The Official Rackspace Blog » Kirk Averett

Launch: Noteworthy Search 2.0 Release: Speed, Quality and Scalability

Kirk Averett — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:36:00 +0000

If you use e-mail to do business, you probably receive an exorbitant amount of emails every day, each of which is important to the work you do. Keeping track of all that data in your head is near impossible, so, you try to filter and segregate incoming messages to better organize your mailbox. But folders fill up fast, and messages get pushed out of sight and out of mind in an instant.
So, what happens when you need to find the email that someone in HR sent three or four months ago? Was it in the ‘work’ folder, or the ‘HR’ folder?
The classic answer to this question is to run a quick search. After all, search has become a standard feature of email clients, with Noteworthy Search being added in 2006; efficient search has come to be expected from any mailbox. Unfortunately, as mailboxes grow to tens of gigabytes, it has also come to be expected that sifting through all that mail can take a while. Noteworthy’s own search feature has historically had a few issues with certain queries taking too long or, in rare cases, occasionally omitting results due to communication errors.
That’s why we’re very proud to announce the release of Search 2.0 for all Noteworthy users using our Webmail interface. We’ve focused on improving the speed and quality of searches while ensuring that we lay down a scalable foundation to maintain performance as we grow. In our beta testing period, we reduced average query times down to half a second and prevented communication gaps between mailboxes and our indexing servers. With this solid base, we’re prepared to bring you more exciting new search features in future releases. So stay tuned!
If you have a Noteworthy mailbox, go ahead and try it out now.
Note: If it’s your first time using the search feature, give it up to 30 minutes to populate the indexes for your mailbox

At-a-glance scheduling

Kirk Averett — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:24:00 +0000

I love the shared calendars feature in Noteworthy Webmail. As a project manager for Mailtrust, a lot of what I do involves scheduling meetings with various people to discuss priorities, work out processes, and plan our work. Since we have a fairly flat leadership structure, our managers are typically in high demand and have full calendars. Trying to get several of them together at once can be quite a challenge.
The shared calendar tool enables me to view everyone’s calendar at the same time. With access to everyone’s calendars, I can select meeting times when all the people I need are available.

With one look, I can send out a meeting invite for the right time and lock in the mix of people I need for the task at hand.

Updated Email Client Setup Movies

Kirk Averett — Thu, 03 May 2007 09:06:00 +0000

Our support page with information for configuring email programs has been recently updated to include new versions of our setup movies. The setup movies now have a nice narrator voice to go along with the clear illustrations of how to configure each email program. See the list of movies and other information here.
Resellers also have the option of purchasing custom-branded versions of the movie setup guides for their customers to use. The total cost for re-branding is $250 and will take a couple of business days to complete. If you’re interested, please send me an email me a large, high-quality JPG or PNG graphic file of your company logo.

Why We Chose Amazon for Data Backups

Kirk Averett — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 17:47:03 +0000

Bill wrote a great article on why we’re using Amazon for data backups instead of Rackspace, where our primary servers are hosted. Here it is, if you’re interested.

Great Ideas

Kirk Averett — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 05:13:58 +0000

A couple of months ago we launched Idea Central, a website where our customers and employees can submit ideas for things they’d like us to work on. This has turned out to be one of the best moves we’ve made in a long time. In just two months we’ve accumulated more than 200 really great ideas.
When we launched, I promised that we would take Idea Central seriously, and we have. In fact, we just added a ‘Built Ideas’ section to the left menu so you can see what projects we’ve already completed. Some are still in beta, but are finished and will be released soon.
Thanks to everyone who has participated thus far. Not only have your ideas helped guide our product direction, but they also continue to give us justification to add resources to our product development team, which helps to move things along even faster.

More Storage for our Customers

Kirk Averett — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 20:18:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce that we recently started offering a lot more storage space to our retail customers and reseller partners. Retail customers (those that sign up online) now have a choice of 1GB, 5GB, and 10GB mailboxes. Existing customers can upgrade storage plans today, for free, from the My Account section of the control panel.
If you’re a reseller partner, we’re also offering upgraded storage plans. Please contact our customer care team and we will perform the storage upgrade for you.
If you signed up in the last two weeks, you are already on one of the new storage plans as we started offering them to new customers earlier this month.

Webmail.us, Amazon S3, and Our New Data Backups System

Kirk Averett — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 22:27:00 +0000

Several months ago we set out to improve the way we perform email data backups. We were quickly outgrowing our legacy tape backup system. Backups were taking too long to process and data storage costs weren’t scaling the way we wanted them to. We looked into building our own disk-based backup storage system either at Rackspace or within our own data center environment. Then Amazon changed our thinking almost overnight when they released their Simple Storage Service (S3). We knew right away that Amazon’s new web-scale storage platform was something special. So we started playing with it, writing test applications, and soon were talking with Amazon engineers about what we were looking to accomplish.
Tonight, we’re announcing Vault – our new data backup system that is leveraging Amazon S3 to backup and encrypt email and related data, replicating it across multiple Amazon data centers on a nightly basis. Amazon also has a case study online about how we’re working together.
Below are some helpful articles if you’d like to learn more about Amazon’s web service initiatives:
- Business Week on Jeff Bezo’s Risky Bet [on Web Services]
- The CEO of SmugMug on How They Leverage Amazon S3
- Read/Write/Web on Amazon Rolling out its Visionary WebOS Strategy
Hats off to Matt who did a great job leading this project and Mark, the other member of the Vault team. They’ve got some exciting plans for how we’re going to build on top of this new platform. More on that later…

You’ve Got Mail, Now You Can Check It

Kirk Averett — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 16:12:00 +0000

Have you ever been out of the office, wishing you could check your email?
Well now you’re in luck.
Last night, Mike and Matt stayed up all night putting the finishing touches on the first version of Webmail Mobile, the new way to check your email from your cell phone.
So next time you want to check your email while you’re eating dinner with your husband or wife, just go to mobile.webmail.us – they’ll love you for it.
Please keep in mind this is just the initial version. More to come soon…

Webinar: Getting Rid of the Email Headache

Kirk Averett — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 19:33:11 +0000

We’re going to host our first ever Webmail Webinar this Thursday, November 2nd at 4pm, EST. The goal of the Webinar is to educate prospective private label resellers (and other businesses that would like to listen in) on how we can help them more effectively manage email. Here are the points we’re going to cover:
- Common pain points with managing email
- Our Service – the how and why of what we do
- Why choose Webmail.us as your email hosting partner
- Explanation of how our reseller program works
If you would like to join the Webinar, please email us and we’ll send you the login information.

Group List Enhancements

Kirk Averett — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 17:50:00 +0000

The following enhancements have been uploaded to Group Lists as a result of Hackathon 3.0:
- You can set the reply-to on a Group List to either the sender or the list
- You can set the recipients as “All Mailboxes”, “All Mailboxes + Aliases”, or “Specific Mailboxes or Aliases”
- You can add the ability to have dynamic senders (in addition to specific senders)