Rackspace Email & Apps Blog

We are excited to announce our latest feature, Outlook-Sync. This feature has been one of the top requests by our users and we are pleased to add it to our growing list of business-class email services.

With Outlook-Sync, customers who want to use both Microsoft Outlook and our webmail interface can now easily synchronize their calendars, contacts, and notes between the two interfaces. In addition, with Outlook, end-users can conveniently synchronize their shared calendars, allowing visibility to calendars on- and offline.

Sync, which can be purchased through the control panel, will continue to evolve, to include other email clients and mobile devices—including BlackBerry and Windows Mobile. Once you upgrade your domain(s) to Sync, you will automatically benefit from any future versions of this plug-in.

Pricing for Sync is also available within the control panel. The price depends on the number of mailboxes you have with us and includes a free upgrade to 10GB mailboxes.

To purchase Sync services, log in to your control panel and select My Account / Upgrade Services / Upgrade Email Plans. You can also view these tutorials which will walk you through the necessary steps to upgrade your account to include the Outlook-Sync services. For further reference setting up and using Outlook-Sync, please join us for our Sync training webinar on Monday, December 3 at 4:00 PM (US – EST) or Tuesday, December 4 at 11:00 AM (US – EST).

As always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact your sales rep or our customer support team.

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
  

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.