site, there are several ways to contact sales and support, but if you have billing questions or general feedback, this is the way to go. Everyone here responds quickly to email—after all, email is what we know best. With that said, if you still feel the need to go another route, feel free to do so.

I hope this helps.

Mike just finished coding the beta version of our shortcut tool for subscribing to RSS feeds. It’s a pretty nifty tool, especially if you’re a power RSS subscriber. I’ll warn though, it is still in beta and lacks some of the user-friendly aspects you’ll find in other apps we bring to market. Here are the instructions on how to use the tool:

Requirements
• Works only with Webmail.us email hosting accounts
• Users must have the RSS Feeds feature turned on

Description
This tool enables you to automatically add a feed to your RSS Feeds folder, without needing to log into webmail and go through the manual “Add Feed� process.

Directions
1. Right-click the link below:

Webmail.us – Add Feed

Please note: be sure to right-click (not left-click) the link above—and you need to right click it from our actual blog page, (not the page that delivers your RSS Feed).

2. If you’re an IE user, select “Add to Favorites� in the pop-up menu. If you’re a Firefox user, select “Bookmark This Link.� And then click the OK button.

3. Anytime you visit a blog or website that contains an RSS/Atom feed, and you want to subscribe to the feed, just open your browser’s Favorites menu and select the "Webmail.us – Add Feed link."

Please note: When a site contains an RSS/Atom feed, you will usually see an orange [RSS] or [ATOM] icon. Or, you might see a link that says, “Subscribe to this feed� or something similar.

If there are several RSS/Atom feeds on a page, you will need to specify which one you want to subscribe to. Click the RSS or Atom feed icon or link, and then select "Webmail.us – Add Feed" from your Favorites menu, as usual.

4. You will be redirected to a login page. Enter your email address and password (as you would if you were logging into webmail).

5. You will then be automatically returned to the previous website. The next time you log in to webmail, you will see that the feed has been added to your RSS Feeds folder.

Anytime you want to subscribe to a feed, just repeat steps 3-5.

If you have any questions or comments, please use the comments on this blog and we’ll answer them for everyone to see. Remember, this is just a beta!

Bill, our chief technology officer, just launched his blog. Bill is the mastermind behind our email hosting system, specifically the infrastructure (hardware, servers, etc.). I asked Bill to start blogging because he’s one of the smartest dudes I’ve ever known and I think there is a lot of value in getting his thoughts online. Likewise, a lot of what he does these days has a direct impact on our email hosting system and thus, our customers.

If you’re interested in tracking his thoughts as well as the progress we make with our email hosting system, go here and read or subscribe to Bill’s blog. I’ll also be linking to a lot of his posts from this blog—I’m going to do my best to take his technical thinking and paraphrasing things in a way non-techies like me can understand.

A lot of people have been asking lately if there will be any additional costs for Neptune, the latest version of webmail, including calendar and tasks. The answer is NO—there will be no additional costs for these features and upgrades. All customers and resellers will automatically receive the latest version of webmail, which includes calendar and tasks—at no additional cost.

Some other questions that have been popping up are:

Will the calendar and other features synch with desktop email software like Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird?

No, we’re not building synch features at this point in time. We’ll never say “never,� but right now, we want to be as clear as possible that desktop synch is not on our near-term product roadmap.

Will I be able to share my web-based calendar with other users?

Not yet. However, we believe in the power of collaboration and being able to collaborate with co-workers as well as others outside of work. We’re in the process of thinking through our collaboration strategy, so stay tuned.

Will calendar and tasks be integrated into Webmail Lite?

Yes, we’ll be offering calendar and tasks inside of Webmail Lite, free of charge. I’m not sure when that will happen yet but it will be high on our priority list once we release Neptune.

We will be releasing Neptune (faster webmail, calendar, tasks) to all @Webmail.us users early tomorrow morning.

This new version of webmail fully supports Internet Explorer 6.0, Netscape 8.0, Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7, and Safari 1.3.1 for the Mac OS X.

Please note: we will not be supporting previous versions of these browsers. However, we will allow users with older browsers to access the legacy webmail interface for the next 12 months.

Some Internet Explorer users will need to enable ActiveX manually by doing the following:

1. In Internet Explorer, select Tools, then Internet Options

2. Click the Security tab

3. Click the Internet (Globe) icon

4. Click the Default Level button. This will set your security level to Medium and will enable ActiveX.

5. To manually turn on ActiveX, without affecting other settings, click the Custom Level button. Click the Enable button for the “Run ActiveX controls and plug-ins� and "Script ActiveX controls marked safe for scripting" settings. Click the OK button.

6. Click the OK button.

If you would like an @Webmail.us email account, email me and I’ll set one up for you. Likewise, if you'd like your domain to be moved over to the Neptune platform sooner rather than later, email us and we'll move you over just as soon as we can.

One of the features we got rid of when we launched our new website was the ability for returning customers to sign up for email hosting. This feature allowed existing customers to sign up quickly because we were storing their original contact information, etc. It also set them up so they could manage all of their email domains from one control panel login.

This past weekend, we re-enabled this feature. However, it is now available via the control panel as opposed to the Webmail.us signup pages. So, if you’re an existing customer, simply login to your control panel, click Upgrades, and signup for as many email domains as you would like.

We’ve fallen a few weeks behind on our next product development release, code named Neptune. Neptune is a huge project that includes faster webmail (with heavy incorporation of Ajax), Calendar (also Ajaxed) and Company Directory, which will allow email administrators to populate webmail address books from the control panel, providing email users with ‘read-only’ access to that data.

I’ll have an update soon as to exact launch dates, but as of now, we’re still shooting for November. In the meantime, if you’d like some of the gory technical details behind the stuff we’re working on, especially with regards to webmail and Ajax, check out Mike’s blog—Mike is the team lead on the project.

We recently promoted Nell-Marie Colman to product manager. She is responsible for a broad range of projects here at Webmail but most importantly, she is now the first ever product manager for our control panel. The control panel has made it pretty far without putting a product manager in place, but it has become such a critical tool for many of our customers and resellers that we now need someone with product management talent to take over and guide its evolution. So... look for lots of great things to come now that Nell-Marie is in charge.

If you have any control panel requests, feel free to leave a comment on this blog or email our control panel team. Your email will go to myself, Nell-Marie and Kirk, our director of services and support.

Hey everyone—this is Pat Matthews and I’m the CEO of Webmail.us. I’m using this blog entry to let everyone know that we’ve got a new blogging strategy—one that we feel will benefit our customers and those interested in our company. We’ve been blogging for close to a year now, but admittedly, we haven’t really had a focused strategy. Well, we think we have one now. Just as our graphic at the top of this blog says, we want to use this blog to facilitate an open conversation with our customers, prospects, and the rest of the world.

We’re going to blog often. I’m going to be the main voice on this blog, but I’m also going to encourage our employees to blog as well. Some will probably write directly to this blog; some will post pertinent information to their own blogs and when I think it’s relevant, I’ll link to those posts; and finally, some will probably send me information and ask me to post it for them. Either way, we’re going to do our best to keep our customers informed on what’s going on at Webmail.us and we’re going to try hard to stay on topic, keep our posts short and to the point, and hopefully overtime, we’ll be able to engage lots of feedback from you—our customers.

Here are our two basic rules for this new blog:

New Rule #1: all blog posts will have potential impact on a customer—they will have personality to them, but they must have impact, even in the smallest way. This isn’t something we were shooting for before, but as we refine our strategy, we think this is the best and most effective way to go.

New Rule #2: we will blog as concisely and often as possible. Instead of writing really long posts, we will focus on posting often but we’ll try hard to be short and to the point.

Our goal is simple. We want to be as transparent as possible with our customers and the rest of the world. We want to engage our customers in conversation. We want your feedback. I promise we will listen.

The other day when I mentioned new features in the webmail client I managed to skip right over one of the most important features: as you start typing in a recipient for an email, the webmail client will show a little drop-down of names that match what you have typed so far. This is like Google Suggest, only more specific—it only uses names and email addresses in your address book. Very handy!

In a comment to an earlier blog post, someone asked about how you can search emails. It wasn't quite clear which email program they might have been using, but here is how you search for emails using the webmail client we provide:

Click on Search Email in the upper part of the left menu. Then type in the partial word, word, or phrase you would like to search for inside the email. Next, select which folder to search—for many people leaving the setting on Inbox is what will work best. Finally, choose what part of the email message to look in to find the word(s). For instance, if I'm looking for email from yahoo.com, I can choose to search only the "from" field of my emails and this can greatly speed up the search as compared with searching "everywhere".

Here are a few of the improvements either recently added or that will be added in the next few days:

- When scrolling in the preview pane, the column headings don't scroll out of view.

- After checking the box next to a message, the message no longer becomes unchecked automatically just because you have clicked on another message.

- And this is my favorite: rolling select. If you click to check a box and, while still holding the left mouse button down, move the mouse down or up across the check boxes of other messages to check their boxes as well. This also works to uncheck boxes.