We just released a Port Checker inside of the [new] Email Tools section of the Customer Care portion of our website. The purpose of this tool is for testing to see if an end user is able to make connections to the Webmail.us email system. This is useful for troubleshooting situations where it is suspected that SMTP, POP3, IMAP or webmail connections are getting blocked by a desktop firewall or a network device.

The way it works is the Port Checker opens up a connection just as an email client would to all of the various email related ports on our servers (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, and webmail) and checks for meaningful responses. If it gets responses, that means the ports are unblocked and the user can use those ports to connect into to send or receive email. If they’re blocked, the user will need to ask their network administrator to unblock them, or the user may need to use alternate ports in order to connect. The Port Checker provides advice after it runs as to which ports should be used for incoming and outgoing email, and whether or not the Email Auto-Configuration tool is right for them.

Also, there is a "Submit Results" option after running the tool, which will log the results into our Master Diagnostics System for that account so that our Customer Care team can better troubleshoot problems for customers.

Thanks to Doug G. for building this—it’s been in high demand from the Customer Care guys, that’s for sure.

We spent the past week reorganizing the Customer Care section of our website to make it easier for our customers to find what they’re looking for. We added a lot of new content, including a flash movie on how to configure Microsoft Outlook 2003. We’re looking at ways of making our website more interactive—we think people would rather ‘watch’ than ‘read.’ We believe this is a step in the right direction and we’ll be adding a lot more interactive demos and tutorials soon.

We'll also continue to maintain and evolve our desktop email software guides.

For any of our current customers that would like to take a test run of the next version of our webmail client, you can do so by logging in at this URL using your email address and password.

We are making the pre-beta available to our current customers in order to get some early feedback from the users who already know webmail the best. We have focused our development efforts on improving the speed of the application. We want to build a web-based email client that can serve as a reliable alternative to desktop clients like Outlook and Thunderbird, and the first step in doing so is creating a client that can match the speed of the desktop experience. It is a huge challenge, but one that we believe we can overcome.

Our development team understands that the #1 feature of our webmail client is speed. Cool features are great, but if they are slow, we know that they will not be used. We will always support desktop email clients through traditional POP and IMAP, but we believe the future lies in the power of storing your data online and having that data accessible from any location. A fast webmail client has many advantages over a desktop client, such as:

1. Your data is available from home, work, the hotel, the airport-anywhere that has an Internet connection.

2. Storing your data online means that it not only has guaranteed availability, but it is also backed up on a continuous basis. At Webmail.us, your data is not only backed up nightly, but it is immediately replicated across multiple machines the moment it is stored on our system. This includes your emails, calendar, tasks, contacts, and RSS feeds.

3. Administrators have a much easier job if they do not need to configure everyone's desktop application. Desktop clients typically are cumbersome to configure and hard to debug when there are issues. Browsers typically have few configuration issues, if any at all. It doesn't matter if your users like Apple, Microsoft, or Linux; our webmail client is not limited to a particular operating system or browser.

4. New features don't require downloads, installations, or configurations.

5. Never "synch" your data again. Synching your email, contacts, and calendar between various clients can be very time consuming. With an email client that is web based, you will never have these issues.

Of course, all of these advantages are worth nothing if the user experience is slow (like most other webmail software installations-hosted or not). A web-based client should improve productivity, not hamper it.

So if you're a customer, especially if you use webmail, please try the alpha version of webmail and PLEASE report any issues using the "Report Bug" link provided in the top right of the interface. We still have a lot of work to do (including many more speed improvements and the integration of Search) before we release this to all of our customers. We appreciate your feedback.

Webmail.us customers have come to expect a high-level of accuracy with our spam filters. Since 2002 we have done very well at keeping our customer's inboxes clean, by constantly evolving our filters to stay one step ahead of spammers. In recent months however, we are often asked why so much more spam is getting through the filters. We have slipped a little bit and customers have noticed.

There's a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes in order to fight spam... Machine learning algorithms automatically generate new rules based on customer spam reports (the "Blacklist Sender" button in webmail), new spam sources are constantly being identified, and our engineers write custom rules as necessary. Spammers are very smart though, and this alone can't beat them. A vital component of effective spam filtering is the ability to implement new filtering strategies faster than spammers find ways to beat your old strategies. And this is where we have been slipping.

Our focus lately has been on growth, and ensuring that our systems can scale as our customer base multiplies. During 2002 through 2005 we were adding new spam fighting strategies monthly. As of today we have not added a new strategy in almost 6 months.

Today we took the first step to reverse this. We hired a software engineer who's time will be 100% dedicated to building our new spam fighting strategies. We have many cool projects planned on this front, all of which will focus on one thing... beating spammers. Go get 'em Mike!

PS: On one random day last week (Wednesday) we blocked 30,308,827 spam emails, and accepted 4,783,041 non-spam emails. That is 86% spam.

Every now and then we’re going to use this blog to post tips that email users on our system might find useful. Today, we’re going to talk about RSS and how we provide users with the ability to subscribe to blogs and RSS feeds through webmail, and how users can set those feeds to be delivered to the inbox and thus downloaded via POP3 to desktop email software (e.g., MS Outlook or Thunderbird) or wireless devices (e.g., Blackberry, Treo).

If you’d like to subscribe to blogs and RSS feeds through webmail, just follow these steps:

1. Log in to webmail.

2. In the left menu, click the “RSS Feeds� folder.

3. Click the “Add Feed� button.

4. Paste the feed’s URL into the “Paste URL of feed� box. (Sometimes it can be difficult to find a site’s RSS feed. Some sites will display a small “RSS� icon, and others will use a symbol or text. Once you find it, just right-click the icon and copy/paste the associated URL.)

5. Click the “Confirm� button.

6. Click the “Subscribe� button. The feed will appear in your feed list.

Now you can just click the RSS Feeds folder and then click the feed name. You’ll know when a new post has arrived because the “RSS Feeds� folder name will appear in bold text—indicating that a new post is waiting for you.

If you’d like to forward your feeds to the inbox and download them via POP3 to your email software of choice, then follow these steps:

7. Click the “Account Options� link.

8. Click the “RSS Feed Preferences� link.

9. In the POP3 Support section, click the “Yes� button to redirect all feeds to the Inbox.

10. Click the “Save Changes� button.

Now, whenever a feed publishes a new post, it will arrive in your Inbox—just like an email message. You can then set up mail filter rules if you’d like them to automatically be filed in a specific folder—again, just like other emails.

We also have instructions for how to subscribe to our blog, right here.

I spoke to one of our customers on the phone today that wasn’t very happy with our services for an interesting reason. It turns out that his employees are communicating with a number of people via email that have an inbound attachment limit of 10MB set by their ISP—and many of the emails they send out are getting close to that 10MB limit. The problem is, when attachments leave our system they are MIME encoded and thus grow in size by about 33%. For this customer, the MIME encoding is pushing his company’s attachments over the 10MB limit set by the ISPs or email hosting providers on the receiving end of the emails.

This is one of those weird technical issues that can confuse a lot of people (me included). We try to get around the confusion on our end by offering higher attachment size limits to make up for the MIME encoding. As we state on our website:

Incoming and outgoing message size limits are set to 35 MB. This allows a 25 MB file to be attached because MIME encoding adds 33% to size.

Unfortunately, we cannot control what other companies are doing. As an FYI, just about every email system in the world MIME encodes email attachments.

Some email clients will hide this 33% increase, even though it still occurs. For example Outlook displays the un-encoded size (at least in my version of Outlook 2000), but when the email is sent from mail server to mail server, the size is actually 33% larger than what Outlook displays. So the number that really matters is the number we display.

We just updated our active projects page on our website to reference what we're working on from a billing perspective. This project, once delivered, will have many customer facing features. Here are the details:

Version 2.1 of our billing system, codenamed "Okane" (Japanese for "money"), will make it possible for customers to view invoices and payment history, make payments, set up auto–upgrades, and request cancellations—all through their administrative control panel.

Our billing team will benefit from the new payments–and–credits system, advanced reporting tools, daily scripts for invoice generation, and the ability to auto–charge. This new version also includes improvements to the "export to QuickBooks" feature, and the ability to schedule the automatic mailing of invoices and payment receipts.

Why did we pick a codename that is hard to pronounce? That is what happens when you leave name picking up to the developers. ;-o