As mentioned last week, we’re ready to roll out the latest version of our webmail application to Resellers. Webmail 5.5 is now available in the Test environment. We encourage email resellers to login to the Test environment, enable it on your test account and take it for a spin.

Webmail 5.5 is part of the continuing evolution of our webmail application. The overall look and feel is very similar to what users are accustomed to and the transition should be relatively seamless for most.

Here’s what’s changing in Webmail 5.5:

Features:

• Added a Calendar: The calendar features a full “drag-and-drop” interface and is available in both the standard and basic interfaces. Calendars can be shared within the same domain if the end-user chooses to do so. Users can import calendar data from standard ical/.ics format calendar files or from a public ical/.ics format URL. Calendars can be exported to a standard ical/.ics format file. Resellers can choose whether to offer the calendar to their users using the Branding Tool.
• Added RSS Feed Reader: Users can now subscribe to and read RSS feeds within webmail. Users can enter their own RSS feeds or select from a predefined catalog of popular feed sources. The ability for Resellers to choose the feeds within the catalog is planned for a future release, but for now, the contents of the catalog is determined by OpenSRS and contains a broad range of different sources. The RSS Feed Reader is currently only available in the standard interface. As with the Calendar, the RSS Feed Reader can be enabled or disabled by Resellers via the Branding Tool.
• Improved “Basic” interface: The Basic Interface has been upgraded to support all features of the Standard Interface with the exception of the RSS Feed Reader feature. The Basic Interface also now includes a rich text editor and spell checker in the email compose area.

Performance:

• Improved overall speed and responsiveness: Much work was done to optimize webmail across different browsers and for users on slower connections. The result is a dramatic improvement in speed and performance. The improvement is felt across all browsers, but is most noticeable on Internet Explorer and for users with large mailboxes.

Usability:

• Added Dashboard hiding: A new “Dashboard” double-arrow button allows the left-hand folder pane area to be hidden and restored.
• Improved folder icons: Core folders now have custom icons to make them easier to identify.v
• Added/reorganized message list columns: We’ve added Reply-to/Forward Flags, the ability to mark a message as flagged/unflagged. Block/Safe Sender functions have been moved to the “More Options” drop-down. A Message-ID column heading and sort option has also been added. The “Attachment” column has been moved to the right side of the message index display.
• Improved Search: Users can now choose to search by sender, subject, message headers or message bodies. The default continues to be search within the message headers.
• Added a full message source viewer: Users can view the full, raw source of a message.
• Improved email composition: We added the ability to request a “read receipt” when sending a message. Users can now also set message priority when composing and sending email. An auto-save feature has been added that automatically saves composed messages as a draft periodically. Spell-check has been added to the basic webmail interface. The rich text editor has been improved to include more formatting options.
• Improved the Address Book: Added the ability to import from Mozilla Thunderbird address book files.
• Improved the General Settings area: The Interface Preferences and Display Preferences have been combined under a single tab called “Display Preferences.”
• Added Secure POP3 Mail retrieval: POP3 external mail fetching now supports SSL connections.

OpenSRS is “Reseller Friendly” and that motto is something we think about every day when making decisions about new products and features on existing products, like OpenSRS Email Service. While we’re excited to get this new webmail out to users, we understand that this kind of upgrade can have an impact on your support departments, and that email resellers will want to provide some warning to their users to help them get up to speed on the new version. With that in mind, we’re rolling out Webmail 5.5 in a preview program for the first little while.

Here’s how the preview program works:

• Participation in the preview is recommended, but optional, and the default is to not show the preview to end-users. Resellers can enable the preview through the branding tool in the Mail Administration Center (MAC).
• When the preview is enabled, users are offered a choice between the new webmail interface or the current webmail on the login screen.
• At the end of the preview period (which will run for at least eight weeks), the preview option will be removed, and all users will automatically use the new webmail.

Throughout the preview period we’re very interested in hearing from you about the new webmail application and how your customers are responding to it. There is a feedback form that is integrated into the login screen for webmail where users can share their thoughts.

Webmail 5.5 was promoted to the Production Test Environment on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009. We suggest that all of our OpenSRS Email resellers to log into the Test environment to see both how to enable the preview for your users, and also to see the improved webmail interface.

Right now, we’re on track to make the preview available on the Live servers for both Cluster A and Cluster B beginning on Thursday, April 30th, 2009. At that time, you’ll be able to login to the MAC and enable the preview for your users. As mentioned, the preview is disabled by default; it is up to you to determine when you are ready to begin the preview.

Here’s a short screencast that shows how to enable the webmail preview using the Branding Tool within the Mail Adminstration Center.

Since we re-launched our OpenSRS Email Service on our own, unified email platform in mid-2007, we’ve been very busy working to make it even better. A lot of what has been done was focused on the back-end infrastructure – making the service faster, more reliable and more scalable. But not all the work has been focused on the “plumbing.” For the last little while, we’ve also been working on a new release of the webmail application, version 5.5, and it’s nearly ready for its debut.

Over the next few months we’ll be providing our email customers with a way to let their users take the next release of our webmail application for a spin. This opt-in “preview” will run for at least eight weeks between when we make it available on the live servers, to when we retire the old webmail application and make version 5.5 the default webmail for all users.

One important thing to note is that this is not a “beta” program. We’re bringing the new webmail out as a completed application, but in a preview mode. The goal is to get some feedback on some new features we’re adding, but more importantly, we want to ensure that our email resellers can ease into the new webmail with as little impact as possible.

Better Performance, Calendar and RSS

This webmail upgrade is really part of the continuing evolution of our current webmail application. It’s really not all that different from an end-user perspective when it comes to reading and sending mail, managing contacts and doing all of the things you do with webmail.

The big change is in the performance of webmail. We’ve done a ton of work to optimize webmail and the result is a dramatic improvement in speed and performance. It’s felt across all browsers, but the difference is most noticeable on Internet Explorer. It’s much more responsive, especially for users with lots of mail.

And aside from the new stuff “under the hood,” there are a couple of new features we’re adding, namely a calendar and RSS feeds.

The calendar is a full-featured, web-based calendar with drag and drop, as you’d expect. The RSS reader allows users to subscribe to, and read RSS feeds alongside their mail.

We’ll be sharing more about the preview program and the rollout of webmail in the coming days. Rest assured, it will be up to you to decide when and how you’ll bring this new webmail upgrade to your customers during the transition period.

Dear Customers -

On behalf of all of the members of the OpenSRS team, please accept our sincere and deepest apologies for the service disruption on Cluster A this past weekend.

Many of you have asked, “How could we have let this happen again?” We initially were led to believe that we had a software problem. We have now determined that the string of service problems on Cluster A are related to a hardware problem inside one of our NetApp devices.

Below is a letter of explanation I received from Jeff Goldstein, General Manager at NetApp Canada.

We are not without fault in this situation. Network-attached storage is complex and we trusted our vendor to provide us with accurate advice related to our problems. In hindsight, we should have pressed earlier for replacement hardware.

Please rest assured that we are dedicated to providing a reliable email service and will be working tirelessly to restore your confidence in us. An incident report is available at OpenSRS Status.

Sincerely,
Elliot Noss,
President and CEO, Tucows

Dear Elliot Noss,

I am writing today regarding the recent outage that occurred this past weekend with Cluster A of the OpenSRS Email Service.

As you are aware, Cluster A of the OpenSRS Email Service has experienced a number of service degradations related to issues with our NetApp storage device. Our engineers here at
NetApp worked closely with the technical operations and development teams at OpenSRS to trouble-shoot and resolve these issues. In each of the cases, we believed a software
fault was the cause.

The intermittent problem turned out to be due to the hardware shelf controller as well as firmware in one of our NetApp storage devices, which caused the issues on Cluster A.

We are deeply sorry for the inconvenience that resulted from these hardware and email service issues.

One of the promises we make to our customers is that our solutions provide highly available data management and in this case we let you down.

To begin to resolve this issue, we’re taking immediate action to replace the hardware and firmware in Cluster A at our expense. Our engineers will then test and evaluate the components involved to determine what specifically went wrong and apply those findings back into our own quality control
teams.

Our two companies have been working together for the past nine years. We value our relationship and will work hard to restore your confidence in NetApp and our solutions.

Again, please accept our sincere apologies.

Regards,

Jeff Goldstein
Canadian General Manager
NetApp Canada

As mentioned in the previous posting, we’re in the midst of rolling out a new release of OpenSRS Email Service. The most visible of the changes that will be promoted to the live service next week is the end-user spam management settings page. To help you out, I’ve prepared a short screencast to show you what the end-user experience will be.

You can test it out for yourself in the Production Test Environment (PTE). The new release was promoted to PTE earlier today.

Earlier today, we promoted the latest version of code for our email service to the Production Test Environment (PTE). If you’re one of our email resellers, you should have already received an email from us letting you know about the release, so you can familiarize yourself with the changes before your users get them a week from now. Complete information about what’s changing in this release can be found on the release notes page.

In addition to feature releases, we’re constantly working to improve performance and reliability. Those releases where there is no end-user or reseller impact, beyond an improved overall experience, usually happen ‘behind the scenes’ and fairly frequently.

While we’re talking about releases, I wanted to take a minute to explain our approach. In general, we have two main goals in our releases:

1. Address or remove bugs wherever and whenever we can.
2. Add new features that provide the widest possible benefit across both the end-user and reseller user bases.

For example, in this release:

• To help both end users and resellers, we added a new settings page that gives users the ability to change how their spam is handled. In particular, POP users can now choose to have their spam tagged and delivered to their Inbox. Then their spam will get downloaded with the rest of their mail, and they’ll no longer have to use Webmail to check the contents of their Spam folder. We have a screencast showing this functionality in another blog post.
• To help end users, we added the ability to export contacts. Users could previously import contacts from Outlook-format address book files, and now they can export them as well.
• To help resellers, we’ve added a way to mitigate the effects of phishing attacks targeting their user bases.

Our mission with OpenSRS Email Service is to provide an easy-to-use experience that gives the ‘power user’ enough functionality to keep them happy, while not overwhelming the average user with gizmos and whiz-bang that does nothing to help them read their mail quickly and easily.