The Webmail Blog

Moving this blog to a new home

We've decided that we'd rather be using a URL that is more specific to the company. So I backed up bunch of posts and comments and put them in place at the new home for this blog:
http://webmail.typepad.com

For those of you who prefer to use an RSS aggregator, if you already had the Feedburner link, I've made the update for you and you shouldn't have to change anything to keep getting new posts. If you weren't using the Feedburner link: please switch over. Here is the Feedburner page: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheWebmailBlog.

Thanks and sorry for putting you through this little change!

-Kirk

Outlook Attachments And Winmail.dat

Mornings like this remind me why it's great to work at Webmail.us: we like to get things done!   We decided that we had to have a feature on Friday morning.  It was in testing that afternoon.  It went on our system live over the weekend.  This morning our customers have a useful new feature.

Winmail.dat - Proprietary Outlook Attachment

This weekend we updated our Webmail product to automatically decode a winmail.dat attachment and break it into an RTF document (Word compatible) and into any other attachments that may have existed inside the winmail.dat. Here's a little background info for those who want it:

When Outlook is configured to compose a message in Rich Text Format (RTF) it generates a file called winmail.dat, a specially encoded file with extra text color and formatting options.  Before HTML was widely used to compose email, RTF was the way to get nicer formatting.  But other email clients didn't know how to read the special encoding.

Even worse, normal files attached to an RTF'd email were sometimes authomatically zipped up into the winmail.dat as well.  So an email sent from Outlook to Netscape Mail, Eudora, Mac Mail, etc. had this extra, useless attachment and no way to get at any other attachments that might have been sent.  But our Webmail client will now allow our customers to get at all of the RTF information & other attachments they need.

Open Source Community

For any of you who follow our open-source doings, we are releasing this code to the community.  There are another couple of important projects that we're finishing up over the next week or two.  We're even planning a new section on our website just for projects completed in-house to be released under the GPL.  I'm excited to blog about this more, but I'd better wait until we have at least one of those projects available for you to download!

-Kirk

Internet Explorer on the Apple Mac

It has been almost 2 years since Microsoft stopped development of their Mac version of Internet Explorer (check out this news story). Because Microsoft isn't adding modern browser features to the Mac we have decided that we will not be able to officially support IE on the Mac platform in our future releases of Webmail.

For Windows users, that might sound worse than it really is: Safari, the Apple-made browser, is preferred by the vast majority of Mac users. Firefox is also supported on the Mac and will be supported by future versions of Webmail.

Progress
If you're a Webmail.us customer and have been with us very long you know that we like to innovate and improve our products. Some of our next round of product innovations are based on a web programming approach called AJAX. Lack of AJAX support in IE 5.2 on the Mac is one big reason why we won't be able to support Mac IE in the future.

AJAX is the technology behind really great sites like Google Maps. I don't mean great as in "gee whiz, the latest technology", I mean it as in "gee whiz, this makes the web a lot more usable!" It is absolutely the right next step for improving the interface in our existing webmail and adding the features that our customers ask for.

-Kirk

Email Infrastructure Upgrades

As I mentioned in an earlier post it’s been busy around here at Webmail.us. We’re firing on all cylinders -- hiring, growing the business, and putting a ton of resources into product R&D. But the biggest strategic initiative so far this year is one we haven’t talked much about: infrastructure improvements.

Our CTO-led engineering team has been working feverishly with our infrastructure partner, Rackspace, to deploy our next generation infrastructure platform. We’re taking our current platform and adding dozens of servers in a new configuration to improve the performance, reliability, and scalability of our system. According to Pat, our CEO, this is the biggest financial commitment we’ve ever made (he promises to blog in more detail about this soon).

Timing

The only downside to our infrastructure project has been that our timing turned out to be a couple of weeks off. The result has been less than optimal email system performance for some customers, resulting in email delivery delays during peak hours of the business day (some customers have not been affected by this but for those that have, we want you to know what we are doing behind the scenes). We’re not just working on eliminating issues with short-term fixes; we’re thinking miles down the road as we plan for the future growth of our company and achieving the highest level of email performance possible.

The Work Begins

We started bringing new servers online last week that were targeted at eliminating the bottlenecks you might have experienced at peak hours during the past week. The impact was immediate, but we still have a lot more to do. The entire infrastructure upgrade will be complete later this month and we’re committed to keeping the system’s performance as robust as possible in the meantime.

If you have experienced any type of email delays, I want to apologize on behalf of our company. Our entire senior management team and engineering staff is working together to smooth the transition to the new and improved system. If you have technical questions about the issues or our new infrastructure, drop me an email and I’ll fill you in.

-Kirk

Email Client Documentation

We've been working hard on our documentation lately.  The first priority has been to make new email client setup and user guides.  Everything now on the Setup email client page is new and improved.

Resellers should like this because the PDF's can be edited with Adobe's PDF software or even with 3rd party PDF editors.  So minor rebranding should be very easy to accomplish: swap a logo out, change a Webmail reference, etc.  These are released under a Creative Commons license that allows reproduction and changes so long as we get attribution and there isn't a charge for the documentation (because we don't charge for it).

These are short, clean, and simple guides to set up and use email clients with our service.  Here is the list of docs on the site right now:

Outlook (2003, 2002/XP, 2000, 98)
Outlook Express
Mac Mail
Netscape Mail
Mozilla Thunderbird
Eudora
Snappermail

We're working on more docs right now; Versamail comes to mind.  Our service runs fine on Versamail (I'm using it on my Verizon Treo 650) and nearly all mobile email clients.  As long as the program supports POP or IMAP and can do SMTP Authentication with our servers it should work.

-Kirk

Managing Email

My post today was my first in about a month-- sorry about that.  It's been a busy time for the company and my family as well.

I've been meaning to write about managing the large volumes of email many of us receive.  When I was thinking of this subject a few weeks ago I did some googling around to see what others had to say.  There are a lot of different approaches out there!

Here is what I've been trying to do:

1) Delete email I really don't need.  Like the ones where someone says "thanks".  When will I ever need that email?  I used to keep every email (and piles of useless stuff at home, too).  I've taken to deleting everything that isn't pretty obvious that I'll need again.  No "whoops!" experiences, yet.

2) Keep my Inbox clean.  I use folders in my webmail and move messages to folders-- mostly categories of who sent me the message.  I use the Inbox like a short task list now.

3) Make my subject lines summaries of the content.  My consistency could improve here, but I like the idea and I have had some small success.  Instead of something like, "FW: Some customer name" I say, "FW: This customer needs help with a private label website".  I do rewrite FW: and RE: subject lines.  I think it saves people time on the receiving side.  This is probably my favorite new email almost-habit.

Let me know if you have any good ideas for managing a lot of email!

-Kirk

Ransom-Ware Viruses & Predictions

There is a new article up at IOL: Computers / IT about a new type of virus labeled "Ransom-Ware".  The virus-writer wants $200 to remove the virus and not harm the computer & data.

I'm guessing that Internet banking isn't quite anonymous enough to make this commonplace-- too easy for the virus writers to be located.

Radicati Predicts More Viruses

In an unrelated article, the Radicati Group estimates that the 900 million viruses expected to be emailed this year will reach 4.2 billion / yr in 2009.  The article goes into much more detail and is worth a read if you like scary numbers.

I'm not sure that I agree that the figure will quadruple over the next 4 years.  I'm sure they've looked at trend data.  I just don't think that it's possible to know what anti-spam and anti-virus measures will be developed and used.

If 90% of ISP's simply blocked the SMTP port 25 and then used a little connection throttling on their own legitimate SMTP servers, spam and virus traffic would drop tremendously.  As the volume of spam increases over the next year or two, I think it's highly likely that ISP's will start to take notice.  If nothing else, new revisions of their firewalls and mail transfer software will be smarter by default and make an impact.  Just my 2 cents.

-Kirk

Domain Name Scam?

I did an earlier post about domain name scams. ILSCORP was really pushing the boundaries on marketing ethics.

On Monday of this week I received a letter from the Domain Registry of America about a domain name I registered for my mother-in-law a year or two ago. It is leaps and bounds better than the ILSCORP, but it still leaves me a little uncomfortable.

The Good

It uses the word "switch" in the 2nd sentence helping the reader understand that DRoA is not your current registrar. The text "This notice is not a bill" appears twice in the letter; it appears bolded the first time. They have a paragraph about our right to change registrar's when we renew, again emphasizing that they are not the current registrar. Pretty good, in my opinion.

The Bad

The design of the document is built to pull your eye away from the informative text and focus your attention on other things. Three main sections get the attention: a section with the domain name & a "reply requested by" date, a section listing costs for different terms of registration, and a section listing prices on similar domains. It seems likely to me that a casual reader will simply see this as renewing their domain and never think about it being with a new provider.

The second "This notice is not a bill" is squished between larger and heavier fonts on the detachable portion to send in with your money. Not great.

The fine print on the back is almost comically small. It has to be 3 to 4 point font and is a grey color rather than a higher-contrast black. Again, it smells of design built to draw attention away from potentially important information for a consumer.

Competition

This letter seems to add customers to the Domain Registry of America through subtlety. True, there may be some existing domain registrar that doesn't warn its customers that their domain is expiring. The DRoA is then providing a meaningful service. But I'm guessing they mostly get customers because the folks don't realize that they are switching to someone new and maybe not getting the best deal (DRoA charges $25 for one year of registration...there are significantly less expensive registrars out there).

Customers benefit when there is more direct competition between providers on core issues. Customers then choose new companies based on a feature/price ratio that makes sense to them and companies that better meet needs get more customers.

I was just reading through a competitor's web site yesterday and saw where they had an add-on support package where their customers would be guaranteed a response to an email question within 48 hours. 48 hours?!? Maybe that's a big step up from a free email provider.

Needless to say, I believe we're a huge step up from a situation like that. And we're working on doing even more!

-Kirk

Greylisting

I received this comment in response to an earlier blog entry:

Is there any chance of webmail.us implementing greylisting? Here is a link about it: http://projects.puremagic.com/greylisting/whitepaper.html I have yet to see a downside.... Thanks, Zachary

Zachary-- thank you for the question and the answer is: probably not anytime soon. I'm putting this as a separate blog post because I think it is a really good general question and the explanation for my answer might be useful to others.

What Is Greylisting?

First, let's talk about whitelisting and blacklisting. A whitelist is a list of email addresses and/or Internet Addresses that someone knows as "good" senders. A blacklist is a corresponding list of known "bad" senders. Clicking "trust sender" in the webmail interface puts a user on a whitelist. Clicking "report spam" doesn't blacklist the sender, but does submit the message to our filtering software so that it can learn to recognize the new type of spam.

The link Zachary sent along is a great explanation of the concept of greylisting. It is an approach that says, "I don't know who you are so I'm going to make your email message jump through some extra hoops before I accept it." So an email from an unrecognized sender is neither on the whitelist or the blacklist and therefore is treated differently.

Greylisting works by telling the sending email server to resend the message sometime soon. Most spammers right now set their software to blindly transmit their spam email and the software doesn't understand the "resend soon" message. Thus, the spam would never actually be delivered.

One Weakness

There is one weakness to this approach in a business or high-performance personal setting: the delay and resend may take up to an hour. Many businesses receive email from new customers regularly, whose email would be delayed by the greylisting rules, and the delay could have a significant business impact. And if you frequently get email from "friends of friends", then greylist might cause you problems, too.

A second potential weakness is that it seems to Bill Boebel, our CTO, that updating spammer software to follow greylisting rules would be just too easy to implement. So as more people used greylisting it seems likely to stop working altogether as spammers adjusted.

Choosing Your Approach To Spam

There is no wrong approach, just a few choices that will make your mailbox work in a way that's most useful to you.

I've included some info in earlier posts about how we filter spam. The summary is blacklists, keyword recognition, and some very intelligent programming in SpamDNA(r). But our customers can also use desktop anti-spam software and 3rd party services to add more layers if that better meets their needs.

-Kirk

Local Chamber Business Expo

Some people think that there is a conflict between being a global endeavor and a good local corporate citizen.  But we love being in a beautiful place near Virginia Tech.  I've read about more and more high-tech companies moving to places with better quality of living, shorter commutes, and a healthier lifestyle; as long as they can stay well-connected.

We try to support our local business friends when we can.  Today we're participating in a Business and Home Expo put on by The Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce.  If you happen to be in our neck of the woods, check out the Expo at The Event Centre, 1655 Roanoke Street (between exits 118A and 118B on I-81), Christiansburg, Virginia.  It runs from noon until 7:30pm and should be a lot of fun with a lot of interesting people and displays.

-Kirk