Bill wrote a good piece on some of the reasons for why we outsource our datacenter management to Rackspace. If you're interested, here it is.

Our control panel and APIs are now hosted in our high availability data centers with the rest of our email hosting system. The migration went well and was completed last night around 9:00 p.m. EST. We're still working through a few minor issues but overall, the project was a complete success.

Thanks to Bill, Kevin, Vinny, Brian H., Korey, and Tony for knocking this out. This was a major undertaking and has been in the works for a very long time.

We will be taking the control panel, API, and ability to sign-up for our services offline this Sunday. As of right now, we plan to take it offline from 1:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. EST. We made this announcement on our system status page, but I also wanted to explain why we’re doing this.

While we never like to take any part of our system offline for such a long period of time, we’re doing it for a good reason. We are moving the control panel and API to Rackspace, our managed hosting partner. This is the only piece of our system that isn’t hosted in our redundant, high availability environment at Rackspace. So from here on out, the performance and uptime of both the control panel and API will be much better, much more reliable. That is a good thing.

I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause on Sunday. We tried to pick the most unobtrusive day of the week and we’ll work hard to get this done as fast as we can.

We decided to take a page from the guys at 37signals and redesign our homepage with simplicity in mind. It’s a lot simpler now and hopefully conveys our message more effectively.

I did purchase and read Getting Real last week—it’s a quick read, very well-written (if you’re into the modern-blog-conversational style of writing, which I am), and full of great tips.

Thanks to Manny for putting this new design together in less than 48 hours and Brian Lamar for implementation in about the same amount of time.

We’ve just launched our new webmail login page. If you are a webmail user, you may want to bookmark the new page.

Though you can continue to log in to webmail via the main Webmail.us home page, this new login location is simpler (less graphics) and provides you with two cool new features . . .

Log in to webmail automatically when I visit this page
This tool can automatically log you in to webmail when you visit the email login page. It allows you to essentially bypass the login process, which will save you time. (Like the “Remember my information on this computer� option, you should only use this feature on non-public computers.)

Hide browser toolbars in webmail
By hiding the browser toolbars and buttons, you will have more room to view your webmail interface. This feature will not affect your other browser windows—it only hides toolbars and buttons in the webmail window.

We’re getting this question a lot these days so I wanted to take the opportunity to address it.

The answer is YES, we are going to build sharing and collaboration capabilities into our webmail calendar (PLEASE NOTE: we do NOT have any immediate plans for integration with MS Outlook or other desktop email software clients).

But, I cannot give a time estimate yet as to when the first version will be released.

Here is what you can expect in the near term from our development team:

1. We’re 18 days from an internal beta of Harbinger, the project aimed at making our webmail client faster than its desktop counterparts. Speed and performance are the goals here and once we nail them, we’re going to speed up development of other features and enhancements.

2. We’re about two months from an internal beta of Search. The goal here is to release a “Google-like� search feature that will eventually allow webmail users to easily retrieve all data types stored inside of their webmail account.

3. Other projects can be found on the active projects page of our website. The two above are closest to the finish line.

We plan to form a team of three people for Collaboration (codename will be announced soon). One will come from the Harbinger team (and we’re in the process of hiring a replacement as the Harbinger team will move on to other webmail-related projects), another is recent full-time hire and the third will be a part-timer from Virginia Tech.

So as of today, we plan to start Collaboration within 30 days. From there, we’ll work towards an estimate of when the first version of that project will be released. We plan on releasing a scaled-down, simple version at first in order to minimize time to market.

I hope this helps.

Private-label reseller partners can now customize the control panel's main page. Resellers can hide, display, and rearrange existing main page features, and also incorporate new, unique content via the "Custom HTML" option.

To access this new customization tool, log in to the control panel and select "Control Panel Settings" / "Main Page."

We’ve seen an increased demand over the last few months for the ability to safelist and blacklist email senders through desktop email software clients like Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, and others. We provide these capabilities inside of webmail, but we don’t provide these capabilities through the email software clients. We do, however, have documented APIs that would allow a developer or service provider to build this functionality (and much more). Check out our API wiki, if you're interested in learning more about our APIs.

If you’re a developer or service provider interested in working with our APIs, we’re interested in talking to you. If so, please leave a comment here or email me and let’s chat.

We’ve built our own. We’ve installed software. We now use Salesforce.com.

We no longer want to spend time building software that isn’t part of our core business.

We don’t want to install or manage any software.

Salesforce.com works well but we just need something simpler.

All we need is a simple web-based tool that will allows us to quickly and easily log a prospect, assign the prospect to a rep, log communications with that prospect, set reminders for when to follow up with that prospect, and move the prospect to the appropriate place—LOST or WON.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

If you’re interested in what it’s like to work at Webmail, we’ve started an employee testimonial section inside of our website. We’re trying our best to build an awesome culture here and so far, it’s paying off.

We’re hiring too so if you know of anyone looking for sales, customer service, infrastructure scaling, or web-based software development, please send them our way. They can view current job openings, view active projects we’re working on, and even apply online.