A lot of people have been emailing in asking if we’re going to turn the calendar and task manager on for Webmail Lite (in other words, people want to know if they can use them for free). The answer is yes, we are currently working on integrating Neptune with Webmail Lite. In fact, in the future, Webmail Lite will be the first to get most product releases as it will be used for an extended beta testing environment. We’d prefer to let our free users test drive new applications before our paying customers—both of which are after our Quality Assurance team, of course!

Bill has a great post on how we use SPEWS and how we reject email using blacklists (RBLs) at Webmail.us. SPEWS is a pretty controversial blacklist that if not properly used, can produce really bad results for anti-spam filters. If you're interested, feel free to read more.

I hope everyone is having a nice holiday season. You may not read this blog again until the new year and if so, Happy New Year as well. 2005 was a great year for us here at Webmail and we're aiming for 2006 to be even better. I hope the same is true for you.

Kevin has a nice post on what we accomplished from a development standpoint in 2005. Here is a summary of product launches (some are customer facing products; some are development efforts that help improve internal efficiencies):

- An improved billing system for our accounting team
- Faster, more reliable statistics for our customers
- Control Panel 2.0
- Control Panel API 1.5, 1.6
- Webmail API 1.0, 1.1
- Centralized Logging System
- Revamped Webmail.us Website
- Webmail Lite
- An Auto-Configure Tool for POP3 clients
- An Outages Alert System for our customers
- Improved Migration Process
- Improved Anti-Fraud System
- Webmail 3.1
- Webmail w/ RSS Reader
- Webmail w/ AJAX, Calendar, and Company Directory
- Webmail Help Section

And here is a list of active projects currently in development. 2005 was a productive year, but again, 2006 is going to be even better.

A customer sent us some feedback and suggestions yesterday including something related to SPF (Sender Policy Framework—anti-spam stuff). Bill took the opportunity to discuss this topic on his blog. If you're interested in learning more about SPF and what Bill calls the right way to use SPF, go here to read more. Check out the comments too—it looks like the feedback was helpful.

One of the problems with webmail, and most software and web applications is the fact that they slow down when storing a ton of data. With webmail in particular, this has been a major problem for users who have a lot of data stored in a single folder. Well, for those users, we've implemented a fix so that the folders load much faster. Bill is happy about this fix, as he notes on his blog (yes, Bill is quite the power user—BUT, we’re aiming to cater to the Bill’s of the world with webmail—it’s not going to be easy, but nothing great ever is).

In all reality, this is a temporary solution. In fact, one of the biggest projects we've ever taken on at Webmail.us is underway as we speak. You'll hear us talk a lot about this project, code-named Mercury, over the coming year. Mercury will present the ultimate fix for all data storage issues we face today and will help us turn data storage into a competitive advantage because we'll be able to offer lots of it in an efficient manner. I’ll write more about Mercury soon. For now, I hope you’ll see much faster folder loads for folders that store tons of email messages.

Kirk just added another 17 functions to the beta section of the API wiki. They all relate to user identities, contacts, and groups. He also added a "News" section to the front page of the wiki so that customers and partners can see recent additions or other change information.

Last Tuesday night we celebrated a pretty big milestone here at Webmail. If you're interested in reading about it and putting some of the faces behind the names behind the email hosting services we provide, check out my blog as I put the details there.

We have recently implemented a new “forgot password� feature into our control panel. This allows the email administrator to retrieve his/her administrative password at any time, and regain access to the control panel.

But, in order to use this tool, the email administrator must complete the following steps:

1. In the control panel, click the Administrators link.
2. In the Administrator column, click your administrative ID name.
3. In the Optional Information section, fill out the following information:

      a. Email Address
      b. Security Question
      c. Security Answer

4. Click the Save button.

If you have several administrators, each should enter his/her own, unique email address, security question, and security answer.

Please encourage your email administrators to follow the steps above. This is a great tool, but it only works if the administrator has it set up.

Although we try to do everything perfectly, every now and again we have a little “hiccup,� as I like to call it. Realizing this, one of our biggest objectives at Webmail is to be as open and transparent as possible with our customers (hence this blog). With that said, we’ve got a new page on our website dedicated to the status of our email hosting services and our system in general. We highly recommend subscribing to this feed, even if you don’t subscribe to this blog. When something important happens, we’ll post the information there as quickly as we can.

Here are instructions on how to subscribe.

As we go into product release mode with Neptune, we’re also going right back into product development mode on a wealth of other email-related projects. We’re doing our best to keep our Active Projects page up to date, so if you’re interested, here are the bigger projects we’re working on over the next few months. I’ll let you know when we make major updates to that page.

Over the weekend, we launched our latest version of webmail, codenamed “Neptune.� It includes Version 1.0 of our web-based calendar, task list manager, and the latest version of webmail. These new features heavily incorporate Ajax, a popular web development framework that makes web applications perform faster.

New customers will receive these improvements automatically, when signing up for new service. And we’ll be rolling them out to existing customers over the next 30-60 days (and upon request). There is no extra charge.

If you would prefer to have these features sooner, just send us an email and we’ll set you up now.

There has been a decent amount of news coverage lately on the new Sober worm that is now deemed the largest email worm outbreak ever. If you're interested in hearing about how we've worked to combat this latest threat, Bill has a good post with the details. Here is his post, if you're interested.

For a brief period last night and again early this morning, a small percentage of the users on our system had trouble logging into their email accounts. Our engineering team worked to resolve this issue which ultimately affected about 3% of our users.

Here is what happened:

There was an IP address conflict between two of our servers that caused a problem with our automatic failover routines. These routines normally allow servers to temporarily take on the responsibilities of others when a problem is detected, but in this case the conflict caused those particular servers to take over for the wrong machines. The result: some of our customers ended up logging into machines that did not actually host their email. Once we resolved the IP conflict and restarted the necessary services, everything went back to normal with ZERO loss of data. The one good thing here is that 97% of our customers were never even aware that there was a problem.

We regret that any of our customers experienced an interruption of services and we are constantly taking steps to prevent things like this from happening in the future. In this case, we’ll now be comprehensively monitoring the IP addresses on all of our servers and we will now be able to preemptively detect such conflicts before they lead to problems.

Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Kirk just finished putting together a new wiki detailing all of our API functions. The wiki is open to anyone that wants to submit API suggestions, requests, etc. and then track what other people are contributing to their ideas (you just have to create a username and password, first). We’re aiming to create a community around our APIs and we think this is a step in the right direction.

Here is the wiki if you’re interested in reading about what we have now or contributing to what we might build in the future.