There are two phases to the upgrade:

1. Effective today, new accounts you provision will automatically have 5GB of storage.
2. For existing accounts, beginning today, we’re going to start upgrading them from 2GB of storage to 5GB of storage. Getting all accounts upgraded might take a day or two, so feel free to tell your customers and users about the new storage quota, but please let them know they may not see the added space right away.

Share the News

You don’t need to do anything – the upgrades will happen automatically, and without any downtime or interruption in service.

Do enjoy the extra space and, by all means, let your customers know about the good news. Feel free to take all the credit, if you want. We don’t mind.

Mobile Email Configuration Guides

To help your customers get email configured on their device, we’ve put together a collection of mobile email configuration guides for the most popular mobile devices. These are white-label docs with text and screenshots that will walk your customers through the process of getting email setup.

Feel free to download and use them as is, or grab the content and adapt it to your specific domain name with your branding. As with all the documentation and marketing materials we provide, it’s free to use and adapt if you are an OpenSRS Reseller.

Download them here

What do you think?

We’d love to hear your feedback on these guides as well. Is there anything you’d change? Have we missed a popular device? Do you want them in a different format? Drop us a line in the comments and we’ll see what we can do.

Here’s what’s happening:

• Allowable email message size increased to 35MB: incoming and outgoing messages can now be larger. This reflects the increasing size of things like photos and other attachments users are sending through email.
• Maximum length of a folder name increased: users can now create folder names up to 40 characters in length (up from 15) for both IMAP and Webmail.
• Three new languages: Webmail is now available in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish including the user help system built into the webmail interface. This is in addition to the languages already supported: English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese.
• Per-user branding: you can brand webmail down to the user account level instead of just the domain level to add or remove features like the calendar and RSS reader for a subset of accounts on a domain. You’ll see a new drop-down menu to select the brand on both the “New Mailbox” and “Edit Mailbox” screens in the Mail Adminstration Center (MAC) where you can set the brand on the account.

Expect to see the new release in the Production Test Environment (PTE) starting on October 21st, 2010. A week later, on October 28th, 2010, we’ll promote the release to both Cluster A and B.

Making things easier

We looked at how a lot of software anti-spam solutions worked and decided that if we wanted to allow you to get rid of the headache of operating something like Spam Assassin on you own email server, then we shouldn’t create any additional headaches for you to make the switch.

So, we set out to replicate the setup of many of these self-run solutions with the anti-spam software in our data center, maintained by us. That meant allowing you to configure a specific header to add to messages flagged as spam and allowing you to tag the messages as spam in the email subject line.

The net result is an Email Filtering service that is effectively “hot swappable” with your existing setup. To your users, the change can be invisible – they don’t need to change their email client, or be retrained to visit a Spam Quarantine to view spam email. They can continue to receive their email, and messages flagged as spam as they are today, using your own setup.

Fewer hassles

Of course, you get the benefit of not having to maintain those spam filters or worry about things like blacklists, or other abuse issues.

Here’s a graphical representation of the new email flow. You can see on the left, with the Spam Quarantine, users have to deal with two interfaces to email. On the right, with “pass through” enabled, it’s a single point of contact with both wanted email, and spam (tagged and delivered to the spam folder).

Email Filtering starts at just $0.10/mailbox per month. Consider the time spent maintaining your current setup, including downloading and applying rules changes, or modifying settings, and we think you’ll agree that having us filter your users’ mail is the best way to go.

Learn more about OpenSRS Email Filtering.

Users of OpenSRS Email can send email attachments up to about 25MB in size. But sometimes users want to send larger files, or make files available to friends or other people without having to attach them to an email.

We built File Storage to address some of these needs. Users can upload photos, documents, zip files, PDFs, videos…pretty much anything they want…through File Storage. Space is allocated as part of their overall mailbox quota of 2GB.

Once the files are uploaded to the service, they can organize and even share files publicly.

Here’s how it works:

Resellers who are using OpenSRS Email Service will have received an email today with more details about how to enable it for your users.

But wait, there’s more (I’ve been waiting for the chance to use that line for a long time).

We’ve also added outbound filtering to the service at no additional cost. All the benefits of using OpenSRS to filter your incoming mail are now available outbound as well.

Let us handle outbound spam and virus filtering and you won’t have to worry about abusive users getting your servers blacklisted.

If you are already using email filtering, your May bill will reflect the price reduction. Consult the documentation or speak to your Account Manager to find out how to add outbound filtering for yor users.

Full information about the change has been sent to all OpenSRS Email Service Resellers. Full details are available in the Resource Center – direct link.

Bulk Migrate End-user Mail from Other Email Services

Just last week we rolled out the ability to migrate user mail into OpenSRS Email Service mailboxes in bulk. This means Resellers are now able to create a bunch of new accounts on the service, and then move existing mail data from outside servers into those accounts in bulk. This simplifies and streamlines the process of moving users from other email services and servers onto OpenSRS Email and diminishes the need for support or Professional Services involvement on smaller mail migrations.

There’s more detail on page 43 in the Mail Administration Center (MAC) User’s Guide for those looking to start using this tool. If you want to get a sense for how the tool works, here’s a tutorial screencast that shows at a higher level just how it’s done.

What Do You Think?

We’d love to hear what you think of the tools that we’ve already brought down to the Reseller level, be it the ability to restore deleted mail or this new tool to migrate end-user mail over to OpenSRS Email Service mailboxes. I’ve started a forum thread if you want to comment and add your opinions or thoughts. As always, comments right here at the blog are always welcome.

Webmail 5.5 is part of the continuing evolution of our webmail application. The overall look and feel is very similar to what users are accustomed to and the transition should be relatively seamless for most.

Here’s what’s changing in Webmail 5.5:

Features:

• Added a Calendar: The calendar features a full “drag-and-drop” interface and is available in both the standard and basic interfaces. Calendars can be shared within the same domain if the end-user chooses to do so. Users can import calendar data from standard ical/.ics format calendar files or from a public ical/.ics format URL. Calendars can be exported to a standard ical/.ics format file. Resellers can choose whether to offer the calendar to their users using the Branding Tool.
• Added RSS Feed Reader: Users can now subscribe to and read RSS feeds within webmail. Users can enter their own RSS feeds or select from a predefined catalog of popular feed sources. The ability for Resellers to choose the feeds within the catalog is planned for a future release, but for now, the contents of the catalog is determined by OpenSRS and contains a broad range of different sources. The RSS Feed Reader is currently only available in the standard interface. As with the Calendar, the RSS Feed Reader can be enabled or disabled by Resellers via the Branding Tool.
• Improved “Basic” interface: The Basic Interface has been upgraded to support all features of the Standard Interface with the exception of the RSS Feed Reader feature. The Basic Interface also now includes a rich text editor and spell checker in the email compose area.

Performance:

• Improved overall speed and responsiveness: Much work was done to optimize webmail across different browsers and for users on slower connections. The result is a dramatic improvement in speed and performance. The improvement is felt across all browsers, but is most noticeable on Internet Explorer and for users with large mailboxes.

Usability:

• Added Dashboard hiding: A new “Dashboard” double-arrow button allows the left-hand folder pane area to be hidden and restored.
• Improved folder icons: Core folders now have custom icons to make them easier to identify.v
• Added/reorganized message list columns: We’ve added Reply-to/Forward Flags, the ability to mark a message as flagged/unflagged. Block/Safe Sender functions have been moved to the “More Options” drop-down. A Message-ID column heading and sort option has also been added. The “Attachment” column has been moved to the right side of the message index display.
• Improved Search: Users can now choose to search by sender, subject, message headers or message bodies. The default continues to be search within the message headers.
• Added a full message source viewer: Users can view the full, raw source of a message.
• Improved email composition: We added the ability to request a “read receipt” when sending a message. Users can now also set message priority when composing and sending email. An auto-save feature has been added that automatically saves composed messages as a draft periodically. Spell-check has been added to the basic webmail interface. The rich text editor has been improved to include more formatting options.
• Improved the Address Book: Added the ability to import from Mozilla Thunderbird address book files.
• Improved the General Settings area: The Interface Preferences and Display Preferences have been combined under a single tab called “Display Preferences.”
• Added Secure POP3 Mail retrieval: POP3 external mail fetching now supports SSL connections.

OpenSRS is “Reseller Friendly” and that motto is something we think about every day when making decisions about new products and features on existing products, like OpenSRS Email Service. While we’re excited to get this new webmail out to users, we understand that this kind of upgrade can have an impact on your support departments, and that email resellers will want to provide some warning to their users to help them get up to speed on the new version. With that in mind, we’re rolling out Webmail 5.5 in a preview program for the first little while.

Here’s how the preview program works:

• Participation in the preview is recommended, but optional, and the default is to not show the preview to end-users. Resellers can enable the preview through the branding tool in the Mail Administration Center (MAC).
• When the preview is enabled, users are offered a choice between the new webmail interface or the current webmail on the login screen.
• At the end of the preview period (which will run for at least eight weeks), the preview option will be removed, and all users will automatically use the new webmail.

Throughout the preview period we’re very interested in hearing from you about the new webmail application and how your customers are responding to it. There is a feedback form that is integrated into the login screen for webmail where users can share their thoughts.

Webmail 5.5 was promoted to the Production Test Environment on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009. We suggest that all of our OpenSRS Email resellers to log into the Test environment to see both how to enable the preview for your users, and also to see the improved webmail interface.

Right now, we’re on track to make the preview available on the Live servers for both Cluster A and Cluster B beginning on Thursday, April 30th, 2009. At that time, you’ll be able to login to the MAC and enable the preview for your users. As mentioned, the preview is disabled by default; it is up to you to determine when you are ready to begin the preview.

Here’s a short screencast that shows how to enable the webmail preview using the Branding Tool within the Mail Adminstration Center.

Over the next few months we’ll be providing our email customers with a way to let their users take the next release of our webmail application for a spin. This opt-in “preview” will run for at least eight weeks between when we make it available on the live servers, to when we retire the old webmail application and make version 5.5 the default webmail for all users.

One important thing to note is that this is not a “beta” program. We’re bringing the new webmail out as a completed application, but in a preview mode. The goal is to get some feedback on some new features we’re adding, but more importantly, we want to ensure that our email resellers can ease into the new webmail with as little impact as possible.

Better Performance, Calendar and RSS

This webmail upgrade is really part of the continuing evolution of our current webmail application. It’s really not all that different from an end-user perspective when it comes to reading and sending mail, managing contacts and doing all of the things you do with webmail.

The big change is in the performance of webmail. We’ve done a ton of work to optimize webmail and the result is a dramatic improvement in speed and performance. It’s felt across all browsers, but the difference is most noticeable on Internet Explorer. It’s much more responsive, especially for users with lots of mail.

And aside from the new stuff “under the hood,” there are a couple of new features we’re adding, namely a calendar and RSS feeds.

The calendar is a full-featured, web-based calendar with drag and drop, as you’d expect. The RSS reader allows users to subscribe to, and read RSS feeds alongside their mail.

We’ll be sharing more about the preview program and the rollout of webmail in the coming days. Rest assured, it will be up to you to decide when and how you’ll bring this new webmail upgrade to your customers during the transition period.