Rackspace Email & Apps Blog

A lot of customers ask why we name all of our servers using hostnames that fall under a very generic domain name. Bill gave a very good explanation of this today, so if you’re interested, here is his blog post on the subject. Likewise, if you’d like to learn more about our private label email hosting offerings, this page on our website explains just about everything.

If you’d like to subscribe to this blog but don’t know how, we just posted detailed instructions on how to do so via your RSS reader inside of your webmail account. Subscribing via webmail will also allow you to access blog posts via desktop email software like Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird. The instructions will show you how to do that and can be applied to other RSS readers as well. Please go here to learn more.

As we grow our staff and form different “divisions,” with different responsibilities, we’re really hoping that our customers channel their communications properly so that we can best serve their needs. So we’re starting to put more ways to contact us on our website in an effort to properly channel that communication.

We just revamped our contact-us page with email contacts for support, billing, sales, and of course—feedback. As you’ll find throughout the site, there are several ways to contact sales and support, but if you have billing questions or general feedback, this is the way to go. Everyone here responds quickly to email—after all, email is what we know best. With that said, if you still feel the need to go another route, feel free to do so.

I hope this helps.

Mike just finished coding the beta version of our shortcut tool for subscribing to RSS feeds. It’s a pretty nifty tool, especially if you’re a power RSS subscriber. I’ll warn though, it is still in beta and lacks some of the user-friendly aspects you’ll find in other apps we bring to market. Here are the instructions on how to use the tool:
Requirements
• Works only with Webmail.us email hosting accounts
• Users must have the RSS Feeds feature turned on
Description
This tool enables you to automatically add a feed to your RSS Feeds folder, without needing to log into webmail and go through the manual “Add Feed

Bill, our chief technology officer, just launched his blog. Bill is the mastermind behind our email hosting system, specifically the infrastructure (hardware, servers, etc.). I asked Bill to start blogging because he’s one of the smartest dudes I’ve ever known and I think there is a lot of value in getting his thoughts online. Likewise, a lot of what he does these days has a direct impact on our email hosting system and thus, our customers.
If you’re interested in tracking his thoughts as well as the progress we make with our email hosting system, go here and read or subscribe to Bill’s blog. I’ll also be linking to a lot of his posts from this blog—I’m going to do my best to take his technical thinking and paraphrasing things in a way non-techies like me can understand.

A lot of people have been asking lately if there will be any additional costs for Neptune, the latest version of webmail, including calendar and tasks. The answer is NO—there will be no additional costs for these features and upgrades. All customers and resellers will automatically receive the latest version of webmail, which includes calendar and tasks—at no additional cost.
Some other questions that have been popping up are:
Will the calendar and other features synch with desktop email software like Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird?
No, we’re not building synch features at this point in time. We’ll never say “never,

We will be releasing Neptune (faster webmail, calendar, tasks) to all @Webmail.us users early tomorrow morning.
This new version of webmail fully supports Internet Explorer 6.0, Netscape 8.0, Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7, and Safari 1.3.1 for the Mac OS X.
Please note: we will not be supporting previous versions of these browsers. However, we will allow users with older browsers to access the legacy webmail interface for the next 12 months.
Some Internet Explorer users will need to enable ActiveX manually by doing the following:
1. In Internet Explorer, select Tools, then Internet Options
2. Click the Security tab
3. Click the Internet (Globe) icon
4. Click the Default Level button. This will set your security level to Medium and will enable ActiveX.
5. To manually turn on ActiveX, without affecting other settings, click the Custom Level button. Click the Enable button for the “Run ActiveX controls and plug-ins

One of the features we got rid of when we launched our new website was the ability for returning customers to sign up for email hosting. This feature allowed existing customers to sign up quickly because we were storing their original contact information, etc. It also set them up so they could manage all of their email domains from one control panel login.
This past weekend, we re-enabled this feature. However, it is now available via the control panel as opposed to the Webmail.us signup pages. So, if you’re an existing customer, simply login to your control panel, click Upgrades, and signup for as many email domains as you would like.

We’ve fallen a few weeks behind on our next product development release, code named Neptune. Neptune is a huge project that includes faster webmail (with heavy incorporation of Ajax), Calendar (also Ajaxed) and Company Directory, which will allow email administrators to populate webmail address books from the control panel, providing email users with ‘read-only’ access to that data.
I’ll have an update soon as to exact launch dates, but as of now, we’re still shooting for November. In the meantime, if you’d like some of the gory technical details behind the stuff we’re working on, especially with regards to webmail and Ajax, check out Mike’s blog—Mike is the team lead on the project.

We recently promoted Nell-Marie Colman to product manager. She is responsible for a broad range of projects here at Webmail but most importantly, she is now the first ever product manager for our control panel. The control panel has made it pretty far without putting a product manager in place, but it has become such a critical tool for many of our customers and resellers that we now need someone with product management talent to take over and guide its evolution. So… look for lots of great things to come now that Nell-Marie is in charge.
If you have any control panel requests, feel free to leave a comment on this blog or email our control panel team. Your email will go to myself, Nell-Marie and Kirk, our director of services and support.