Rackspace Email & Apps Blog

We hit an interesting recruiting challenge recently. Our company hires a lot of software developers and we’ve done a decent job tapping into the huge resource across the street – Virginia Tech. We go to all of the VT career fairs and most of the computer science and engineering students have at least heard of Mailtrust.
However, one of our part-timers, who is a CS student at VT, told me a few months ago that although most students have heard of us, they don’t always think of us as an exciting company to work for. “They just don’t know about all the cool things we do here,” he said. To make things more challenging, most students at VT do not plan to stick around Blacksburg, VA after they graduate. Most students have no clue that there are interesting technology companies in this area, and think they’ll have to move to Northern VA, Charlotte, or other big cities in order to find a job where they’ll get paid to do the stuff they love.
From the outside looking in, it is hard to tell that this little ol’ email company in Blacksburg, VA is working with some of the most innovative new technologies on the Internet. So to address this and get more students excited about what we do, we came up with a simple idea… let’s start publicly talking about all of the cool stuff we’re building! And to make it even more interesting and help promote the entire software development community in the region, let’s invite other companies to come and talk about the cool stuff that they are building, too!
So we started hosting a series of Tech Talks that anyone can attend. The first three were a great success and the videos of the talks are now online:
Tech Talk 1: MapReduce vs. MySQL (Video on Y!DN)
Speaker: Stu Hood (software developer @ Mailtrust)
Tech Talk 2: Next Generation Data Storage with CouchDB (Video Part 1 and Part 2)
Speaker: Jan Lehnardt (open source developer)
Tech Talk 3: Introduction to the Semantic Web (Video)
Speaker: Manu Sporny (CEO @ Digital Bazaar)
If this sounds interesting to you and you’ll be in the Blacksburg area on Wednesday July 9th, please join at 6pm eastern for Tech Talk 4: Agile Software Development.

• Student’s for Free Culture at VT hosted an awesome talk given by Richard Stallman last month, so we hit them up to see how we could bring more interesting speakers to Blacksburg. On Wednesday the 23rd, Mailtrust and Students for Free Culture bring you Nelson Pavlosky to give his popular talk on Free Speech, Free Software and Free Culture.
  When: Wednesday, April 23, 2008, 6:00 PM Eastern
  Where: Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business, room 30
  As usual, Mailtrust will provide pizza.
• Tech Talk 3: Practical Web Semantics
  Join Mailtrust again on Monday April 28th for a presentation by Manu Sporny of Digital Bazaar covering the Semantic Web.
  When: Monday, April 28, 2008, 6:00 PM Eastern
  Where: Mailtrust, 775 University City Blvd, Blacksburg VA
  RSVP: techtalk@mailtrust.com (yes, more free pizza!)

We’ve started hosting a series of Tech Talks here at Mailtrust. These talks are given by our software developers, engineers, or other techies outside of Mailtrust, and are intended to create a local forum for sharing information about interesting technologies. We invite technology experts from inside and outside of Mailtrust to share useful real world information about what they are working on.
These are public events, and we invite anyone in the community to attend… Virginia Tech students, professors, local developers, entrepreneurs, and of course Mailtrust and Rackspace employees.
Our first talk was given by Stu Hood, one of our developers, on Hadoop and MapReduce and it’s comparison to SQL for processing large data sets. We had about 50 people attend. The video will be posted soon.
Our second talk is coming up this Monday, St Patty’s day, and is titled Next Generation Data Storage with CouchDB. If you are host a web application and are looking for a scalable way to store lots of data, this talk may be helpful.
For details on the CouchDB talk and all upcoming talks, check out the Racklabs blog. All talks will be recorded and posted afterwards on the Racklabs blog.

“Yesterday I mistakenly deleted a folder from my webmail account. It happened to contain an important email from a customer and I had not replied to it yet. Now the email is gone. Help!”
I hear this story from our customers all the time. They have accidentally deleted an email, or a folder, or an entire account – and they have lost some important emails. The customer needs the emails back, and fast. Luckily the data on our servers is backed up nightly, so if the email was in there overnight, it usually can be restored. However, in the past we would charge customers $100 for each data restore, because performing a restore was a time consuming, manual task for our customer care team. Many customers end up just opting out of the restore, saving $100, but never getting their missing data back. Obviously this is less than ideal.
So we assembled a team to automate the email restore process and put a tool in the hands of our customers so that they can do it themselves. We want customers to be able restore their deleted mail as soon as the need it, as often as they need it, and best of all… for free. We code named this project “Vault”.
Well, the Vault team has been hard at work the past few months and the tool is now here. Every customer now has access to their data backups via their control panel and can do their own restores for free. If you log in, you will see it under Email Accounts > Data Restores.
We hope you never mistakenly delete an important email, but if you do, give this new tool a try and let us know what you think.
If you are interested in the technical details of how we built this, I gave a presentation about it at ISPCON last week. I’ve posted the slides on my personal blog.

We have released a few new setup guides for various mail clients. Get ‘em here. The new guides include:

• Windows Mail (ships with MS Vista)
• PowerMail
• Mulberry
• Mozilla SeaMonkey

We also updated the Mac Mail and Eudora guides.
Enjoy!

Many of you use the new anti-spam features we released back in August that allow you to add IP addresses to your blacklists and safelists and turn on greylisting for mail from new senders. Well now we have another way you can manage these features.
This week we released a set of new API functions that let you write your own programs to control these settings for your users. You can build all sorts of clever things with this. For example, if you are an ISP or a web host, you can write a tool that syncs your IP space with your customers’ whitelists so that your IPs are always whitelisted. Or if you run honeypots or spamtraps, you can write a program that automatically blacklists IPs that send malicious traffic there.
If you build any cool applications using these API functions, I would love to hear about it.

Tonight we added a new alternate SMTP port for customers who are unable to use port 25, 465 or 587. The new port is 8025. This port functions exactly like 587 and will accept plain-text or TLS encrypted SMTP sessions, and requires SMTP Authentication.
fyi, 8025 is a somewhat standard alternate SMTP port, and was requested by several customers.
Enjoy!