We are excited to announce that we have officially changed our name to Mailtrust. We did this for a number of reasons, but primarily because we feel the new name better reflects our commitment to business email hosting and building trust with our customers.

Customers will not be impacted by this name change and do not need to take any action because of it. It is simply a corporate name change. As part of the name change, we have launched a new website, and will be changing the look and feel of our corporate documents, including our emails and invoices.

I want to personally reassure everyone that while our name and branding have changed, our leadership, people, and dedication have not. We are as committed as ever to delivering the best possible email hosting experience to our customers. We just feel our new name does a better job of saying that.

Here is a good article on our name change from The Roanoke Times.

Before we get too far into 2008, I wanted to take a second to reflect on some of the things we accomplished in 2007. I know it’s a little late, but better late than never.

It was busy, but 2007 proved to be another successful and productive year for us at Webmail. We met—and often exceeded—our goals, thanks to our dedicated team. We’re always working to make our products, infrastructure, and customer care the best it can be for our customers . . .

Products

* We enhanced our webmail product with several new features, including shared calendars and SMS reminders for calendar events. We also completely redesigned and improved the Contacts section and implemented a new, more intuitive menu system.

* Customers can now easily set up and manage Bcc archiving services and data restores through the control panel. We have also released new anti-spam API, as well as helpful troubleshooting tools for customers.

* We launched our new email marketing service, Outreachâ„¢, which allows customers to contact large audiences through email newsletter campaigns. We continued to integrate new features into this product throughout the year.

* We launched Outlook-Sync, our first in a series of sync products that will allow customers to synchronize their online data (calendar, contacts, tasks) with popular software and wireless devices.

System Infrastructure

* We added more than 300 servers throughout the year, and we implemented a “smart traffic balancing� system between our data centers.

* We released a new anti-spam solution.

* We released “Vault,� our new data backup and restore tool, which allows customers to perform their own restores via the control panel.

* We released “Fenbu,� a robust data replication and failover system that improves the reliability of our storage infrastructure.

* We implemented major performance upgrades to several areas of the system, including anti-spam, mail routing, firewalls, webmail, and search.

Customer Care

* We improved many internal tools used by our support team, in order to continue to enhance the level of support we provide to our customers.

* We released a new customer care ticketing system, which gives customers the ability to open and manage tickets from inside their control panel. This gives customers the benefit of being able to conveniently view the status of existing tickets and track their progress.

I’m sure we’ve missed a few, but I think this is still a very impressive list. We look forward to more to come in 2008!

I’ve been an avid Blackberry user for several years now. It has become my lifeblood—I can’t imagine life without it.

But recently my Blackberry has become an even bigger part of my life. In addition to getting the new 8830 World Edition, I have been testing out our new Blackberry sync capabilities—currently in the late stages of beta. For the first time ever, all of my contacts, calendar events, and tasks sync up with all of the data I put into webmail, and vice versa. Instead of needing to manage the two separate systems, I now have the peace of mind that my data is centralized, synchronized, and always up to date. This is incredibly valuable because now, no matter where I am, I can see my contacts, calendar, and task lists, and add to them, knowing the data will then be in my webmail account when I get back to my desk.

This is nothing new for many Blackberry users that run Microsoft Exchange. That’s because many Blackberry users are running Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES), which talks to their Microsoft Exchange Server and automatically syncs all of this information between Blackberry and Outlook. Our customers don’t need BES or Exchange to enjoy some of these luxuries. I personally use webmail as my full-time email client and now I sync webmail data with Blackberry. For me, this is the perfect combination.

Blackberry sync capabilities are scheduled for release next month. If you’re a customer and a Blackberry user, I highly recommend checking it out. Blackberry life will never be the same.

A note about sync’ing your email . . .
To sync your email, you just need to configure your email account via Blackberry Internet Services on your handheld. Unfortunately, Blackberry will only allow you to manage and sync the email that is stored in the email server’s Inbox (and not in your online Drafts folder, Sent folder, or any other online folders you have created). This can be a problem if you typically filter incoming email into other folders. So for emails you want to read on your Blackberry, you should turn off your email filters, and instead have all email arrive in your Inbox.