We just added a new function on our website that makes it really easy and clean to print out information. Why did we do this and why am I blogging about it? Well for starters, I personally prefer to read information in print format and I figure I’m not the only one. And I hate when I have to spend time copying and pasting web pages into MS Word and then deleting all of the pictures and graphics so that I don’t waste a lot of printer ink. So now you can print all you want—with ease.

We’ve got a lot of information throughout our website—if you’re a customer or partner I highly recommend printing out pages in our support section. If you’re thinking about becoming a customer or partner, you may want to print different pages throughout the website. Either way, I hope this helps.

Email administrators can now manage their alias assignments for a specific mailbox, from one location. This makes it possible to assign a mailbox to any or all of the domain’s aliases, all at one time.

To access this control panel feature, select “Email Accounts� / “Mailboxes,� and then click the “Alias� link for the mailbox you want to manage. Select “All� from the “Filter� drop-down to view all of the aliases in your domain. You can then add and remove alias assignments for the mailbox, as desired.

As always, you can create and manage aliases by selecting “Email Accounts� / “Aliases.� And you can view a list of all aliases and their assigned mailboxes by selecting “Email Accounts� / “Tools� / “Export Mailbox Aliases.�

If you’re not a reseller, disregard this post.

Resellers occasionally need to move a domain from one client to another. To make this transaction easier for resellers, we have automated the process and incorporated it into the control panel.

To access this tool, select “Reseller Tools� / “Clients & Domains.� Click the button next to the client currently assigned to the domain, and then select “Move Domains� from the “Select Action� drop-down menu. In the next window, you can select a destination client and indicate which domain (or domains) should be moved.

Recently a customer requested the ability to encrypt the SMTP traffic in both directions between their internal mail server and the Webmail.us SMTP servers. They wanted mail sent from their servers to our servers to be encrypted, and they also wanted mail sent from our servers to their servers to be encrypted.

You may already know that you can use SSL (secure sockets layer) or TLS (transport layer security) to connect to our servers securely via POP3, IMAP, SMTP and Webmail. This will encrypt the communication between your computer and our servers. However, due to the nature of SMTP this doesn't encrypt your messages as they travel to the recipient's server when you send mail to folks outside of the Webmail.us network, which is what the customer wanted. So we decided to implement it.

If you run an internal mail server at your office, and it supports TLS for incoming or outgoing mail, or both, you now can configure it to send and receive mail securely with the Webmail.us SMTP servers. The exact procedure will vary depending on what type of mail server you run, but here it is at a high-level:

For mail sent from your server to domains hosted by Webmail.us: (1) Configure your server to deliver mail to mx1-tls.emailsrvr.com instead of the default mx1.emailsrvr.com (mx1-tls.emailsrvr.com supports TLS on port 25 and SSL on port 465; mx1.emailsrvr.com only supports plain-text on port 25). (2) Configure your server to use TLS or SSL in its SMTP client when sending mail to remote servers.

For mail sent from Webmail.us to your mail server: (1) Configure your server to accept incoming TLS connections on port 25, via the STARTTLS command. (2) Tell Webmail.us tech support that you want all mail sent from our servers to your servers to be sent using TLS, and let us know your server's hostname and what domains it hosts. Also let us know if you would like our servers to bounce the message back to the sender if we cannot establish a TLS session to your servers, or if you would like our servers fall-back to non-encrypted mode if TLS cannot be established.

By default, an administrator cannot log in to the control panel more than once at one time (for example, an administrator cannot log in to the control panel from two separate browser windows at the same time). But, now a company can allow specific administrators to have such simultaneous logins.

To access this tool, select “Administrators,� and then click the administrator’s name. In the “Security Settings� section, check the box for, “Allow simultaneous logins using this Administrator ID.� Note: Only Super Admins are allowed to make this change.

Companies can now allow administrators to access the control panel only from a specific IP address (or up to 3 IP addresses). This allows companies to allow an administrator to, for example, log in to the control panel from work and home, but not from any other location.

To access this tool, select “Administrators,� and then click the administrator’s name. In the “Security Settings� section, check the box for, “Login restricted to IP Address(es)� and enter the IP address(es) in the box.

Note: Only Super Admins are allowed to make this change.

We've been making a lot of improvements to our control panel as of late. I'll be blogging the changes as they go live over the next couple of weeks. For starters, when you log in to the control panel, you’ll see our newly re-designed Main Page. In addition to being able to view system alerts and status, you can now access the latest posts to this blog. This helps to make the Main Page a one-stop location for viewing important and timely information about our email hosting services.

Today is Hackathon 2.0 at Webmail.us (Hackathon 1.0 took place last August). In short, a Hackathon is a day we set aside (usually a Saturday) where all of our software developers pick a small project that they can code, test, and just about launch—all in one day. I say “just about launch� only because we’ve got to thoroughly test everything that we put into production these days… and with so many projects, it might take our QA team up to a week to get them out the door.

Here are the projects we’re working on today, by developer. I’ll blog each one individually or in groups as we release them into production.

Email Traffic Analyzer
Huey and Wenjie are building a web-based visualization of all our email traffic in real time throughout the United States using the Google Maps API. This is more of a whiz-bang type of website feature for us—but we think it will be a pretty cool visual representation of how many customers use our email in the US.

Group Lists
Brian H and Matt are building a Group List feature that will be made available to all of our customers at no extra charge. Group lists will allow for unlimited internal mailings within the same domain, expanded (but limited) external mailings, restricted sender lists, automated management of lists through the control panel, and an “everyone alias� for every domain. This will greatly improve bulk communication abilities for our customers.

Outage Alert Improvements
Doug is modifying our Outage Control Center to include the ability to select specific servers that are affected when an alert is entered. This will allow us to push system alerts to affected customers without having to let everyone know there is a problem for just a few of our customers.

Right Click Capabilities
Mike and Steve are building right-click capabilities into webmail. Once implemented, you’ll be able to use shortcut functions by right clicking on things like folders, emails, and the calendar.

Compose Page Improvements
Ellen is going to build an account option that will allow users to turn off Frequent Contacts inside the Compose Page. Since we’ve implemented auto-complete, some users would prefer more room in the “To� field as opposed to having Frequent Contacts take up space. She is also building an account option to set default fonts and colors for our HTML Editor.

Website Search
Will is building search capabilities into our website. He’s using the Google search API to make this happen. Search inside the website will be great for people researching our company as well as for current customers looking for support documentation or anything else they need from us. As our website content has grown, so too has the need for search.

BCC Archiving Administration
Tony is building an interface for our support team so that they can more effectively manage customers with BCC archiving. Administration of this feature has been a challenge internally. Since the demand for this feature has been growing, we now need a better way to manage it.

Webmail Login
Jing is building a simple interface for returning customers so that they can log in to webmail without having to return to our homepage. We know that some of you don’t like looking at our marketing messages and stock photography so now you’ll have another option. ;-)

Control Panel Enhancements
Vinny is coding several enhancements to the control panel. Upon completion, we’ll now have a section that shows which aliases point to specific users. We’ll also have a section that shows mailbox counts for resellers and enterprise clients per domain. And finally, he’s going to improve support and upgrade forms—all things we’ve needed for quite some time.

Mailbomb Management
Korey and Tony are working on creating an administrative interface for our support team so that they can more effectively manage our mailbomb system. Right now, when someone violates our Acceptable Use Policy, we put a hold on their outgoing bulk email. Then, a really technical person will have to get involved to release the message and contact the customer—with this new interface, our entire support team will be able to handle these tasks.

Mail Filtering Bug Fix
Nguyen is the newest addition to our software development staff so he got stuck with fixing bugs this time around. The main bug he’ll be fixing has to do with our mail filtering system and what happens when mail is set to filter to a deleted folder (right now, we don’t handle it properly).

After a decent amount of customer feedback, we decided to eliminate the ability to purge the sent folder in webmail (purging allows you to delete all emails within a folder with the click of a button as opposed to deleting all emails manually). We debated this for a long time internally and I think we made the right move in getting rid of it. Now you can only purge Spam and Trash. Perhaps one day we’ll bring back the ability to purge other folders—we’ll probably give you the choice inside of Account Options. I imagine that instead of a button though, you’ll be able to right-click and purge. Right clicking capabilities are right around the corner. No pun intended. ;-)

We have just started to release to our customers our newest feature—the webmail company directory. If you would like for us to turn this feature on for your company, please email us and we’ll enable it as quickly as we can.

The company directory is currently optimized for companies with less than 200 employees, but we will be scaling the feature to support larger numbers. If your company has more than 200 employees, and you are interested in the company directory, let us know—if the demand is there, we’ll work faster.

The company directory provides email administrators and users with the following capabilities:

• Email administrators can create multiple directories across multiple domains, and can select which users should be included in each directory

• Users included in the directory have access to the most up-to-date contact information for all users in the directory, via the webmail address book

• Users can view and manage their own contact information (if permitted by the email administrator) via their “My Profile� section in the webmail address book

We’ve got a long list of software development priorities here at Webmail, but we took on the company directory project sooner than later because we needed it, ourselves—especially as our company continues to grow. Before the company directory, it was a nightmare trying to track down a new employee’s contact information. Everyone in the company would come to me and ask, “Pat, can you send me so-and-so’s phone number?� Like I don’t have more important things to do than keep track of everyone’s contact information! But now, everyone here has access to everyone else’s up-to-date contact information. So now I can politely ask, “Did you look in the company directory?�

We have added several enhancements to the import/export tool in the webmail address book. You can now do the following:

• Using the .csv file format, you can import an address book from any email application (Outlook, Yahoo, Thunderbird, Gmail, etc.)

• Since email applications use different terminology for certain fields (e.g., Cell Phone vs. Mobile Phone), we now allow you to match, or “map,� the original fields to the corresponding fields in the webmail address book. This gives you control over how your information is imported.

• In addition to creating address book export files for Outlook, Yahoo, Netscape, and Webmail, you can now export your address book for Gmail and Thunderbird.

To access the import/export tool, log in to webmail, click the “Contacts� link, and then click the “Import/Export� button. We hope these enhancements will be helpful to you!

Thanks to Huey for taking this on as his 20% project. I believe we're the one in the industry to take this approach. Very nice innovation!

I'd like to clarify my previous post after hearing from our Tech Support Team that a few customers have asked if we will be able to block the Kama Sutra virus and all of it's variants... Yes, our virus scanners have been blocking this virus since it was discovered in mid January. The threat posed by this virus however, is that it has been hiding out on infected computers, just waiting for February 3rd to start overwriting files. So it is a good idea to scan your computer before tomorrow, just to be safe.

Most viruses in recent years have been designed to steal computer resources for profit, such as relaying spam without the computer's owner knowing. This virus, on the other hand, goes back to the "good old days" when viruses were designed to damage computers. It has been a while since we have seen one of these, which is why I recommend scanning your computer today.

300,000 people are going to lose their important documents on Friday. Please don't be one of them. If you haven't done a full virus scan of your hard drives lately, today is an excellent opportunity to do so. If you do not have a desktop virus scanner installed, try ClamWin (the open source Windows version of ClamAV) -- we love ClamAV here at Webmail.

The Kama Sutra virus (aka Kasper, Blackmal or Nyxem) will overwrite the following types of files on an infected computer beginning some time on February 3, 2006: DOC, XLS, MDB, MDE, PPT, PPS, ZIP, RAR, PDF, PSD and DMP. It overwrites the files with the string "DATA Error [47 0F 94 93 F4 F5]".

The address book API allows any of our customers to modify their users’ address books, as long as they have administrative rights to the domain. The current set includes all the basic functionalities to manipulate the Personal Contacts and Groups section of the address book. We will eventually add more functions as the need/demand arises. The following is a list of functions available and a brief description of what it does.

• GetUserContactsSimple – returns a list of all contacts in a user’s address book. But instead of returning every field per contact, this function only return the following: 'id', 'lastname', 'firstname', 'nickname', 'email', and 'favorite'.

• GetUserContactsFull – returns a list of all contacts in a user’s address book, including all fields per contact

• AddUserContacts – add one or more contacts into a user’s address book

• DeleteUserContacts – delete one or more contacts from a user’s address book

• DeleteAllUserContacts – delete all contacts from a user’s address book

• ModifyUserContacts – modify the fields of one or more contacts from a user’s address book

• GetUserGroups – returns all groups in a user’s address book

• AddUserGroups – add one or more groups to a user’s address book

• DeleteUserGroups – delete one or more groups from a user’s address book

• DeleteAllUserGroups – delete all groups from a user’s address book.

More information is available in our API Wiki. The address book API is currently under the Beta API section. It will be a part of our Webmail API when the beta phase is complete.