As the CEO of a growing company, my calendar stays pretty full. Some days I'm in back-to-back meetings all day long. Because of my schedule, one of the biggest problems I always have with typical calendar reminder systems is that I'm rarely at my computer to see my reminder pop up or to receive my email alert. This is why I'm so excited about our new reminder system that includes the option to receive reminder alerts via text messages. Now, as long as I configure my reminder to alert me via text message, I don't have to worry about being in front of my computer to be reminded of my next meeting. It has already saved me from being late to several meetings.

Here is an example of three back-to-back meetings I recently attended:

11:00am - 12:30pm: Development Meeting in the conference room
12:30pm - 1:30pm: Lunch with Marisa at the Sigma Grill
1:30pm - 2:30pm: Meeting with Doug at his office

Looks easy, right? Not quite.

The problem is, when I'm in the development meeting in our conference room, I'm typically fully engaged and not thinking about my lunch appointment. The next thing I know, I look at my Blackberry and its 12:40 - I'm late! So I rush to lunch. Marisa and I then start chatting about new candidates we're looking to recruit, job offers we're going to make, and all of the great things we're doing in HR. Then, as she starts giving me one of her stories about why our employee handbook isn't finished yet, I look at my Blackberry again and its 1:28. I'm almost late again!

Fast forward to the present and I'm no longer late to my meetings because 10 minutes before my next meeting starts, my Blackberry vibrates, I look at it, it reminds me of my next meeting, and off I go.

In order to set reminders via text message (or any of the other options we now offer), simply click on the Reminder Options link on the Add Event page. You can set reminders the way you want them and you can set defaults, or configure your options on a per-event basis.

Enjoy!

Webmail 6.3 is now live. You can find all of the new features, enhancements, etc. in our blog post from two weeks ago.

We held our 4th Hackathon over the weekend and it was an incredible success. Here are the projects that we completed that will go into beta soon:

Webmail

- Right click functionality
- Task list improvements
- Search improvements (front end)
- Search improvements (back end, speed)
- Drag and drop improvements
- Double byte language support
- Preview pane enhancements

Control Panel

- Bcc Archiving for resellers
- Ability to undelete mailboxes
- Mail access controls (pop/imap/ssl)
- Ability to disable "Login As User"

Outreach

- First demo of our new email marketing system

Billing

- Forecasting revenue report (internal project)

Check out Bill's blog for more info, pictures, etc.

We'll be hosting a webinar on Thursday, March 29th at 4pm, EST. The goal of this webinar is to educate prospective private label reseller partners on the value proposition offered by providing our email hosting services to your customers. Here are the topics we will cover:

- Email hosting today
- Advantages of strong email hosting
- How Webmail.us fits into your picture
- The Webmail.us reseller program
- How to get started
- Who to call
- Q&A
- Brief demo of control panel
- Brief demo of webmail interface

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

Our customer care team has some great tools for troubleshooting email related problems. These tools help us to resolve issues quickly, or at least point us in the right direction. For example we can:

• view all of the settings for a domain or a mailbox on one screen
• check to see if a domain's DNS is set up correctly
• test the deliverability of mail to remote servers
• decipher the meaning of email message headers
• look up the meaning of all of our spam rules
• look up IP addresses in third-party spam blacklists

We've long thought that these tools might also be useful to our customers and resellers. So today, we are making them available. You'll find these tools in your Webmail.us control panel, in the new section labeled "Troubleshooting".

As always though, if you're not able to find the solution to your problem using these tools, we are here 24x7 to help.

You can now automatically delete mail from your Inbox, Drafts, Sent, Spam & Trash folders. This has been a highly requested feature.

The cleanup process runs nightly and can be configured for your entire domain or for specific mailboxes. You can configure this to occur either based on how long the email has been stored, or based on the number of emails in the folder. I've been using it for my Trash folder for the past month while it was in beta, and it works great.

You can find it in your control panel under Email Accounts > Settings > Folder Cleanup Settings.

We just released Webmail 6.3 into beta. Webmail 6.3 has several speed and performance enhancements (we focus on speed and performance in every release now) and many new features. Features include:

1. Calendar Reminders

- Improved reminder alert that now includes dismiss and snooze
- Missed reminder alerts will appear the next time you login to webmail
- Reminder alerts can now be sent via text message (SMS)
- Reminder alerts can now be sent to an alternate email address

2. Draft Improvements

- Forwarding a draft no longer deletes the draft

3. Spell Check

- Now includes a personal dictionary that you can add words to
- Now shows the number of misspelled words
- Now checks spelling for all of the languages we support

4. Contacts

- Added option for how to display name ("first last" or "last, first")
- Double clicking a row now opens the edit contact form

5. Message List

- You can now use arrow keys to move up and down the message list

My two favorite new features are text message reminders and the ability to add words to my spell check dictionary. I think I'll blog in more detail soon about text message reminders.

We plan to release Webmail 6.3 to all customers next week.

We have released a few new setup guides for various mail clients. Get 'em here. The new guides include:

• Windows Mail (ships with MS Vista)
• PowerMail
• Mulberry
• Mozilla SeaMonkey

We also updated the Mac Mail and Eudora guides.

Enjoy!

Earlier this week we released phase 3 of our Domain Management system. Here is a quick summary of the features in this release:

* We modified the "Add Domains" section in the control panel to allow an admin to add a domain to our system without needing to purchase email hosting. This means that current customers can use us for DNS hosting or Registration but are not required to purchase mailboxes for those domains.

* We added a new section to "Upgrade Services" which will allow customers to purchase email hosting services for domains that are in our system but do not yet have email hosting services. So, if a customer purchases a new domain, but elects not to purchase email hosting they can at any time change their mind by going to this new section.

Thanks to Will, BL, Vinny, and Nell-Marie for their hard work on this project.