Rackspace Email & Apps Blog

We know that communication is extremely important to all of our customers. We appreciate this fact so much that we developed an internal tool to further facilitate communicating with our customers.

The second version of this tool, internally named Broadcast, was just launched. This is an internal tool that allows us to update our system status page, control panel page and internal pages to alert employees and customers of outages, planned maintenance or other important information. The beauty of the tool does not stop there. We can also alert specific customers by email or text messages sent directly from the tool to the account administrator.

If you are currently a customer, this is a great time to update your contact information in the control panel to make sure you receive updates from the new Broadcast tool.

We pride ourselves as a company on transparency. We admit that we are not above having issues. The important part is that we want to be upfront and timely in letting our customers know what they can expect at any given time. This tool facilitates that transparency.

One of my favorite things about working for Mailtrust is their dedication to the personal and professional development of their employees. There are many ways that we go about this development: reading a book, attending a conference or a seminar, internal tech talks, external tech talks, involvement in the local development community, and so on. As a software development manager here at Mailtrust, it is often my job (and always my pleasure) to encourage and facilitate this development. This can be anything from ordering a book for an employee, to developing a relevant exercise which encourages best practices, to organizing an entire development conference (Thanks Matt!)
This may sound a little cliché, but I think that one of the things a lot of employers forget is that employees are people, too. If you want to keep the best people, you need to actively encourage them to continue growing. Set aside some money every year to send one or two of your best people to a conference of their choice. In the long run, this investment will pay you back in spades. Not only do you get the immediate benefit of having better trained employees, but those employees also have expanded their social and professional circle. And, that growth will continue well beyond the conference. Furthermore, we “thought industry” types assign more value to employers that help us grow which, in turn, creates more loyal employees.
I bring this up because I’m in a position where I conduct a lot of interviews. One question that we always ask is, “why do you want to leave your current job”? Easily, seventy-five per cent of the time the answer is essentially, “because my employer has no interest in helping me grow.” Please, take my advice and commit to your employees’ growth. If you don’t, you’re liable to watch your best employees walk out the door for places that will. If you think it’s too hard, or too expensive, to commit to their growth, that’s OK too…I’m always looking for new talent.

To reduce labor costs, many businesses are relocating customer support operations to places like India, China, or Eastern Europe. The move may trim corporate bottom lines but customers often pay the price in the form of communication disasters and potential security issues. Trying to communicate regarding mission critical activities with someone who lacks a firm grasp on the English language can be maddening. With offices located on the other side of the world, distance and lack of control over day to day operations may prolong the identification of problems and leave holes in security. For example:
• Dell made the decision to transfer customer support overseas, they saved money but immediately felt the ire of customers who had difficulty communicating their issues and getting resolution from reps whose primary language is not English. They promptly moved their support activities back to the U.S.
• After moving customer support overseas, a skateboard manufacturer quickly found the terminology in their demographic changed so rapidly that the foreign reps could not keep up. While they spoke English, the reps could not effectively support customers because they did not understand the nuances and slang of the language.
• As of July 2008 India, a major outsourcing location, had no comprehensive privacy law relating to securing private data. So, if your private information is compromised by an Indian company, it may result in the loss of a contract but not legal penalties.
The Mailtrust Support Team spans secure offices in Texas and Virginia. We know that the most important part of support is communication. So, when you are choosing a partner for outsourcing vital parts of your business, look beyond price. Be sure you investigate who is going to answer the phone when you need help or you may find yourself lost in the translation.

We have released a new tool which allows Administrators to communicate directly with our Customer Care team through their email control panel, and monitor the status of trouble tickets as they are being worked on.
Some of the features of note include:
- Ability to view old trouble tickets
- Send a copy of all communications to an email address as desired by the Administrator
- Provides the ability for Administrators to close their own trouble tickets
- Enables Administrators to confirm whether or not our solution solved the issue
- Offers Administrators the opportunity to grade our Customer Care Reps
The tool can be found in the Control Panel under a new option called “Ticketing

Our customer care team has some great tools for troubleshooting email related problems. These tools help us to resolve issues quickly, or at least point us in the right direction. For example we can:

• view all of the settings for a domain or a mailbox on one screen
• check to see if a domain’s DNS is set up correctly
• test the deliverability of mail to remote servers
• decipher the meaning of email message headers
• look up the meaning of all of our spam rules
• look up IP addresses in third-party spam blacklists

We’ve long thought that these tools might also be useful to our customers and resellers. So today, we are making them available. You’ll find these tools in your Webmail.us control panel, in the new section labeled “Troubleshooting”.
As always though, if you’re not able to find the solution to your problem using these tools, we are here 24×7 to help.

To follow up on the previous post regarding email forwarding to Blackberry devices, we have today implemented a workaround whereby mail forwarded to Blackberry accounts is now routed through an alternate set of servers, rather than our usual forwarding system. The forwarding issues should now be resolved.
Thanks for your patience, and we again apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused. We are continuing our investigation of this issue and will be working with RIM to determine why it arose in the first place and what can be done to prevent it in the future.

For the past 24 hours we have been experiencing problems with Blackberry and the ability for our users to forward email to their Blackberry devices. Blackberry is throttling these emails, which is causing delays in email delivery times to Blackberry devices. We are working on trying to resolve this problem but so far, Blackberry has not been very cooperative. We will continue to work on contacting the right people at Blackberry and we will do everything we can to restore the ability to forward emails to Blackberry devices as soon as we can. We very much apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.
Keep in mind that this issue is only affecting the ability to forward email from user accounts to Blackberry devices, and you can still setup your mobile device to interact with our system via POP/IMAP connection through your service provider.
Most Blackberry carriers provide access to a website through which you can create an external POP or IMAP account. Simply set the incoming mail server to pop.emailsrvr.com for POP or imap.emailsrvr.com for IMAP. The username will be your full email address, in all lower-case letters, and the password will be your regular email account password. There is also a link to Blackberry’s setup guide on our website and, as always, our Customer Care team is available 24×7 should you have any further questions regarding this.

I posted in February about proactive customer support, and I said that On-Star should tell me when my car needs a tune-up.  Well, check out this announcement from GM: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050913/tc_nm/autos_gm_onstar_dc (Link Removed)

GM is doing exactly what it should by adding these features.  I don’t know that it is enough to replace their current marketing efforts, but this sort of design and approach needs to continue on many fronts, not just in cars.

-Kirk

It has been exciting and gratifying to see us move to the last stages of our infrastructure upgrade.  By and large, it has proceeded very smoothly considering the vast amount of work that has been undertaken.

I have been sending emails to the alert addresses entered by email administrators in the control panel, but a few customers have left that field empty or it has an old address, so that information hasn’t made it to everyone.

We are now migrating private label webmail sites over to the new system.  It is critical that all email client programs and customized DNS records have the correct information in order for your service to continue uninterrupted.

POP Setting: pop.emailsrvr.com

IMAP Setting: imap.emailsrvr.com

SMTP Setting: smtp.emailsrvr.com

Secure Settings: secure.emailsrvr.com (for POP, IMAP, & SMTP)

Please note

The new system has the latest-and-greatest design and ability to load balance and hot-failover private label webmail sites.  However, the new system requires that the private label site *not* have the same hostname as your POP, IMAP, and SMTP settings (i.e. "mail.yourdomain.com" can no longer be the hostname for webmail + POP + SMTP).

Also, the hostname mail.emailsrvr.com will continue to work for POP, IMAP, and SMTP so clients and CNAME records configured in this way are just fine.

And if you need a quick way to update your email configuration on a Windows PC, try the email auto-configuration tool mentioned in an earlier blog post: http://www.webmail.us/downloads/Emailconfig.exe

-Kirk