Rackspace Email & Apps Blog

We have three conference rooms at our Blacksburg office and they are in great demand often scheduled from early in the morning until late in the evening. There are a lot of recurring meetings like the weekly operations meeting or the monthly product strategy meeting. To help us keep track of conference room schedules, we set up mailboxes with their calendars so that everyone can see when a room is available and sign up for a free time.
On Friday the 12th of December, we added support for resource mailboxes for our Hosted Exchange 2007 customers. Resource mailboxes are a special kind of mailbox that automatically accepts invites to events as long as no schedule conflict exists. As an Exchange customer, I can see a resource like a conference room or a projector (also in hot demand in Blacksburg) when I use the scheduling assistant built into Outlook 2007. It is easy to find a time when the resource is available along with the other Exchange users I’m inviting to a meeting. When I send the invite to the other attendees, the invite also goes to the resource mailbox and blocks out the time for our event.
If you are an administrator and have other Exchange users, you can set up a new resource mailbox by logging into the control panel, clicking on “Add/Edit Mailboxes,” and then choosing “Resources” from the submenu.
One more thing, unlike many other email hosting providers we’ve chosen to make these resource mailboxes free of charge.

For any of our current customers that would like to take a test run of the next version of our webmail client, you can do so by logging in at this URL using your email address and password.
We are making the pre-beta available to our current customers in order to get some early feedback from the users who already know webmail the best. We have focused our development efforts on improving the speed of the application. We want to build a web-based email client that can serve as a reliable alternative to desktop clients like Outlook and Thunderbird, and the first step in doing so is creating a client that can match the speed of the desktop experience. It is a huge challenge, but one that we believe we can overcome.
Our development team understands that the #1 feature of our webmail client is speed. Cool features are great, but if they are slow, we know that they will not be used. We will always support desktop email clients through traditional POP and IMAP, but we believe the future lies in the power of storing your data online and having that data accessible from any location. A fast webmail client has many advantages over a desktop client, such as:
1. Your data is available from home, work, the hotel, the airport-anywhere that has an Internet connection.
2. Storing your data online means that it not only has guaranteed availability, but it is also backed up on a continuous basis. At Webmail.us, your data is not only backed up nightly, but it is immediately replicated across multiple machines the moment it is stored on our system. This includes your emails, calendar, tasks, contacts, and RSS feeds.
3. Administrators have a much easier job if they do not need to configure everyone’s desktop application. Desktop clients typically are cumbersome to configure and hard to debug when there are issues. Browsers typically have few configuration issues, if any at all. It doesn’t matter if your users like Apple, Microsoft, or Linux; our webmail client is not limited to a particular operating system or browser.
4. New features don’t require downloads, installations, or configurations.
5. Never “synch” your data again. Synching your email, contacts, and calendar between various clients can be very time consuming. With an email client that is web based, you will never have these issues.
Of course, all of these advantages are worth nothing if the user experience is slow (like most other webmail software installations-hosted or not). A web-based client should improve productivity, not hamper it.
So if you’re a customer, especially if you use webmail, please try the alpha version of webmail and PLEASE report any issues using the “Report Bug” link provided in the top right of the interface. We still have a lot of work to do (including many more speed improvements and the integration of Search) before we release this to all of our customers. We appreciate your feedback.