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_JackieD_: Rackspace Email & Apps softball team... I missed the picture, oops...http://ow.ly/1npzj 4 hours, 16 minutes
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Portal Systems Saves 300 Hours a Year with Rackspace
Portal Systems, a network solutions firm, uses the Rackspace Reseller Program to add value and reduce complexity for their clients. The Northern Virginia-based company currently manages about 100 clients under the reseller plan. “We were all ready managing the email accounts for our clients. As a reseller, we could do it all from one control panel without having to log in and out of the individual accounts,” says David Korte, Managing Partner of Portal Systems.
Rackspace resellers also enjoy volume pricing, API integration options, and marketing support without major equipment investments or huge upfront fees. With low monthly minimums and the option of Microsoft Exchange, Rackspace Email, or both, resellers can create a competitively priced and compelling offer to their customers. For David, that means his firm can work with smaller companies who need a few mailboxes and seamlessly scale to meet the needs of large clients needing hundreds of mailboxes.
Since using Rackspace for their clients’ email needs, Portal Systems has also seen the value of email hosting and moved their in-house email to Rackspace, returning the over 300 hours a year they were spending on email maintenance to more mission-critical activities. Read the Portal Systems case study to find out more about their experience with Rackspace, both as a reseller and customer. Visit the Rackspace Reseller Program page for more information on becoming a reseller.
New Features in Beta for Rackspace Email
For those of you who don’t already know, we have a beta version of our webmail product for Rackspace Email – https://beta.apps.rackspace.com. We use this version, affectionately known as simply “beta,” to get our newest features into the hands of customers as soon as possible, so we can get valuable feedback and work out any kinks before going live.
We recently launched our latest version of beta and, as a member of the webmail team, I am extremely proud of this release. It’s packed full of improvements to existing features, as well as brand new features. Here are a few highlights:
Autocomplete
We have completely rewritten the autocomplete feature (which you see when addressing an email). It is now faster, smarter, and delivers a much better overall user experience.
Keyboard Shortcuts
We have added the ability to use keyboard shortcuts in the Email section of webmail. To try this out, click “Settings” and check “Enable Keyboard Shortcuts.” Use the “?” key to see everything you can do. This feature is still in its infancy, so the more feedback the better.
Compose Reminders
Ever send an email without a subject and get yelled at by that one picky co-worker? Ever send an email with an attachment to someone, only without the attachment? No more. If you try to send an email without a subject, or if we think you meant to include an attachment and didn’t, you will get a popup letting you know.
We’ll be touching on everything that went into this release in more detail in future posts. Remember to keep the feedback coming, and enjoy!
Don’t Put All “Emails” In One Basket
There is a proven theory in the investing world about how one should not put all their eggs in one basket. In a word, diversification. The logic of diversification has been applied to many circles of life, but it is now proving to be good advice in communications, especially email.
Several of the consumer email providers have been trying to service business customers in recent years. Microsoft began with MSN mail, added Hotmail, and now has Live Mail, which accepts subscriptions from individuals as well as micro businesses. Google is another example, where Gmail is offered to both consumers as well as universities and businesses under Google Apps. Having both one’s personal and work email in one account with the same provider might sound like a move that simplifies life, but it exposes additional risks when outages happen.
This is coming to light for users of Gmail today, which is having another unfortunate service outage. (Full Disclosure: We admit we are not perfect either) A tweet message from @eskobarnow hits on this exact point. When your personal email account is unavailable, you can use your work account for important personal emails. Vice versa when your work email is down. However, as @eskobarnow points out, one can be “screwed” when a single outage makes both your work and personal account inaccessible.
These days, the ability to easily import contacts and files from one system to another is rather easy in many cases. Accordingly, the benefits of using the same provider for work and personal email are lessened. Some providers allow two accounts to be viewed in a single inbox view, which is surely more elegant then using forwarding rules to accomplish the same. HOWEVER, what good is it to have all messages from two or more different accounts on the same inbox, when the inbox is not accessible?
Yes, diversification works in the email world just as it does in investments.
Launch: Auto Delete Invitations
I receive several event invitations a week—sometimes even several a day. Every time I get an invitation, I either accept or decline, and then I delete the email. The way I see it, if I can’t attend the event, I don’t need to keep the invitation. And if I accept the invitation, the event information is transferred to my calendar.
So, for people like me, Rackspace Email has released a new webmail calendar feature that saves me a few valuable seconds. With the new “Autodelete Invites” option, I can automatically delete the invitation email as soon as I’ve accepted or declined the invitation.
To check it out, just log into Rackspace Email and select Settings / General Settings / Calendar.
Is Email Dead?
Many blog posts have written about the share shift of email toward social media apps, like Facebook. A post on ReadWriteWeb yesterday attempts to explain this. But, this is not a race to zero for email—especially in the business world. Why? Because businesses want to have their employees digitally communicate using a corporate email account and, in some cases, are legally obligated to do so.
To say or suggest that traditional email is on a race to irrelevance, or even to say that it will ever be irrelevant is simply false. Proof of this point can be found by asking any person, of any age whether or not they have an email account. You’d probably find that most people have multiple email addresses. Many of us have a business email address, a personal email address, a spam email address, and more. We doubt there is a person in the digital world that lacks an email account. If you know of someone active in the digital world that does not have an email address, stop reading here and email andy.schroepfer [at] rackspace.com.
The truth is that email is still the preferred way to communicate. Social media is a complimentary tool. Just look at this graph below compiled by Forrester Research this year.
It could even be said from the above graph that email is gaining momentum.
Email comes with an unwritten expectation. When we email someone, we have the expectation that each and every recipient will (eventually) open, view, and respond to our outreach. When we post something to our social media accounts, we have no expectation that all of our friends on that social media application will read our comment, watch our video, or download our file.
Since email is the only form of digital communication where the sender has a right to “expect” a read and response to their outreach, email will remain at the top of the communications hierarchy instead of slipping down on the list of important and effective communication methods.
And remember, before you can sign up for most social networks, you are going to need an email address!
Rackspace Rescues MariTool from Deliverability Issues
To thwart spam, email providers use aggregated blacklists to determine whether to deliver an email to the inbox or the spam folder, or reject it completely. The blacklist is a reference point for IP addresses identified as sending spam. The list is compiled from IP address traffic patterns and user feedback. Some providers allow their customers to participate in activities that increase the likelihood of winding up on a blacklist, like sending large volumes of email or repeatedly sending unsolicited email for marketing purposes.
Tom Fetcho, Project Manager at MariTool, was with an email provider who was blacklisted. “Communication is important in a web-based business and we feared losing customers because our emails weren’t getting to the inbox,” says Tom. Confidence in deliverability was his main concern, but email landing in the spam folder also threatened their professional image. “No one checks the spam folder, so either they’d think we didn’t respond or we’d have to ask them to check their spam folder, which makes us appear unprofessional,” explains Tom.
At Rackspace, we enforce strict policies to protect the reputation of our IP addresses and ensure deliverability of our customers’ email. MariTool can now be confident that their email isn’t mingling with spam in the spam folder; instead, their email gets the attention it deserves in the inbox.
Read the full MariTool case study to find out how Rackspace rescued their email from deliverability and accessibility issues with another provider.
[Email Tip] Don’t Send Stupid Stuff
Oh no! I can’t believe I forgot to attach the file I spent so much time describing in that email. Guess I’ll have to send a follow-up “here is the file…” email.
Ever happened to you? Ever sent an email and forgot to include a team member? Or, send a message and leave out a key piece of information? How about sending a meeting invitation with the same details missing? Worse yet, after hitting send, realizing that you’ve sent that invitation to the wrong group of people? If you’ve done these things you are not alone. I am with you.
Being a technical project manager at Rackspace, I am constantly looking for ways to improve everyday things. If I can fix the small things that annoy and frustrate me, I can get back a few minutes each day and spend that time on what matters most. For example, the act of not attaching a file wastes a lot of time. For example, let’s say I send an email without an attachment on Monday morning. Monday afternoon I get a reply saying I left off the attachment. I then resend the attachment. My recipient gets it later that afternoon or evening. So instead of getting the email and reading the attachment mid-day Monday and dealing with it, we are now dealing with it on Tuesday. Imagine if I sent that email without the attachment the day before my month long vacation.
The bottom line is that it wastes time. In a fast-paced environment, this creates a bottleneck.
To avoid that bottleneck, I devised a quick solution. It is as simple as delay sending. When I hit send, the email sits in the outbox for a preset amount of time before actually taking off. This short period of time helped me catch countless mistakes and leads to a better experience for those who receive my emails.
Here’s how to set up delay sending in Outlook 2007:
- Select Tools > Rules and Alerts
- Select New Rule
- Select “Check messages after sending” > Next
- Check “on this machine only” > Next
- Check “defer delivery by a number of minutes” and Select “a number of” and set your delay (mine is set at 3 minutes) > Next
- Finish
Ben Hubbard Named Top 20 Under 40
Congratulations to our Director of Internal Operations here at Rackspace Email & Apps, Ben Hubbard, who last week was named one of the top 20 business leaders under the age of 40 in central and southwest Virginia by the Blue Ridge Business Journal. You can check out the online version here. Ben’s profile is on page 14.