Is there anyone out there that enjoys receiving spam? We haven’t met anyone who asks to receive more and yet over 95% of email traffic today is junk. Over the past eight years we have learned that one of the top reasons customers choose to outsource their email is to reduce spam.

The bad news is that the amount of spam is growing.

The good news is that we are pursuing innovative ways to fight it.

Most recently, we decided to partner with Cloudmark, one of the industry’s most effective and highest performing anti-spam providers. With Cloudmark, we can filter an estimated 98% of the incoming spam that we receive every day—which is more than 60,000,000 email messages!

That still leaves some spam that could pass through our filters. This is where we get a chance to be innovative and if you’re a Noteworthy customer who uses Noteworthy Webmail, you can help.

Here’s how: if spam email slips through our filters, click the “Report Spam� button in the preview pane of the email message. That message will be sent directly to Cloudmark’s Global Threat Network, which helps build fingerprints that are used to increase the level of spam protection. These fingerprints are then pushed to our server in sub-minute intervals and are used to help increase the effectiveness of our filters. This feedback loop is yet another way we can work together to combat spam.

We hit an interesting recruiting challenge recently. Our company hires a lot of software developers and we've done a decent job tapping into the huge resource across the street - Virginia Tech. We go to all of the VT career fairs and most of the computer science and engineering students have at least heard of Mailtrust.

However, one of our part-timers, who is a CS student at VT, told me a few months ago that although most students have heard of us, they don't always think of us as an exciting company to work for. "They just don't know about all the cool things we do here," he said. To make things more challenging, most students at VT do not plan to stick around Blacksburg, VA after they graduate. Most students have no clue that there are interesting technology companies in this area, and think they'll have to move to Northern VA, Charlotte, or other big cities in order to find a job where they'll get paid to do the stuff they love.

From the outside looking in, it is hard to tell that this little ol’ email company in Blacksburg, VA is working with some of the most innovative new technologies on the Internet. So to address this and get more students excited about what we do, we came up with a simple idea... let's start publicly talking about all of the cool stuff we're building! And to make it even more interesting and help promote the entire software development community in the region, let’s invite other companies to come and talk about the cool stuff that they are building, too!

So we started hosting a series of Tech Talks that anyone can attend. The first three were a great success and the videos of the talks are now online:

Tech Talk 1: MapReduce vs. MySQL (Video on Y!DN)
Speaker: Stu Hood (software developer @ Mailtrust)

Tech Talk 2: Next Generation Data Storage with CouchDB (Video Part 1 and Part 2)
Speaker: Jan Lehnardt (open source developer)

Tech Talk 3: Introduction to the Semantic Web (Video)
Speaker: Manu Sporny (CEO @ Digital Bazaar)

If this sounds interesting to you and you'll be in the Blacksburg area on Wednesday July 9th, please join at 6pm eastern for Tech Talk 4: Agile Software Development.

We are proud to announce the launch of our latest version of Noteworthy Webmail—a version full of improvements to Webmail’s functionality and usability. Our customers are great about sending us valuable feedback, and that feedback drove every improvement that you’ll find in Webmail 6.7.

The most obvious changes are found in the settings section, which underwent a complete redesign and now allows for easier access to Webmail’s mail management tools. Other improvements include the ability to:

• Create and save HTML-based signatures. Customers can even upload an image to incorporate into the signature.
• Schedule a vacation message to begin and end on specific dates.
• Filter email more specifically, using new email filtering rules.

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

Having access to your vital data on your mobile device—data such as email, calendar, and contacts—is almost as important today as having access to that data through your computer. I know many of my colleagues here at Mailtrust find themselves spending as much, if not more, time on their mobile device as they do on their computer throughout the day. We understand that a mobile revolution is taking place and we want to help our customers have access to the data they need, whether that is behind a desk or not.

That is why we are proud to announce the latest addition to our Noteworthy offering, Noteworthy Sync for Windows Mobile devices. This is the second mobile product addition for Noteworthy Sync; the first was Noteworthy Sync for BlackBerry.

With Noteworthy Sync, customers can keep their contacts, calendar, and tasks synchronized between Outlook, Noteworthy Webmail, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile devices. The best part is that customers can schedule automatic synchronizations, so that the data is always kept up to date without having to think twice about it.

Interested in using Noteworthy Sync?

• Customers who signed up online for email hosting service after October 1, 2007 already have Noteworthy Sync included in their pricing package—just log in to the control panel and select Collaboration / Sync to get started.

• For those customers who signed up online before October 1, 2007, the pricing depends on the number of mailboxes you have with us and includes a free upgrade to 10GB of storage per mailbox. Log in to the control panel and select My Account / Upgrade Services / Upgrade Email Plans to purchase the Sync upgrade.

• All other customers can determine pricing online—just log in to the control panel, select Collaboration / Sync, and follow the instructions to get started.