As we rise, bleary-eyed into another new year, credit cards aching nearly as much as our heads, we at The Very Good Email Company like to get things started with a bump. No easing ourselves into January, no siree-bob. Our development cycle for January has been likened to being thrown from a long hibernation into an ice-pool. From 100 feet. With sharks.
This, of course, is good news for you as we can already announce our first enhancements for 2011. Kicking off today are not one, not two but no less than three biggies. Strapped in? Good.
Firstly, if you’ve an IMAP user with us and have noticed your email going a little quicker, you’re not mistaken. We’ve installed some new software on our IMAP servers (what is the collective noun for IMAP servers? I like an ‘expungement’) that has provided a speed increase that initially led us to believe it wasn’t working because everything seemed to be a little *too* fast. We were wrong and it turns out that the new Dovecot IMAP software has given everyone one heck of speed boost.
To compliment this upgrade, and to prepare for new fab feature number three, we’ve upgraded our webmail software to its latest version. These are mostly back-end improvements, although users do now have a faster interface, proper flagging support, better previews and an improved layout of the server-side control panel.
Finally, we are very happy to announce that server-side filtering is now available on all our email accounts. Server-side filtering allows you to set combinations of simple or extremely tricksy rules to be applied to incoming email. You can have emails from certain servers automatically moved to folders, flagged up for further action, automatically respond to them or have messages forwarded to another address. The potential combinations of rules available are mind-boggling. Of course, many email clients have this functionality already but we’ve put it server-side which means that your client does not need to be running and it affects all the devices you use to access your mail.
To use server side filtering customers must be using the latest webmail URL (the old webmail platform doesn’t support this) – http://vwm.apm-internet.net (unless they already have a CNAME defined, in which case they can use that URL).
If setting up on behalf of users:
Login to users webmail via your VISP control panel
Once in Webmail:
- Select ‘Personal Settings’
- Then ‘Filters’ tab
- Click on ‘+’ sign (lower left corner of screen)
- Give filter a name
- Select required rules (should all be intuitive)
- Once complete click ‘Save’
New filter should appear under ‘Filters Column’ (l/h side of screen). To delete, or amend the filter – simply select and open the relevant filter.
These three features are available to all users of our platform right now and all at no extra cost. We often tell people that hosting your email with us is like hiring an email development team for pennies a month. I hope we’ve just proved that to you.
Enjoy the new features and, as ever, let us know if you have any feedback. Can’t stop, more cool stuff is in the coding oven.
PJ Evans
Geek-in-Chief