The amount of spam email swirling around the Internet continues to grow. In the past month, we've seen an enormous influx of potential customers and resellers calling us because they're having trouble keeping up with all of the spam attacking their email hosting systems. It seems like we're hearing this, time and again, every day:

"I've either got to invest in a lot more hardware to process all of this spam, or I've got to make the decision to outsource."

We, of course, would like them all to outsource.

With that said... if there is anyone out there that would like to learn more about how we tackle the spam problem, here are two ways you can do that without having to talk to us:

1. We have a detailed write-up on our website. Go here if you'd like to read all about how we do what we do.

2. Techbroadcasting.com just released a podcast with Bill, our CTO, discussing this exact topic. Go here if you'd like to listen in. Please note that the show starts off with an introduction to many topics, but Gene was nice enough to carve out the Webmail specific piece. So once you get through the intro, it's all Bill from there. It's pretty long and detailed and will help a lot if you're looking to learn more about who we are, what we do, and how we handle spam.

And of course, you can always contact us to learn more.

Tonight we added a new alternate SMTP port for customers who are unable to use port 25, 465 or 587. The new port is 8025. This port functions exactly like 587 and will accept plain-text or TLS encrypted SMTP sessions, and requires SMTP Authentication.

fyi, 8025 is a somewhat standard alternate SMTP port, and was requested by several customers.

Enjoy!

Bill wrote a great article on why we're using Amazon for data backups instead of Rackspace, where our primary servers are hosted. Here it is, if you're interested.

Do you have an email account that you don't use anymore that receives nothing but spam? Turn it into a spamtrap!

We have software that can automatically block mail from spammers who send mail to these accounts. Rules are added to our spam database as soon as an email is received from a spammer, and expire after a few days. By donating a spamtrap account to us, you will help everyone receive less spam.

If you have an email account you'd like to donate, please let us know by emailing donate-a-spamtrap@webmail.us. We will host the account for free.

Important Note: Do not post the email address as a comment to this blog post. We don't want the spammers knowing that the account is a spamtrap. Also spamtrap accounts must not receive ANY mail from legitimate senders.

A couple of months ago we launched Idea Central, a website where our customers and employees can submit ideas for things they’d like us to work on. This has turned out to be one of the best moves we’ve made in a long time. In just two months we’ve accumulated more than 200 really great ideas.

When we launched, I promised that we would take Idea Central seriously, and we have. In fact, we just added a ‘Built Ideas’ section to the left menu so you can see what projects we’ve already completed. Some are still in beta, but are finished and will be released soon.

Thanks to everyone who has participated thus far. Not only have your ideas helped guide our product direction, but they also continue to give us justification to add resources to our product development team, which helps to move things along even faster.

I'm happy to announce that we recently started offering a lot more storage space to our retail customers and reseller partners. Retail customers (those that sign up online) now have a choice of 1GB, 5GB, and 10GB mailboxes. Existing customers can upgrade storage plans today, for free, from the My Account section of the control panel.

If you're a reseller partner, we're also offering upgraded storage plans. Please contact our customer care team and we will perform the storage upgrade for you.

If you signed up in the last two weeks, you are already on one of the new storage plans as we started offering them to new customers earlier this month.

Several months ago we set out to improve the way we perform email data backups. We were quickly outgrowing our legacy tape backup system. Backups were taking too long to process and data storage costs weren’t scaling the way we wanted them to. We looked into building our own disk-based backup storage system either at Rackspace or within our own data center environment. Then Amazon changed our thinking almost overnight when they released their Simple Storage Service (S3). We knew right away that Amazon’s new web-scale storage platform was something special. So we started playing with it, writing test applications, and soon were talking with Amazon engineers about what we were looking to accomplish.

Tonight, we’re announcing Vault - our new data backup system that is leveraging Amazon S3 to backup and encrypt email and related data, replicating it across multiple Amazon data centers on a nightly basis. Amazon also has a case study online about how we’re working together.

Below are some helpful articles if you’d like to learn more about Amazon’s web service initiatives:

- Business Week on Jeff Bezo’s Risky Bet [on Web Services]

- The CEO of SmugMug on How They Leverage Amazon S3

- Read/Write/Web on Amazon Rolling out its Visionary WebOS Strategy

Hats off to Matt who did a great job leading this project and Mark, the other member of the Vault team. They’ve got some exciting plans for how we’re going to build on top of this new platform. More on that later...

Have you ever been out of the office, wishing you could check your email?

Well now you’re in luck.

Last night, Mike and Matt stayed up all night putting the finishing touches on the first version of Webmail Mobile, the new way to check your email from your cell phone.

So next time you want to check your email while you’re eating dinner with your husband or wife, just go to mobile.webmail.us – they’ll love you for it. ;-)

Please keep in mind this is just the initial version. More to come soon…