As part of our first Beta Push from yesterday, you can now sort your emails by flags and new email messages in webmail, as long as you've upgraded to Harbinger.

This is an amazingly helpful feature when you're trying to stay organized.

Enjoy!

As I've been talking about for quite some time, now that our new webmail platform has been released, we're going to take the "release early and often" approach to software development. As opposed to always taking on enormous projects that take forever to complete, we're going to break all projects down into small chunks and get the smaller chunks out the door as quickly as possible.

Here is how we're going to move forward for the foreseeable future, with regards to software development around our webmail platform:

1. As we develop new features and enhancements, we're going to initially upload them to our beta site. Feel free to login there at any time, but realize, it's just a beta site.

2. Once the latest fixes, features, and enhancements are ready to go live, we'll release what we call a "beta push" which means we're pushing the new stuff from beta to the live environment.

We're going to release Beta Push 1 later today, which includes close to 30 fixes, enhancements, and new features. I will write about the primary features that can be found in this release once they go live.

All users who have upgraded to Harbinger, the new webmail platform we announced last week, will now find a search bar integrated into the header of each message-listing page. We built this new search functionality at the same time we built the new webmail platform because we believe that search becomes increasingly important as users store more information inside of webmail.

In order to make searching for email as fast and accurate as possible, we’re now indexing all messages as they come into our system. We’re using Lucene, a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library, to help with the indexing, and lots of Ajax on the front-end. The combination of the two technologies makes search really fast, which was one of the top goals with this project.

Here are some cool features of search:

- Search the current email folder
- Search all email folders with one-click
- Search RSS feed folders
- Search the web via Google
- Use Advanced Search to refine your search
- Quickly search for the same search phrase in different folders
- Refine your search based on whether or not messages contain attachments

At this point in time you can only use search for email and RSS feeds. But we’re not going to stop there... so stay tuned!

A special thanks goes out to Wenjie, the team lead on this project, as well as Nguyen, Wenjie’s partner in crime. The two of them did an outstanding job on this project, one that will surely bring lots of value to all webmail users.

We’re excited to announce that the latest version of webmail, codenamed Harbinger, is now live. This version of webmail supports Firefox, Internet Explorer 6.0 and higher, as well as Safari. However, webmail runs much faster in Firefox than other browsers and therefore we recommend downloading Firefox.

If you would like to try out the new platform, here is our one-click demo that will launch a demo version of the webmail interface.

Here is the press release about our product launch that we issued yesterday.

We were also reviewed by TechCrunch and Read/Write/Web, both of which are highly visible blogs in the technology world.

If you’re an existing customer, you can log into your control panel and upgrade immediately. If you would like to wait to upgrade, you have until November 22, 2006, at which time we’ll move everyone to the new platform.

We worked really hard on this release. As I’ve mentioned a few times before, this was almost a complete re-write of our webmail code base with the intention of providing a much faster experience for webmail users. It will also allow us to add features quickly, something we’ve already started working on.

Thanks to Mike for doing an outstanding job as team lead of this project and Steve, Joel, Huey, Jing, and the many others who spent the last eight months building Harbinger into what it is today.

Over the weekend we uploaded a new company contacts page for the control panel, modeled after the contacts section in webmail. It allows for multiple contacts and provides a much better user interface. There is also a newly designed billing information page, also based on design elements from webmail.

There are two main things to take away here:

1. We’re in the process of applying a better user interface to the entire control panel; the UI elements from these new pages will be incorporated throughout

2. Please make sure your contact information is up to date. You can now add multiple contacts and designate specific people to receive different types of information from our company.

Attached are some screen shots of the new interface. Thanks to Ben P., Nell-Marie, Lamar, and Vinny for knocking this out.

We launched Group Lists just a few short weeks ago and we’ve already added new features, based on customer feedback. Subject tags now allow customers to automatically tag the subject of every email sent to a Group List with specified text. This makes it easy to recognize that an email was sent from a Group List. For example, the subject of an email with the Subject Tag “Developers" would look like this:

[Developers] Meeting Today in the Conference Room

Two new functions were also added to the control panel to make it easier to create Group Lists and keep them up to date.

These changes are available immediately in the control panel.

Thanks to Matt and Hartsock for taking customer feedback so seriously and knocking this out in their spare time.

We released another phase of our summer spam upgrades today. Users and administrators now have the ability to Safelist and Blacklist IP addresses. Like the email address Safelisting and Blacklisting, this takes affect within Postfix, which means whitelisted email messages will bypass spam filtering and Blacklisted emails will not be accepted by our servers. This ensures that the email you want gets to you quickly and accurately and the email you don't want doesn't clutter your inbox or spam folder. You can also Safelist or Blacklist entire IP address ranges, making this very powerful for large organizations.

This feature is available in the control panel today for all customers, and will be available in webmail once you upgrade to Harbinger (you will be able to upgrade starting sometime next week).

We just made a significant improvement to the way vacation messages work. In the old system, if you turned on a vacation message, your mail filters would stop working. Now, turning on a vacation message will not stop your mail filtering rules from applying. This includes any mail forwarding rules you have setup. Of course you still need to leave a copy of the message on the server when setting up mail forwarding. In order for these changes to take affect, you will need to turn off your current vacation message and then turn it back on. And remember, only one vacation message is sent to each sender no matter how many times they send email to the person with the vacation message set, until the vacation message is reset.

Thanks to Kevin for knocking this out, based on customer feedback, in his spare time.

I’m proud to announce that we were just named the second best place to work in Southwest Virginia by the Blue Ridge Business Journal. We work really hard to build an incredible place to work here and it’s an honor to get such recognition.

We try to only post information on this blog that is relevant to our customers, and maybe this is a stretch, but I truly believe that the quality of service we deliver is a direct result of the quality of people that we employ—so there you have it. Plus, I’m damn proud of the award!

I’d also like to give a special shout out to Marisa (pictured below), our HR Coordinator, for helping us to get this recognition—and of course, for her dedication to helping create an incredible place to work.

This morning we released automatic upgrades, the latest phase of our ongoing billing project. Automatic upgrades allow customers who have signed up on our website to upgrade their services without having to contact our Customer Care team. You can simply login to the control panel, click "Upgrade Services" inside of “My Account,� and then fill out a form that is very similar to the signup form used on our website. See the screenshot below.

The process is completely automated, meaning that the upgrades are provisioned immediately, an invoice is generated, your credit card is charged, and all of the important billing information is updated.

Brian Lamar and Vinny worked extremely hard on this project and put in some very long days this week to make sure it was released on schedule. Nell-Marie, Andrea, and Manny all worked hard on designing the system and providing the content. Ben and Velvet not only contributed much of their invaluable input, but tested the heck out of the system and found many key issues before it was released.

And like everything else, Kevin led the charge and helped where he could.

This billing stuff can get really complex but the #1 goal is to make it easy for the customer. We think this is another step in the right direction.

As a side note, resellers and larger customers do not have the same automatic upgrade capabilities quite yet. We’ll be working on that soon.