We’ve been talking a lot about our goal of turning webmail into a really fast web-based email client. We have two projects underway right now, Harbinger and Mercury, both of which are aimed at tackling our speed challenges. With Harbinger we’re rewriting our webmail client using what most people refer to as Web 2.0 technologies, like Ajax. With Mercury, we’re rewriting a lot of our backend software infrastructure. Together, the front end and the back end will ultimately provide a ‘better than desktop’ experience—at least that is the goal.

Both projects are huge and will be ongoing for months and even years. But yesterday, we started releasing the first speed related improvements associated with Mercury.

Here are the details:

We’re replacing our current IMAP server with Dovecot, an open source based IMAP server. Dovecot is much faster at IMAP sort commands, which are used every time a folder is displayed. This will especially improve message listing speeds when viewing folders with many email messages. The improvement will be implemented server by server, with the first server change on April 19th (yesterday).

Implementing Dovecot is a major step in the right direction for us and if you’re a webmail user, you’ll see some pretty decent speed improvements over the next few weeks. This isn’t the release of Harbinger or Mercury though, just a step in the right direction.

Thanks to Bill and his team, especially Matt, for making this happen. And a special thanks to Timo Sirainen, the creator of Dovecot, who worked with us to make some improvements we needed in a timely fashion.

We’ve added two new features that should make composing email a little easier . . .

Default font and font size
When a webmail user is composing an email in HTML format, they can now save some time by using a default font and font size. To choose your desired defaults, select Account Options / Display Preferences. In the Composing Email section, select a default font and font size in the drop-down boxes.

Hiding the Frequent Contacts box
Our Frequent Contacts feature allows users to have quick access to contacts they write to most often. Users who do not want to use this feature, however, can now hide the Frequent Contacts box—freeing up more room for their To, Cc, Bcc, and Subject boxes.

To hide or display the Frequent Contacts box, select Account Options / Display Preferences. In the Composing Email section, check or clear the “Display the Frequent Contacts box.�

Thanks again to Ellen for knocking these out.

We recently partnered with Translate.com to help us translate our webmail interface into multiple languages. The first language we took on was Spanish.

We plan to add many different languages over the coming months and years—and keep them up-to-date as webmail evolves and features are added.

Language settings are in Account Options, under Display Preferences (email administrators will soon be able to configure language settings in the control panel). You’ll notice that you have a choice of English, Spanish, French, German, and Greek. However, only Spanish is translated by Translate.com. The others we’re going to work on with them soon.

Thanks to Ellen and Translate.com for knocking this out.

If you have any feedback, please let us know.