Ever been on holiday weeks after you’ve returned?

We’ve got yet more features to announce for our email platform. These are available right away in your Control Panel. Please note that all enhancements apply only to the ‘new’ Control Panel and version 2.3 of the API.

Making AutoReplies a little less ‘auto’

AutoReplies (or out-of-office replies) have been around since the earliest email clients. Our current AutoReply system allows you to send automated responses without having to leave an email client running and what’s more we’re bright enough not to get into a fight with a responder at the other end.

So far so good, but we’re only human and, like Mickey’s brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, your AutoReply will keep on announcing your plans to your senders until you command it to stop. Provided you remember, of course. Ah.

As a solution to the forgotten AutoReply, you can now set a start date and end date for the responses to be sent out. You can even just specify one of these, creating either a start-but-never-end or start-now-end-then configuration. We’ll do it down to the minute too, so come 5:30pm on Friday you can be boasting about your two weeks in Skeggie without having to do a thing.

So, have a look at the AutoReply settings panel in your Control Panel. Of course, you don’t have to use the time feature and to help out even further we’ve put a little graphical indicator on the mail mailbox list (Partners and Primary accounts only) to see at-a-glance who has their AutoReply feature activated.

Better Whitelists and Blacklists

We’ve had a lot of feedback about our sender control lists. People love our ‘Auto Whitelist’; where every email address you send to automatically gets ‘whitelisted’ (a red carpet through our spam filters). However, it can amass quite a few addresses to say the least. If fact, it got pretty unusable and we were forced to mask automatically-whitelisted addresses from the Control Panel as some users had thousands.

In order to correct this, we’ve added searching and paging into the list management area and re-introduced the auto-whitelist in its own tab. We believe this will make the whole system easier to manage for the end user.

Coming Soon: Spam Digest

Finally, we’re currently beta-testing a new way to check your Spam folder. A feature often requested by Partners, Spam Digests are a daily or weekly HTML email delivered to the Inbox of the user that lists all spam quarantined in the Spam folder for that period. The idea is to give an at-a-glance report for users of the contents which in turn makes it really quick to spot false positives. If testing goes well, expect to see this in the next few weeks.

As ever, we value your feedback and are keen to know what you think. Don’t be shy! support@verygoodemail.com

PJ Evans
Geek-in-Chief

Just like Spinal Tap!

We’re pleased to announce some major changes to our hosted email services. You’ll be relieved to hear these do not require any action on your part, although you may want to go have a look.

Firstly, we’ve got a new spam setting. In true Spinal Tap fashion, we decided to make our spam detection systems go one louder.

You see, spam is getting trickier. It’s always a game of who can build the better mousetrap and we’ll always be playing catch-up to a certain extent. We just think we’re ahead of all the others.

Currently we use a range of tools neatly bound together to give us a likelihood of any given message being ‘spam’. These include language analysis, looking a the route and source of the message as well as comparing it with several ‘fingerprint’ databases of known bulk email.

As it is impossible to say with 100% certainty that the recipient will consider the message spam (you may very well want that little blue pill; it’s none of our business), we can take great steps towards determining that the message has used tricksy methods to find it’s way into your mailbox. This results in a score out of 10 where 0 is all clear and 10 is the most spammiest message ever written.

Once we have the message score, your settings determine what we do with it. Up ’till now we’ve just some rather misguiding words to describe the settings: Low, Medium, High and Extreme. Fact is, Extreme is the best in use and some spam still gets through.

Today we’re renaming these level as 1 to 4 and introducing our new friend, Level 5 or ‘highest’. Level 5 introduces a new bespoke system that we have been testing in-house for over a year to make sure we’ve got it just right. It adds additional remote server blacklisting using our own internal scoring system.

We’ve also altered the control panel to use a funky little slider as we think this will better represent how the system works. API v2.3 users can also take advantage of the new setting by setting ‘spam’ to 5 in ModifyMailbox.

No spam filter will ever be 100% effective but Level 5 will give you the best protection you’ve ever had against unsolicited email. Better still, this upgrade is available to all users free-of-charge.

And there’s more!

If you’re noticing that the Control Panel is a little zippier today, you’re right. We’ve introduced version 2.3 of the API which is demonstrating a 1000% speed increase over 2.1 and 2.2. The reason? We’ve replaced the SOAP interface with REST. OK, this may be nonsense to some of you reading so lets put it this way. REST is simpler and more efficient than SOAP so it’s a lot faster.

For those of you using the API, you can read the docs at http://soap.apm-internet.net/v2.3/apidoc/. Please note the existing SOAP interface isn’t going anywhere for a while yet.

Finally, we’ve made some tweaks to the user interface. This is the start of many more improvements to come. Mailboxes now show at a glance if Autoreply is set and we’ve fixed a problem with the Autoreply input screen.

As ever, any questions do let us know via support@verygoodemail.com

PJ Evans
Geek-in-Chief

The Fax machine is still an office essential in many businesses – but have you ever stopped to consider the cost of running one of these machines?

If you’re using a dedicated BT line for fax this can add up to over £180 per year alone!

• Then there’s power usage – it’s not particularly green to have fax machines sat on standby 24 x 7.
• Do you have a maintenance contract in place? How much does that cost?
• Consumables such as paper and toner – well, there aren’t any if you use faxtastic!
• And how much of your staff time is taken up managing the fax and distributing incoming faxes?

It all adds up – actually more than we realised when we started adding it all up!

So, on cost alone, choosing a fax to email solution like faxtastic! should be a simple decision and that’s before you look at functionality benefits!

With services ranging from FREE, to only £2.50 per month for the most expensive, it’s considerably cheaper than other Fax to Email services.

Oh – and being run by the very nice people at The Very Good Email Company – it’s friendly too!

If you haven’t already got your fax to email number – go get it now at www.faxtastic.co.uk

Iain