A quick update on what’s been happening here at The Very Good Email Company:
New Website
We’ve been busy in recent weeks working on our new website – it’s an evolution of our old one rather than re-inventing the wheel, but less ‘corporate and, we hope, a little more friendly!
The navigation has been simplified, so it should be quicker to find what you’re looking for.
We’ve also re-purposed the old tag-line we used back in our Nildram days in the late ’90s/early noughties: ‘Real Service in a Virtual World’. Of course we’re not the original Nildram but our MD Adrian was the founder, and I was the Marketing Manager, of that highly regarded Internet Service Provider – and our values are very much the same today. We think it encapsulates what we stand for as a business: high-performance email services, with top-notch customer support if you ever need us.
As always, any feedback welcomed!
UK Data, UK Support, UK Accountability
GDPR is doing the heavy lifting
Most customers know what GDPR is. Far fewer can say exactly where their email is physically processed, who has access to it, or which country’s laws would apply if something went wrong. The ICO has been steadily more vocal about due diligence on cloud providers, and we’re seeing it bleed through into procurement questionnaires from quite small businesses now – particularly anyone working with professional services, the public sector, or any regulated industry.
If your customer has ever had to answer ‘where is our data hosted?’ on a tender, they already know the question matters.
What ‘UK’ actually means – with us, and with Microsoft
This is the bit that catches people out. Microsoft will tell a customer their data is “in the UK”, and at the headline level that’s true – there are UK data regions. The actual picture is more complicated: routing through other regions, processing by global support teams, and underlying US ownership that brings the CLOUD Act and various extraterritorial questions into play.
Our position is much simpler. Every service we run is hosted in our own UK data centre. Our support team is in-house, in the UK, and answers their own phone. The company your customer signs a contract with is the same company that holds the data and picks up the support call. There’s no third party in the middle, and no offshore team behind the scenes.
Talking points you can lift straight into proposals
A few lines that work well in customer conversations and written proposals:
- Hosted in a UK data centre, supported by a UK in-house team.
- UK data controller and processor – no onward routing, no transatlantic transfer.
- Subject to UK contract law, with the ICO as the relevant regulator.
- No offshore call centre, no ticket black hole.
- We can answer ‘where is your data?’ for any tender questionnaire in one sentence.
The pitch tends to land more cleanly if you turn it into a question for the customer first: “Do you actually know where your email sits today? Could you answer that on a tender if you had to?”
That’s usually all it takes to get the conversation going.
Introducing Our New Member of Staff: Edwin
And a possible opportunity for you?
For years we’ve joked that a lot of our job, in terms of providing technical support, is in Googling things for people. You see we get a lot of questions about how to configure various email clients, some of which we have not even heard of before. Although this is not really our job, catch us on a good day, and we normally try to be pretty helpful. We don’t know the answer, so we Google it.
In more modern times, we use our favourite AI, Claude. As well as speeding up the task, it often provides a more detailed and helpful answer than we have time to do ourselves.
Although intended as a tool to support our Direct customers, some of you may have used our AI chatbot in recent months with varying degrees of success. We have now replaced it with our own system that uses Claude for the AI, and we’ve called it Edwin.
Edwin is fully briefed on our systems, and has been given permission to search the web for answers about configuring email client software as well.
Once a conversation with Edwin is finished, a transcript of that conversation is sent to the customer and to us. That way, we can make sure he’s getting things right (and if not, re-educate him). Edwin is only available on our main website, and not on our webmail, and you can find him lurking in the bottom right corner of the page.
Generally speaking, as a Partner it’s probably not something you’re going to use to contact us, but it might be a very useful tool for your own website! If that’s of interest we’d be delighted to help you implement for your own environment – please get in touch to discuss.
Monthly Tip: A 5-Minute Check of Your Partner Account
A bit of light housekeeping every month tends to head off most of the awkward conversations later. With our Partner Control Panel, the whole round-trip takes about five minutes – and it’s worth doing.
As we announced in January, we’ve launched a new Partner Control Panel area – have you had a chance to go through and familiarise yourself with it yet?
Log in at https://mail.overssl.net – or your branded version of that – using your VISP level login, you’ll see a new ‘Admin’ section at the top of the screen.
1. Update your contact and billing details
If your business has changed address, switched accounts email, or got a new main contact, please let us know by emailing us at accounts@verygoodemail.com. It makes invoicing and any urgent account communication far smoother…
2. Scan your active customer subscriptions
We include a .csv file with your Invoice email every month that details the individual elements/accounts that make up the bill – check for anything that doesn’t quite add up: a customer you no longer support, mailbox counts that look off, or a service marked active that should have ended. Far easier to catch now than at year-end! A quick check against what you’ve billed your own customers usually saves a long email thread three months later. If anything doesn’t match then make the necessary changes via your Partner Control Panel – we’ll automatically pick up your changes in the next Invoice.
3. Re-check your escalation path
Make sure the individual contact details we have still match the right people at your end. If our systems identify a customer mailbox that has been compromised and used to distribute spam then we need to ensure that the right email contact in your organisation is informed, so that they can work with the customer to resolve. Again – please drop us an email and we can ensure our details are up-to-date.
4. Feedback
Our Partners are very much part of our team – if there are things we can improve, perhaps with the Control Panel tools, or our service offerings, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!
Until next time!
That’s it for now, wishing you all a fabulous summer and trouble-free email!
