The Official Rackspace Blog » Bill Boebel

Microsoft Opens Up Outlook Storage Format

Bill Boebel — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 08:22:00 +0000

There’s been some buzz lately about the fact that Microsoft has decided to fully document the Outlook PST storage format and open it up for developers to freely code against. So what does this mean? . . .

Well, in the short term there are two immediate impacts we’ll see by software developers having deep access into Outlook PST storage format: (1) faster development of Outlook plugins such as Xobni, and (2) easier migration of mail data out of Outlook and into services such as Rackspace Email and Google Apps. This move by Microsoft will drastically reduce the time it takes to develop these products because developers no longer have to reverse engineer the Outlook storage format.

Longer term, Outlook could become an apps platform where we see all sorts of third-party apps being developed that add value to the core feature-set of Microsoft Outlook, similar to what you see with Facebook Apps today but on your desktop. However, in order for this to play out, Microsoft will need to do more than just open up the storage format. They will have to also redesign Outlook with apps in mind so that apps can be easily developed and can feel like an integrated part of Outlook. They’ll also need to launch some sort of an “app store” model for third parties to distribute their apps, such as what has worked so successfully for Apple’s iPhone apps.

Or this announcement could simply be part of a less-sexy initiative where Microsoft is releasing more of their proprietary specifications in order to make lawyers in the EU and elsewhere happy. We’ll see.

iPhone Sync

Bill Boebel — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:41:26 +0000

It’s not every day you get asked, “Can I see your hands?” As it turns out, we are in the process of releasing the iPhone sync feature for our signature email platform, Noteworthy. Being an iPhone user, I am especially thrilled about assisting our product team with video tutorials of how easy it will be to sync the iPhone with a Noteworthy account.
I am pretty excited about this for two reasons. First, iPhone sync is about to be released! I, as well as many of our customers, are anxiously awaiting this feature. Second, I personally get to be a part of history as Mailtrust releases yet another revolutionary feature for our email hosting products.
I guess it’s time to break a leg…er, hand?!

Tech Talks

Bill Boebel — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:35:00 +0000

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 Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4)
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.

Two Upcoming Mailtrust Events

Bill Boebel — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:26:12 +0000

Student’s for Free Culture at VT hosted an awesome talk given by Richard Stallman last month, so we hit them up to see how we could bring more interesting speakers to Blacksburg. On Wednesday the 23rd, Mailtrust and Students for Free Culture bring you Nelson Pavlosky to give his popular talk on Free Speech, Free Software and Free Culture.
When: Wednesday, April 23, 2008, 6:00 PM Eastern
Where: Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business, room 30
As usual, Mailtrust will provide pizza.
Tech Talk 3: Practical Web Semantics
Join Mailtrust again on Monday April 28th for a presentation by Manu Sporny of Digital Bazaar covering the Semantic Web.
When: Monday, April 28, 2008, 6:00 PM Eastern
Where: Mailtrust, 775 University City Blvd, Blacksburg VA
RSVP: techtalk@mailtrust.com (yes, more free pizza!)

CouchDB talk – Monday March 17

Bill Boebel — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 12:45:06 +0000

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.

Data Restores Are Now Free

Bill Boebel — Wed, 30 May 2007 00:03:00 +0000

“Yesterday I mistakenly deleted a folder from my webmail account. It happened to contain an important email from a customer and I had not replied to it yet. Now the email is gone. Help!”
I hear this story from our customers all the time. They have accidentally deleted an email, or a folder, or an entire account – and they have lost some important emails. The customer needs the emails back, and fast. Luckily the data on our servers is backed up nightly, so if the email was in there overnight, it usually can be restored. However, in the past we would charge customers $100 for each data restore, because performing a restore was a time consuming, manual task for our customer care team. Many customers end up just opting out of the restore, saving $100, but never getting their missing data back. Obviously this is less than ideal.
So we assembled a team to automate the email restore process and put a tool in the hands of our customers so that they can do it themselves. We want customers to be able restore their deleted mail as soon as the need it, as often as they need it, and best of all… for free. We code named this project “Vault”.
Well, the Vault team has been hard at work the past few months and the tool is now here. Every customer now has access to their data backups via their control panel and can do their own restores for free. If you log in, you will see it under Email Accounts > Data Restores.
We hope you never mistakenly delete an important email, but if you do, give this new tool a try and let us know what you think.
If you are interested in the technical details of how we built this, I gave a presentation about it at ISPCON last week. I’ve posted the slides on my personal blog.

Troubleshooting Tools in your Control Panel

Bill Boebel — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 11:40:09 +0000

Our customer care team has some great tools for troubleshooting email related problems. These tools help us to resolve issues quickly, or at least point us in the right direction. For example we can:

view all of the settings for a domain or a mailbox on one screen
check to see if a domain’s DNS is set up correctly
test the deliverability of mail to remote servers
decipher the meaning of email message headers
look up the meaning of all of our spam rules
look up IP addresses in third-party spam blacklists

We’ve long thought that these tools might also be useful to our customers and resellers. So today, we are making them available. You’ll find these tools in your Webmail.us control panel, in the new section labeled “Troubleshooting”.
As always though, if you’re not able to find the solution to your problem using these tools, we are here 24×7 to help.

Automatically delete mail in certain folders

Bill Boebel — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 21:24:12 +0000

You can now automatically delete mail from your Inbox, Drafts, Sent, Spam & Trash folders. This has been a highly requested feature.
The cleanup process runs nightly and can be configured for your entire domain or for specific mailboxes. You can configure this to occur either based on how long the email has been stored, or based on the number of emails in the folder. I’ve been using it for my Trash folder for the past month while it was in beta, and it works great.
You can find it in your control panel under Email Accounts > Settings > Folder Cleanup Settings.

New setup guides

Bill Boebel — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 19:57:00 +0000

We have released a few new setup guides for various mail clients. Get ‘em here. The new guides include:

Windows Mail (ships with MS Vista)
PowerMail
Mulberry
Mozilla SeaMonkey

We also updated the Mac Mail and Eudora guides.
Enjoy!

New Anti-spam API – time to start coding!

Bill Boebel — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 14:50:24 +0000

Many of you use the new anti-spam features we released back in August that allow you to add IP addresses to your blacklists and safelists and turn on greylisting for mail from new senders. Well now we have another way you can manage these features.
This week we released a set of new API functions that let you write your own programs to control these settings for your users. You can build all sorts of clever things with this. For example, if you are an ISP or a web host, you can write a tool that syncs your IP space with your customers’ whitelists so that your IPs are always whitelisted. Or if you run honeypots or spamtraps, you can write a program that automatically blacklists IPs that send malicious traffic there.
If you build any cool applications using these API functions, I would love to hear about it.