We're going to host our first ever Webmail Webinar this Thursday, November 2nd at 4pm, EST. The goal of the Webinar is to educate prospective private label resellers (and other businesses that would like to listen in) on how we can help them more effectively manage email. Here are the points we're going to cover:

- Common pain points with managing email

- Our Service - the how and why of what we do

- Why choose Webmail.us as your email hosting partner

- Explanation of how our reseller program works

If you would like to join the Webinar, please email us and we'll send you the login information.

The following enhancements have been uploaded to Group Lists as a result of Hackathon 3.0:

- You can set the reply-to on a Group List to either the sender or the list

- You can set the recipients as "All Mailboxes", "All Mailboxes + Aliases", or "Specific Mailboxes or Aliases"

- You can add the ability to have dynamic senders (in addition to specific senders)

A Hackathon is a day we set aside (usually a Saturday) where all of our software developers pick a small project that they can code, test, and just about launch—all in one day. I say “just about launch� only because we’ve got to thoroughly test everything that we put into production in our beta environment before going live.

We’re currently right in the middle of our Halloween Hackathon. This is going to be the best one ever, by far, as we’ve learned a ton from the first and the second Hackathons about how to make these successful.

Below are the projects that everyone is working on.

Control Panel Logging
Brian L. and Doug are adding logging to the control panel so that email administrators can trace their steps and hold each other accountable when playing with their email settings.

Email Address Linking
Tony is making it so that email addresses will be links on the Read Email page. Clicking the link will take you to a Compose Email page.

Date Recognition
Huey is building intelligence into the Read Email page so that dates will now be recognized by the system. When you hover a phrase like: “tomorrow at 6:00� you will be able to click it, which will pop up an Add Event window with the date and time pre-filled. You will have to hover the date to be able to tell that it is a link because we don’t want the page to look annoying.

Back End Search Improvements
Wenjie and Nguyen are making back end improvements to Search.

Drag and Drop
Mike and Ellen are adding drag and drop functionality to the message listing. This will allow users to move emails between folders by dragging and dropping them.

Preview Pane Print
Nithiwat, our newest member of the team, is making it so that you can print email messages from the preview pane without having to open the message in a new window.

Searching Blacklists and Safelists
Mike T. is building in the ability to search blacklists and safelists.

Colored Flags
Steve is building the ability to choose different colored flags by right clicking to flag an email message.

Multiple Task Lists and Priorities
Ben P. and Brian H. are adding the ability to create multiple Task Lists and prioritize tasks by ordering them using drag and drop.

Alias Error Checking
Korey and Vinny are building intelligence into the way we handle aliases. They're going to: (a) make it so that our system deletes an email address from an alias when the email account is deleted, and (b) verify that email addresses that the alias address points to do indeed exist. This will lighten load on our servers because we won’t have to process needless bounced messages.

DNS Record Management
Will is providing customers with the ability to manage their DNS records through the control panel.

Mailbox Logins in the Control Panel
Vinny is making it so that email administrators can login to individual mailboxes through a web interface in the Control Panel.

Download Multiple Attachments at Once
Joel is building in the ability to download multiple attachments from an email message at once instead of having to download each one separately.

Group List Enhancements
Matt is making several enhancements to Group Lists.

Customer Care Ticketing Improvements
Kirk and Jon are building enhanced functionality into our Customer Care ticketing system.

Data Migration Efficiency
Jesse is building migration scripts to make migrating data onto our system more efficient.

Sorting Improvements in Webmail
Jing is improving the “sort by user� functionality. The way it works now is terrible and he’s going to fix that.

I will announce when each one of these new features is available over the coming weeks.

Happy Halloween!

The second interview I did with Becky is all about we got our start, how we survived the dot-com bust, and what we’re doing today to grow our business.

Here is the interview if you’re interested in listening.

I participated in two Podcast interviews the other day with Becky McCray from the Great Big Small Business Show and author of the blog, Small Biz Survival. In the first interview, I talked to Becky about some of the advantages we have by being located in Blacksburg, Virginia, a small town in Southwest Virginia with the population of about 60,000 people.

Here is the interview if you’re interested in listening.

The first release of our domain management system (codenamed Cyprus) is online, available in the control panel. Customers can now easily manage renewal settings for domain registration and DNS hosting services. They can browse a list of domains that are registered with us, renew services and setup auto-renewal, sort by expiration date, and filter by type of service.

We have also setup an email notification system, which sends email alerts to all billing contacts whenever a domain is within 60 days of its expiration date. Or, if you have chosen to auto-renew your domain services, you will receive an email notification when the domain is renewed—which automatically occurs 30 days prior to the expiration date.

Thanks to Will and Vinny for their hard work on this project. It's definitely one that will save us a lot of manual work and will provide customers with the domain management services they've been wanting for a long time.

We just the released the latest version of webmail for all users that have upgraded to Harbinger (if you haven't done that yet, you have until November 22nd to do so inside the control panel. On November 22nd, everyone will be automatically converted). This release includes more than 10 fixes and enhancements. Most are small, but include the following:

- There are now keyboard shortcuts for scrolling through email messages
- Contact sorting is now saved between log-in sessions
- We removed the confirmation dialog when closing webmail based on user feedback

This is the last minor release before we launch Concord, version 1.0 of shared calendaring. Keep an eye on our active projects page for more details.

Netcraft just voted Rackspace the most reliable web hosting company in the industry (in September). As many of you already know, Rackspace is our primary hosting company for our email hosting and related services. We currently have hundreds of servers hosted with them and are adding close to a dozen more every month.

We didn’t need a Netcraft report to know that Rackspace is as good as it gets. From their Fanatical Support to their Zero Downtime Network, Rackspace has been the best partner we could ever ask for—three years running now.

We’ve been around the block with web hosting companies and while Rackspace isn’t the cheapest company out there, we feel that the investment we make in them is well worth it. They bring an enormous amount of value to our team—and of course, to our customers and resellers.

If you’re ever considering a web hosting company and want to talk about Rackspace, get in touch with me. I’m happy to talk about them and I’ll give it to you straight.

We just updated the Active Projects page of our website. It’s a pretty good reflection of what our product developers are currently working on for the next couple of months.

Additionally, if you want a glimpse into how much work we’ve got ahead of us, check out Idea Central. Since we launched it a few weeks ago, more than 80 great ideas have been submitted.

If you’re interested in learning more about what’s powering our new email search capabilities, we just created a Search Indexing page on our website. Enjoy!

I’m happy to announce that we were voted the Technology Business of the Year by the Roanoke Chamber of Commerce. I’m not sure that we are the most deserving of this award, but we’ll take it nonetheless!