Rackspace Email & Apps Blog

Over the weekend, we launched our latest version of webmail, codenamed “Neptune.

There has been a decent amount of news coverage lately on the new Sober worm that is now deemed the largest email worm outbreak ever. If you’re interested in hearing about how we’ve worked to combat this latest threat, Bill has a good post with the details. Here is his post, if you’re interested.

For a brief period last night and again early this morning, a small percentage of the users on our system had trouble logging into their email accounts. Our engineering team worked to resolve this issue which ultimately affected about 3% of our users.
Here is what happened:
There was an IP address conflict between two of our servers that caused a problem with our automatic failover routines. These routines normally allow servers to temporarily take on the responsibilities of others when a problem is detected, but in this case the conflict caused those particular servers to take over for the wrong machines. The result: some of our customers ended up logging into machines that did not actually host their email. Once we resolved the IP conflict and restarted the necessary services, everything went back to normal with ZERO loss of data. The one good thing here is that 97% of our customers were never even aware that there was a problem.
We regret that any of our customers experienced an interruption of services and we are constantly taking steps to prevent things like this from happening in the future. In this case, we’ll now be comprehensively monitoring the IP addresses on all of our servers and we will now be able to preemptively detect such conflicts before they lead to problems.
Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Kirk just finished putting together a new wiki detailing all of our API functions. The wiki is open to anyone that wants to submit API suggestions, requests, etc. and then track what other people are contributing to their ideas (you just have to create a username and password, first). We’re aiming to create a community around our APIs and we think this is a step in the right direction.
Here is the wiki if you’re interested in reading about what we have now or contributing to what we might build in the future.

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,