Rackspace Email & Apps Blog

Mailtrust is a great company on so many levels.

Not only did they give me my first “real person” job, saving me from having to have the awkward “we’re cutting you off financially” conversation with my parents, but they have supported me through some tough times as well.

On April 16th I was involved in the shootings at Virginia Tech and instantly the dreams about what I was doing with my life after graduation were flushed down the toilet. I knew I had to push forward, graduate, and get a job, but my newfound fear of confined places and the loss of direction made it hard for me to focus on my future.

Nonetheless, I had been scanning the job boards for some positions that I could apply for when I came across the “Primary Money Wrangler” position at Mailtrust – this one got me hooked, and excited. With a title like “Primary Money Wrangler” who wouldn’t want to work here!? I went into the interview, was asked tough questions, and was treated like any other candidate rather than someone who had just gone through a traumatic event. I’m not sure why that surprised me, since no one at Mailtrust knew my situation, but it was a relief to experience an ounce of normalcy again. And the best part: I got the job!

During my first month at Mailtrust, I didn’t talk to anyone about what had happened to me or what I was going through because I was trying to start over and I felt like it wasn’t something that others wanted to hear about. I didn’t want to be treated special any way.

However, it eventually became more apparent to those around me that I was having trouble coping. Rather than being overbearing and nosey, which many others who knew my secret were, my co-workers were so helpful. If I ever needed to go for a walk or if I couldn’t get into work they understood. Everyone respected my space when I needed it and didn’t push the subject but were always there for me if I wanted to talk.

I’m grateful to my co-workers for having stood by me, put up with my antics, and helped me through the toughest time in my life. I am truly proud to work at Mailtrust because I know I’m part of an incredible group of people. So even though the week of April 16th will be a tough one, I know I have great people to lean on. People that understand what it was like because even though they weren’t in the building – they were here and all of them know: “Once a Hokie, Always a Hokie”.

Thank you, Mailtrust.

A blogger from SMB IT Pros recently posed the following questions, regarding the relevance of Microsoft in the IT marketplace:
Why do I need Exchange, Sharepoint, or Office to run my business? What value do they add beyond the free or nearly free applications I can now find online?
These are not new questions, and they’re questions we ourselves have asked. In fact, our business was originally founded on the idea that we should offer an alternative to Microsoft Exchange, which we have done successfully through Noteworthy. Yet, we have learned a few things over the years, and those lessons have driven us to offer Hosted Exchange, in addition to Noteworthy.
- Microsoft products are still more feature-rich than their alternatives. Compare Word to Google Docs. Compare SharePoint to any of the web-based alternatives. Compare Exchange to Noteworthy. What you’ll find in every case is that Microsoft products bring more to the table, even if they also typically bring a higher price tag and a deeper level of complexity. Every business needs to do a cost-benefit analysis, but the reality is that many businesses need the features that Microsoft software applications have to offer.
- People are used to Microsoft products. Case in point, about 60% of our Noteworthy customers use Microsoft Outlook every day to check their email, even though we offer a feature-rich webmail client. People have grown used to Outlook. They like it and they don’t want to change. And why would they? Outlook is still the most powerful email client in the world.
- Businesses want it. While Noteworthy has been a huge success (we host more than 750,000 paid business mailboxes on the Noteworthy email hosting platform), we were missing opportunities every day because we didn’t host Exchange. People in the startup world can speculate all day long about whether or not Microsoft is relevant (of course, some of them also argue that email doesn’t work anymore), but I can tell you right now, we talk to businesses every day that want Hosted Exchange. And with 180 million mailboxes deployed worldwide (according to the Gartner Group), I don’t think Exchange is going away anytime soon.
I believe that some people enjoy hating Microsoft because they’re the big guys. But the reality is, Microsoft is still the greatest software company in the world. And many of their products are the most relevant in the world.
So, if that’s the case, why do we still offer Noteworthy? Because we believe that people, and businesses, want choice. They want successful, relevant alternatives. Here are some examples of choice I can see, just by looking around our office:
- I can’t imagine giving up Microsoft Windows on my computer. But, I’d estimate that 1/4 of my employees use Ubuntu, an open-source operating system.
- I haven’t fired up Outlook in almost three years. But, while I use webmail every day, many of my employees use Outlook, Thunderbird, and some other obscure email clients.
- I am addicted to my Blackberry. But if you walk around our office, you’ll see iPhones, Windows Mobile, and all kinds of other mobile devices.
And, for our customers, a choice of mail platforms is starting to become a really big deal, too. Some businesses want Exchange. Some businesses want a lower-cost Exchange alternative, which is Noteworthy if you host your email with us. And an increasing number of customers want the best of both worlds (some employees need the full capabilities of Exchange while others do not).
The bottom line: Microsoft matters. Choice rules.

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.

Juan Carlos Perez at IDG News Service wrote an article last week on service level agreements (SLAs) for hosted web applications. Juan says, “Unfortunately, SLAs are far from prevalent among SAAS vendors

Rackspace, our parent company, launched a corporate blog today. From everything I’ve been told they’re really going to take it seriously. I’m happy to see them do this, as I really believe Rackspace should have a strong voice in the industry. Starting a blog is a great step in the right direction.
Subscribe here if you’re interested in reading along.

We are excited to announce that we have officially changed our name to Mailtrust. We did this for a number of reasons, but primarily because we feel the new name better reflects our commitment to business email hosting and building trust with our customers.
Customers will not be impacted by this name change and do not need to take any action because of it. It is simply a corporate name change. As part of the name change, we have launched a new website, and will be changing the look and feel of our corporate documents, including our emails and invoices.
I want to personally reassure everyone that while our name and branding have changed, our leadership, people, and dedication have not. We are as committed as ever to delivering the best possible email hosting experience to our customers. We just feel our new name does a better job of saying that.
Here is a good article on our name change from The Roanoke Times.

Before we get too far into 2008, I wanted to take a second to reflect on some of the things we accomplished in 2007. I know it’s a little late, but better late than never.
It was busy, but 2007 proved to be another successful and productive year for us at Webmail. We met—and often exceeded—our goals, thanks to our dedicated team. We’re always working to make our products, infrastructure, and customer care the best it can be for our customers . . .
Products
* We enhanced our webmail product with several new features, including shared calendars and SMS reminders for calendar events. We also completely redesigned and improved the Contacts section and implemented a new, more intuitive menu system.
* Customers can now easily set up and manage Bcc archiving services and data restores through the control panel. We have also released new anti-spam API, as well as helpful troubleshooting tools for customers.
* We launched our new email marketing service, Outreach™, which allows customers to contact large audiences through email newsletter campaigns. We continued to integrate new features into this product throughout the year.
* We launched Outlook-Sync, our first in a series of sync products that will allow customers to synchronize their online data (calendar, contacts, tasks) with popular software and wireless devices.
System Infrastructure
* We added more than 300 servers throughout the year, and we implemented a “smart traffic balancing

I’ve been an avid Blackberry user for several years now. It has become my lifeblood—I can’t imagine life without it.
But recently my Blackberry has become an even bigger part of my life. In addition to getting the new 8830 World Edition, I have been testing out our new Blackberry sync capabilities—currently in the late stages of beta. For the first time ever, all of my contacts, calendar events, and tasks sync up with all of the data I put into webmail, and vice versa. Instead of needing to manage the two separate systems, I now have the peace of mind that my data is centralized, synchronized, and always up to date. This is incredibly valuable because now, no matter where I am, I can see my contacts, calendar, and task lists, and add to them, knowing the data will then be in my webmail account when I get back to my desk.
This is nothing new for many Blackberry users that run Microsoft Exchange. That’s because many Blackberry users are running Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES), which talks to their Microsoft Exchange Server and automatically syncs all of this information between Blackberry and Outlook. Our customers don’t need BES or Exchange to enjoy some of these luxuries. I personally use webmail as my full-time email client and now I sync webmail data with Blackberry. For me, this is the perfect combination.
Blackberry sync capabilities are scheduled for release next month. If you’re a customer and a Blackberry user, I highly recommend checking it out. Blackberry life will never be the same.
A note about sync’ing your email . . .
To sync your email, you just need to configure your email account via Blackberry Internet Services on your handheld. Unfortunately, Blackberry will only allow you to manage and sync the email that is stored in the email server’s Inbox (and not in your online Drafts folder, Sent folder, or any other online folders you have created). This can be a problem if you typically filter incoming email into other folders. So for emails you want to read on your Blackberry, you should turn off your email filters, and instead have all email arrive in your Inbox.

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