Have you ever signed up for a service that was a pain to cancel when you didn’t want it anymore? Credits cards, online video rentals, cable companies, and other hagglers come to mind. Or, have you resisted signing up for a service because they make you sign a long-term contract? Cell phone carriers and software companies are notorious for this. Well at Mailtrust, part of our promise to you is that if we don’t live up to your expectations (or your priorities simply change), you can cancel your service at any time. We’ve honored this for as long as we’ve been in business, but it’s always been a manual process. And with the rest of the world making it so hard to cancel a service, I truly wonder how many businesses haven’t signed up with us because they thought it would be too hard to cancel if we weren’t the right fit for them.

Well last week, we launched Flatline, a feature that makes it easy for customers to cancel their plans with us, with the push of a button. Customers can now cancel services through their control panel at any time without the perceived hassle of contacting us. While we never want our customers to leave, for whatever reason, we do want to make sure they have the best possible experience if that time comes.

To cancel your services, log into your control panel and navigate to My Account, then click Cancel Services. You can even schedule your cancellation in advance, up until your renewal date. If you have prepaid for the service, we will automatically give you a pro-rated refund for the time remaining at the date of cancellation.

While we hope that customers never leave us, the reality is, some will. And now, canceling a service has never been so easy.

We consider speed enhancements to our applications to be one of our top priorities. We are constantly pushing our development team to design ways to make our applications run faster. Our customers demand that we come up with innovative ways to increase productivity for users and we know that speed improvements can dramatically increase those productivity levels.

Last week we launched Noteworthy Webmail 6.6, which includes major performance enhancements. Thanks to these enhancements, customers will now be able to navigate through emails within a folder without waiting for each email to load. In the past, navigating between emails in a folder would require time for the email to be loaded into the application, but not anymore!

In addition to the major performance enhancements, we have also integrated the following enhancements:

• We added an optional notification sound any time new email arrives in the inbox
• You can now drag and drop multiple messages into another folder
• We have updated SMS notifications, making them compatible with new providers

We promise to continue to update Noteworthy with further product enhancements as a part of our commitment to innovation. Keep checking our blog—and share your ideas with us via Idea Central.

We've started hosting a series of Tech Talks here at Mailtrust. These talks are given by our software developers, engineers, or other techies outside of Mailtrust, and are intended to create a local forum for sharing information about interesting technologies. We invite technology experts from inside and outside of Mailtrust to share useful real world information about what they are working on.

These are public events, and we invite anyone in the community to attend... Virginia Tech students, professors, local developers, entrepreneurs, and of course Mailtrust and Rackspace employees.

Our first talk was given by Stu Hood, one of our developers, on Hadoop and MapReduce and it's comparison to SQL for processing large data sets. We had about 50 people attend. The video will be posted soon.

Our second talk is coming up this Monday, St Patty's day, and is titled Next Generation Data Storage with CouchDB. If you are host a web application and are looking for a scalable way to store lots of data, this talk may be helpful.

For details on the CouchDB talk and all upcoming talks, check out the Racklabs blog. All talks will be recorded and posted afterwards on the Racklabs blog.

Juan Carlos Perez at IDG News Service wrote an article last week on service level agreements (SLAs) for hosted web applications. Juan says, “Unfortunately, SLAs are far from prevalent among SAAS vendors� and one of the analysts he quotes in the story echoes this: "For the most part, SLAs haven't been in place for the broad cross-section of SAAS [offerings] currently available".

It’s pretty shocking to me that businesses would work with service providers that don’t offer strong SLAs. As I told Juan (we were featured in this story), even though no provider is perfect (us included) a strong SLA at least demonstrates a commitment to uptime, performance, and reliability. If you don’t have a strong commitment to delivering a great service, how will you ever deliver one?

Here is the article, if you’re interested in reading it.

If you want to skip the article, here is the most important part that relates to us and how we handle SLAs:

“Mailtrust, which is backed by parent company Rackspace, a managed hosting specialist, also doesn’t lock customers into long-term contracts, but rather renews the engagements on a monthly basis. Thus, dissatisfied customers can walk at any time, with no penalties.�

Like I told Juan, we’re here to earn your business—over and over again.

Update: here is a link to the Rackspace blog talking about the Fanatical Support Promise, something very relevant to this conversation. Rackspace is our parent company.