Utilis had been looking at outsourcing its Zimbra services for a while and had looked at a number of different options but always came back to The Very Good Email Company.

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After many requests from our Partners we are delighted to announce the launch of outbound faxing in addition to our existing fax to email service.

With Email to Fax your customers can send a message to number@domain and we’ll deliver it to the destination fax machine. Your customer will get a sent receipt via email.

Email to Fax billing is based upon outbound credits charged at 5p each. The standard rate in the UK for geographic numbers is one credit per page but varies for other destinations. Management of outbound credits is via the Partner Control Panel where you will also find details of the varying credit charges for differing destinations.

We bill Partners at the end of the month based on actual usage. Partners can charge up-front for credits, or charge monthly in arrears for larger customers if they choose to do so. Monthly invoices contain details of credits used by number.

We’ve put together a short video on using the new outbound fax features.

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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

As we wave a fond farewell to 2010 with it’s elections, austerity and student riots, what better way to end these 12 months than with…

Another awesome Control Panel feature!

Yes, I know, exciting isn’t it? Well here goes…

At the mailbox level, the Control Panel now features a ‘Quarantine’ tab. This shows you a view of your Spam folder. In a couple of clicks you can easily move Spam back to your Inbox.

This new feature is primarily aimed at those of you using SMTP forwarding (aka Gateway) to push messages to your own mail server. There is a now a very quick way of checking for ‘false positives’ and getting them back to your server quickly.

This completes our latest round of enhancements for the Control Panel. Over the last few months we’ve revamped the look and feel, improved the management of new mailboxes and aliases, added diagnostic tools, made the creation of SMTP forwarding accounts a one-step process and added a new spam protection level. There has also been much more going on behind the scenes to improve the performance and reliability of the service, including a host of new servers (is that the correct collective noun?) going into the data centre at Milton Keynes.

2011 will be bringing more features and improvements that are already in the pipeline. We’re looking forward to sharing them with you and as ever welcome your feedback.

A very merry Christmas to you and yours.

PJ Evans
Geek-in-Chief

Partner Control Panel; now with 40% Less Clicking!

Yes, it’s time to update the Control Panel again. The request list is starting to look a bit thin so if you have any ideas, let me know at pj@verygoodemail.com.

Three new features this time around. A bit of housekeeping first. At your earliest convenience, please log into the Control Panel using your Partner login and click ‘Settings’ at the top of the screen. Please check the two email addresses shown are correct. The first should be your general contact email and the next your alerting email. This is the email we will send technical alerting information to, so it should be a technical support contact who can act on the information.

Your reward? SMTP Forwarding alerts. As soon as the Alert Contact Email is populated, we’ll let you know as soon as we have any problems forwarding emails to the SMTP servers of your customers. You get a heads-up probably before the customer starts wondering where their email has gone, scoring numerous smug and customer-service points with them.

Now we need to talk to you about our Gateway Control Panel and the main Control Panel. Confused? Exactly. That’s why we’re simplifying it starting today. Some of our partners have been using the Gateway Control Panel for many years now. As we’ve continued to improve the main Control Panel we’ve decided to make things a lot easier by deprecating the Gateway Control Panel and moving it’s functionality over to the main Control Panel. End result: one Control Panel.

We actually started on this some weeks ago, replicating the diagnostic tools that Gateway Panel users found so useful. Today we’re introducing one of the most widely requested features: A simplified setup process for new Gateway accounts.

Anyone who has set up a Gateway (aka SMTP Forwarding) account in the past knows it’s a bit of a pain. You create the account, you set up the alias, you enable SMTP forwarding. There’s a lot of clicking and moving around before things are working.

Not any more.

Log in as a Partner and click on ‘Add’ to add a new Account. See the fancy tabs? You can now choose between a standard IMAP/POP3 account and an SMTP Forwarding account. This allows you to set up an account, completely ready to go, in one simple form.

Moving forward we’ll be modifying the Panel to only show relevant control and pages based on what type of account you are using. You can always switch between them at any time.

We’ll be shortly publishing a short video on how to use the new form most effectively.

Also, we’re bringing in improvements to the Spam Digest feature. It’s had a great response and we’ve received one message loud and clear: Can we restore and whitelist ‘false positives’ directly from the email. Well, now you can. When you receive the Digest, select the checkboxes relevant to emails you wish to restore and in one click the messages will be moved to your Inbox and the sender whitelisted. You don’t even need to log in. Snazzy, eh?

As ever, thanks for reading and keep the feedback coming.

PJ Evans
Geek-in-Chief

For a while we’ve been using a number of Control Panels. The long-term goal is to amalgamate these into a single unified collection of tools. It’s sounds like a businessy thing to do, so we think it’s a pretty good idea.

We’re now in the process of moving the coolest features of our ‘Gateway’ panel into the main Control Panel. The first fruits of our labours can now be seen with the new ‘Tools’ section.

We put a number of diagnostic features into the original Gateway panel that made it easy to test various things were working as expected. It was pointed out that these might be a wizard thing to have for our regular IMAP/POP3 customers too. We agreed. So, log in as a Partner or Account-level user and marvel at our Tools menu. Although a couple of weeks ago we introduced Mailbox Size checking (and we’ve improved it based on your feedback – try dragging the progress bar when running a long job), we’ve now added more tools to this section to help you diagnose problems quickly. In no particular order these are:

Send Test Spam/Virus
Send a ‘pretend’ spam or virus-infected email to any of your mailboxes. An easy way to check that your anti-spam and anti-virus settings (and any rules you’re operating locally) are working as expected.

Send Test Email
Just sends a quick ‘Hello’ to your Inbox. In this case, the message should get right to you uninhibited.

If you’re got SMTP Forwarding enabled, you get more:

Connection Check
Attempts to connect to the destination mail server and checks for a correct response. A perfect tool for diagnosing firewall issues.

MX Record Test
Checks the customer’s MX records are pointing to your servers. No branding is shown at any time.

Firewall Check
Attempts to connect to the destination server from an IP address external to the TVGEC network. Once you have SMTP Forwarding (Gateway) up and running, it’s a really bad idea to let any other SMTP feed connect to you. This utility allows you to check that protection is in place.

So there you have it, an initial batch of tools to help you diagnose problems and test setups quickly and easily from within the Control Panel. Need any more? Let us know. support@verygoodemail.com

PJ Evans
Geek-in-Chief