The Official Rackspace Blog » RackApps CMS Admin

Launch: Flatline, Canceling a Service Has Never Been So Easy

RackApps CMS Admin — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 13:47:00 +0000

Have you ever signed up for a service that was a pain to cancel when you didn’t want it anymore? Credits cards, online video rentals, cable companies, and other hagglers come to mind. Or, have you resisted signing up for a service because they make you sign a long-term contract? Cell phone carriers and software companies are notorious for this. Well at Mailtrust, part of our promise to you is that if we don’t live up to your expectations (or your priorities simply change), you can cancel your service at any time. We’ve honored this for as long as we’ve been in business, but it’s always been a manual process. And with the rest of the world making it so hard to cancel a service, I truly wonder how many businesses haven’t signed up with us because they thought it would be too hard to cancel if we weren’t the right fit for them.
Well last week, we launched Flatline, a feature that makes it easy for customers to cancel their plans with us, with the push of a button. Customers can now cancel services through their control panel at any time without the perceived hassle of contacting us. While we never want our customers to leave, for whatever reason, we do want to make sure they have the best possible experience if that time comes.
To cancel your services, log into your control panel and navigate to My Account, then click Cancel Services. You can even schedule your cancellation in advance, up until your renewal date. If you have prepaid for the service, we will automatically give you a pro-rated refund for the time remaining at the date of cancellation.
While we hope that customers never leave us, the reality is, some will. And now, canceling a service has never been so easy.

Outreach 1.4

RackApps CMS Admin — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 18:09:00 +0000

Since May, our Outreach Email Marketing Service has served as an excellent tool for distributing your email campaigns to large subscriber lists. Based on great input, we continue to enhance this service, and are happy to announce the availability of Outreach 1.4!
This latest version of Outreach provides you even more flexibility in newsletter creation, tracking and productivity enhancements. Now, when creating an email campaign, you have the capability to:

Create drafts of your email campaigns for sharing, review and updates prior to distribution and reuse at a later date
Add “first name, last name

Launch: Outlook-Sync

RackApps CMS Admin — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 09:17:45 +0000

We are really excited to announce our latest feature…the ability to sync with Outlook. This has been one of the top requests by customers—and prospect—and we are pleased to add it to our growing list of business-class email features.
Starting now, you will be able to sync your personal calendar, contacts, and tasks between Outlook and webmail. In addition, you will be able to view and sync any shared calendars that you have enabled for your domain.
Our sync service is based on the open-source Funambol Outlook Plug-in, and is available to new customers, as well as to current customers. To get started, simply log-in to your control panel, click on “Collaboration

Hackathon V

RackApps CMS Admin — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 11:13:00 +0000

This past weekend we conducted our fifth – and most successful – Hackathon! During a Hackathon, our developers get together on a weekend to work on projects that will enhance our current services. The goal is to complete as many projects as possible during the all-day Hackathon. They meet in the morning, discuss plans for their particular project, then go to work. At the end of the day, they meet again to share their accomplishments.
We focused on some really cool projects this time – many of which have been suggested by our users. As a result of some incredible effort, you will see several great new features launched over the coming months. Here is a list of what you can expect:

A desktop notification tool for your taskbar indicating you have new email messages
Ability to purchase archival CDs or DVDs via the control panel
Webmail Lite (for high latency, low speed connections)
The ability to forward multiple messages
The ability to use iCalendar feeds in programs like iCal, Google Calendar and Outlook 2007
Translation of Webmail interface into Chinese
Improvements within the Control Panel, giving administrators capability to specify which users have access to POP, IMAP and STMP

We also completed productivity enhancing projects for our developers and Customer Care team that will enable them to do even a better job supporting our customers!
It was a productive, fun, and successful day all around. We will keep you posted – via this blog – as we start launching these projects.

Announcing Webmail 6.5

RackApps CMS Admin — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 17:05:00 +0000

We uploaded Webmail Version 6.5 this week for our customers. Thanks to major changes in the backend design of certain features, customers will notice increased speed throughout webmail—especially when logging in and when launching the Compose window. Many customers have already contacted us to say they’ve noticed the improvement!
In addition to the performance gains, we have integrated the following design enhancements:

We redesigned the Compose window, moving the buttons to a more intuitive position on the page, improving the auto-complete feature, and allowing users to compose their email while waiting for their attachments to upload.
You can now adjust your date and time format to support European and 24-hour time structures.
The Contacts feature now supports foreign languages, and you can add a photo image for each contact.
Company Directories can now support aliases.

We will continue to enhance Webmail over the coming months. Keep checking our blog–and share your ideas with us via Idea Central.

Got a spamtrap?

RackApps CMS Admin — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 15:41:00 +0000

Do you have an email account that you don’t use anymore that receives nothing but spam? Turn it into a spamtrap!
We have software that can automatically block mail from spammers who send mail to these accounts. Rules are added to our spam database as soon as an email is received from a spammer, and expire after a few days. By donating a spamtrap account to us, you will help everyone receive less spam.
If you have an email account you’d like to donate, please let us know by emailing donate-a-spamtrap@webmail.us. We will host the account for free.
Important Note: Do not post the email address as a comment to this blog post. We don’t want the spammers knowing that the account is a spamtrap. Also spamtrap accounts must not receive ANY mail from legitimate senders.

Need to Create Bigger Email Lists?

RackApps CMS Admin — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 10:17:19 +0000

Many of us need to create email lists with larger groups of people, even though we’re not spammers. So this past week, we launched ‘Group Lists’ which provide our customers with the ability to easily send an email to a large group of internal or external recipients through a single alias. Group Lists provide customers with the following:
• Ability to create Group Lists in the Control Panel, inside of the Email Accounts section
• Ability to send to unlimited internal (same domain) recipients
• Ability to send up to 50 external (outside domain) recipients
• Ability to setup dynamic recipient capabilities—as new mailboxes are added to a domain, they will be automatically added to the Group List
• Ability to setup restricted senders so that only certain people can send to the Group List
We’ll be adding more capabilities in the future but for now, I hope this is a big help. Feel free to email me if you have any questions about Group Lists.
One point I’d like to make—our regular Acceptable Use Policy is still in effect, meaning we don’t allow customers to send bulk mail to recipients outside of their domains.
I want to thank the people who made this project happen. Brian H was the main contributor but I’d also like to thank Nell-Marie, Pat, Bill, and Ben, who all provided lots of guidance and feedback.
– Matt

New Logging System and Statistics

RackApps CMS Admin — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 15:33:00 +0000

We’re about to finish up a major infrastructure redesign here at Webmail and one of the last parts involved is creating a new and improved logging system. In a nutshell, we need a centralized log database that will allow us to easily search and manage enormous log files on all of our servers. After a few months of development, we finally implemented a solution last week.
Without getting too technical here is how this works: every night, a Perl script runs for about an hour—that generates all of the statistical data for the previous day using the log data in the database. There’s also an Apache web server running a PHP-based query tool that allows us to run live queries on the databases whenever we need information. Well I at least tried not to get too technical.
So, how awesome is this? Very! Now, all of our servers send their log data to a single server whose sole purpose is to log all email data. Once the data gets across the network to the log server, it is inserted at a very fast rate into the database. This database then allows us to do two things:
- Create daily statistical information about the number of emails received, the number of viruses detected, the number of spam emails caught, etc. This information is made available for email administrators inside the Control Panel.
- Provide our customer support team with the ability to troubleshoot every single email that ever enters or leaves our system.
- As importantly, we learned a TON about large data sets which will play a huge role in our next infrastructure project, code-named Mercury (more on that later).
By the way, we insert roughly 500,000 records in about 30 seconds of real time. Not too shabby.

Finding Folders in Webmail Lite

RackApps CMS Admin — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 15:01:00 +0000

One thing we love is when users give us feedback. Webmail Lite is the first application we.ve
released with the ability for users to directly send us feedback, and so far
it.s going great. About a week ago I
received some feedback from someone we.ll call Bob. Bob was accessing his ISP.s email account
through IMAP, and wanted to know how he could manage his folders through
Webmail Lite.

When I first got the email, I wasn.t even sure how to answer
his question because we have changed the appearance and wording for the left
side of webmail so many times. Unfortunately, amidst all of these changes, we forgot to keep a link in
Webmail Lite to manage folders. The
functionality and page are still there, but no one knows it; so I am here to
offer some advice (a sort of hack) to those looking to manage their IMAP
folders through Webmail Lite.

If you look in the address bar of your browser, you should
notice at the end it says ./src/webmail.php.. If you want to manage your folders, simply change .webmail.php. to
.folders.php. (without the quotes.) That.s it. Once you.re done you
can simply press the back button and you will be taken back to webmail.

Since we use webmail so much and know exactly how everything
works, sometimes we miss the small things. So if any of you have any quirks you.ve discovered or little things
you.d like to see changed, do not hesitate to let us know. You can comment here or follow any feedback
links you see in our products, we see it all.

And don.t worry, we are working to get the link back in
there somewhere, one day .

-Mike Bulman

Report Spam

RackApps CMS Admin — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 14:04:00 +0000

Ideas for features and enhancements in our applications come
from a ton of different sources. One of our recent enhancements was suggested by several customers and also by none
other than Mrs. Matthews, our CEO.s mother. She mentioned to Pat, ….you have to ‘open’ it [the email]
before you can report it as SPAM!.

Our webmail application recently still required users to open an
email in order to mark it as spam. Since
I don.t get spam in my work email (which is amazing), I never realized that
this was a problem. When I heard what
Pat.s mom and others had to say, I decided that it needed to be fixed. So last week we added the ability to
Report Spam to the actions dropdown. Now
users can report spam without opening messages as well as report multiple
emails as spam at the same time.

Again, thanks to Mrs. Matthews and our many customers for the great ideas you pass along.

If anyone else has any ideas, please let us know by
commenting on our blog.

-Mike B.