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).