I’m extremely proud to announce that we have officially extended our Customer Care division and we’re now fully staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year.

This is a really big move for us and one that demonstrates our dedication to providing our customers with an awesome level of customer service and support.

I would like to thank our entire team for helping to make this happen, especially Michael Petersen, one of our top customer care guys, who has been instrumental in helping to pioneer our move to an around-the-clock environment.

We just updated the Active Projects section of our website, adding a lot of new content based on projects we’ve been working on for a while as well as those that we’ve just started. Check it out if you’re interested in learning what we’re up to in the second half of this year.

We have completed our upgrade to Dovecot as our backend IMAP server software. This upgrade provides a significant speed improvement over our old IMAP software (Courier-IMAP), by indexing and caching mail header information. The performance of folders that contain tens of thousands of email messages is amazing compared to its predecessor. With this, plus our 5 GB storage limit, you no longer need to be afraid to fill up your folders.

Dovecot also provides real-time push email support. Try it... log into your IMAP account using Thunderbird or whatever IMAP program you use. Open your Inbox. Now from webmail send yourself an email. In a second or two you will see the new email appear in your IMAP account without having to press the Check Email button. Fast, huh?

You can even take advantage of this push email feature using your Treo. ChatterEmail seems to be the best Treo client for this. It will establish a connection to our IMAP system and then sit in the an idle state waiting for our servers to tell it when there is new mail. It can even watch for new mail several folders at once and alert you the second you have new mail, which makes it very powerful for folks on the go.

For you techies, this is powered by IMAP's "IDLE" command. While we have always supported the IDLE command, our system did not previously provide real-time notices of new mail. We would poll your folders once every few minutes and then push a notice to you. Now our IMAP system is event driven and doesn't need to poll for new mail, so the moment a new email arrives we let you know.

I’m sure someone famous has said something along the lines of, “the partner you need to fear most is the partner that tells you nothing ever goes wrong.� If not, there you have it.

At Webmail, we believe it’s good to keep customers in the loop when something goes wrong with the services we provide. Although it might be easier to try to sweep things under the carpet, we don’t do that. We keep an updated system status page, we send out system status alerts when something goes wrong, and we openly blog about issues we’ve encountered and solutions we’re bringing to the table. I don’t know too many businesses out there that are as open as we are.

With the recently launched, latest version of our system status manager, email administrators now have a personalized view of system status alerts from inside their control panel. Administrators will see a ‘How am I affected?’ link inside their control panel (we publicize the same information openly on our system status page), which will show the individual email domains and users who are affected by a particular issue. This means that the administrators will be notified if and only if users from their domain are on a cluster of servers that is experiencing an issue.

While this is one feature we hope you don’t see very often, it'll be there when you need it.

Thanks to Doug for developing the latest version of our system status manager.

Last week, our Billing Team finished a project that provides customers with the ability to view their invoice history from within the Control Panel. Invoices are now available from January 1, 2006 and forward. Invoices contain Email Hosting and Extra Storage service fees (we don’t provide the ability to view other services—YET).

These invoices are for viewing purposes only, and do not include outstanding balances.

Invoices can be found in the ‘My Account’ section of the Control Panel.

Thanks to the Billing Team for knocking this out, especially Vinny and Lamar. The team continues to crank out code that improves our billing system on a monthly basis and will provide customers with more advanced capabilities as we go.

Many of us need to create email lists with larger groups of people, even though we’re not spammers. So this past week, we launched ‘Group Lists’ which provide our customers with the ability to easily send an email to a large group of internal or external recipients through a single alias. Group Lists provide customers with the following:

• Ability to create Group Lists in the Control Panel, inside of the Email Accounts section

• Ability to send to unlimited internal (same domain) recipients

• Ability to send up to 50 external (outside domain) recipients

• Ability to setup dynamic recipient capabilities—as new mailboxes are added to a domain, they will be automatically added to the Group List

• Ability to setup restricted senders so that only certain people can send to the Group List

We’ll be adding more capabilities in the future but for now, I hope this is a big help. Feel free to email me if you have any questions about Group Lists.

One point I’d like to make—our regular Acceptable Use Policy is still in effect, meaning we don’t allow customers to send bulk mail to recipients outside of their domains.

I want to thank the people who made this project happen. Brian H was the main contributor but I'd also like to thank Nell-Marie, Pat, Bill, and Ben, who all provided lots of guidance and feedback.

-- Matt

Many of our customers got a ton of spam on Saturday (you might not be checking it until Monday, but most of it came on Saturday). This was our fault. We made a change to our IP addressing in our mx2.emailsrvr.com network, and this temporarily caused all mail that arrived to the mx2 servers to get white-listed—even spam.

This problem was identified and corrected on Sunday morning.

If you were an affected user, please accept our apologies. We have modified our white-listing logic so that this mistake cannot be made again in the future.

At the very least, hopefully you can see how much spam we really are blocking on a daily basis.