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

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

This upgrade will incur a short amount of downtime when you will not be able to access your mailbox. However, no emails will be delayed at this time as our unique infrastructure allows us to queue messages for delivery when the system comes back online.

After this is complete we suggest that you upgrade to the latest version of Zimbra Connector, available from our support pages.

Important: In order for Zimbra Connector for Outlook (ZCO) to work properly with Zimbra 6.0.x, users must have Microsoft Outlook 2003 Service Pack 3. If users don’t already have Service Pack 3 installed (the majority of users will have this already), ZCO users may see the error “can’t open your default folders” and then Outlook will shut down. Outlook 2007 is not impacted by this.

No other action is required on your part.

Zimbra002 to follow next week.

This upgrade will incur a short amount of downtime when you will not be able to access your mailbox. However, no emails will be delayed at this time as our unique infrastructure allows us to queue messages for delivery when the system comes back online.

After this is complete we suggest that you upgrade to the latest version of Zimbra Connector, available from our support pages.

Important: In order for Zimbra Connector for Outlook (ZCO) to work properly with Zimbra 6.0.x, users must have Microsoft Outlook 2003 Service Pack 3. If users don’t already have Service Pack 3 installed (the majority of users will have this already), ZCO users may see the error “can’t open your default folders” and then Outlook will shut down. Outlook 2007 is not impacted by this.

No other action is required on your part.

Zimbra002 will be upgraded to Zimbra 6 from Midnight on Wednesday 14th April.

Zimbra 6 delivers a host of new features that enhance user experience, such as:

• Greatly improved integration with Microsoft Outlook
• Greatly improved Calendar functionality and management
• Sync tasks, view tasks by status and print Task Lists
• Users can enable/disable Zimlets (from our list of available ones)
• Greatly improved Zimbra Mobile functionality
• Optional Mandatory Spell Check
• Improved Shared Folder Management
• Ability to run Filters over existing emails
• Improved View Options
• Optional Read Receipt management
• Multiple Compose Tabs
• Multiple Forwarding Addresses
• Ability to sort messages by size
• Select and print multiple messages at once
• Create and manage documents, presentations and spreadsheets directly in Briefcase
• Attach Briefcase documents to emails sent
• Greatly improved Zimbra Mobile functionality

In order to minimise any disruption we plan to implement this upgrade as follows:

Zimbra001: from Midnight on Wednesday 7th April and will take approximately half an hour.

Zimbra002: from Midnight on Wednesday 14th April and will take approximately half an hour.

Each upgrade will incur a short amount of downtime when you will not be able to access your mailbox. However, no emails will be delayed at this time as our unique infrastructure allows us to queue up messages for delivery when the system comes back online.

After this is complete we suggest that you upgrade to the latest version of Zimbra Connector, available from our support pages.

Important: In order for Zimbra Connector for Outlook (ZCO) to work properly with Zimbra 6.0.x, users must have Microsoft Outlook 2003 Service Pack 3. If users don’t already have Service Pack 3 installed (the majority of users will have this already), ZCO users may see the error “can’t open your default folders” and then Outlook will shut down. Outlook 2007 is not impacted by this.

No other action is required on your part.

“The Spamhaus Project is proud to release its newest spam-blocking advisory list to the world’s internet users, this time focused on the domain side of email filtering. Called simply the Domain Block List, the DBL has been in beta testing for much of 2009 on production ISPs and corporate servers in Europe, Asia and North America, and results have been exceptionally positive. It upholds the Spamhaus reputation for extremely high spam detection and virtually no false positives. The DBL is now ready for broad use in production spam filter systems.”

It goes without saying that we use Spamhaus as part of our email filtering platform!

When our SMTP servers try to make a connection to any of hotmail MX servers the connection is either accepted and then closed immediately or outright rejected.

There is nothing on the hotmail/Microsoft postmaster site to acknowledge the problem at this stage however it has been reported on twitter that it may be down for as long as 8 hours which allegedly came from a Microsoft technical support representative.

If you have sent an email to someone on Hotmail, our servers will continue to retry to deliver the message until the Hotmail servers come back on-line. You don’t need to re-send.