One of the best parts of my role here at Tucows is being able to bring talented people into the company.

I’m thrilled to announce that Rohan Jayasekera has joined my team as Director of the Tucows Email Service.

At the risk of sounding like a stalker, I’ve had my eye on Rohan since I first met him at a BarCamp event here in Toronto a few years ago. I was impressed by Rohan’s deep insights on the topic our little “unconference” group was talking about (although I can’t for the life of me remember what exactly we were discussing) and when I got home I did a quick Google on Rohan and found a peer with an incredibly interesting background.

Rather than gush about exact how great a fit Rohan is, I’ll just point you to his blog post about joining Tucows so you can hear it from the man.

Last week we told you about a number of enhancements we were making to the Tucows Email Service. Much of those efforts focused around making the webmail interface more brandable. Those updates, including the new branding features, are now available in both the Live and Test email environments.

Existing brands aren’t affected by these changes.

There’s more information in the updated documentation. A release note listing the changes made in this release has also been published.

One of our primary goals with the Tucows Email Service is to be competitive with the best email services, and to be the best wholesale offering available for service providers.

Just like we do with all of our services, it comes to you as a “white label” service, with no Tucows branding anywhere. This past month we’ve been working on making the webmail interface much more extensible so you can brand it and make it even more like your own.

Here are some highlights of what we’re prepping for release:

• Single sign-on - do your users log into a portal? Do you want them to automatically access the email service without logging in twice? You can do that now with the single sign on feature inside the Tucows Email Service. By passing a token, you can authenticate as that user, without having to know their password. That means seamless logins from your portal and an improved user experience for your customers.
• We’re making the branding tool more flexible - if you put in a logo bigger than our “webmail” logo, it will automatically expand to the size of your logo. The front login page will pick up the logo from webmail, along with your background colour. You can also add your own support links, and customize the window title bar.
• Support for ads - some of our resellers like to have ads in their webmail, or they want to totally overhaul the header and footer of the webmail. In order to meet everyone’s needs, we’re making it very flexible. The header and footer will support images, and iframes hosted on another server (including target urls). We’re also adding the ability to have an ad in the bottom left-hand corner of webmail.

There are a number of other changes that are outlined in the release notes, including usability enhancements, and more. Updated documentation is available as well.

The email team is excited to get this release out. The UI changes to webmail and single sign-on is already in our Test Environment, and the branding enhancements will be promoted to both Test and to Live on March 4th. Existing brands won’t be affected by the update.

Stay tuned - there’s more to come including more branding, more flexibility for service providers and more features for end users!

If you haven’t checked out our webmail yet, try it out! We can provision you a demo account — all you need to do is fill out a quick form here and we’ll set you up.

Today, spam filtering is a must, not an option. By some estimates, as much as 90% of mail sent is spam. The filtering that’s included in the Tucows Email Service provides effective protection for users against spam and viruses.

Starting today resellers can provision what we call “filter only” accounts inside the Tucows Email Service. Cutting to the chase, the net result is that email is sent through our filtering system, spam is redirected to a quarantine, and only the legitimate mail is then directed on to our customer’s email server.

Last fall at ISPCON in San Jose, CA, I had the opportunity to give a presentation about our experiences running Tucows Email Service. I called it “Email Nightmares: Tales from the Edge” and in that talk I showed some of the pain points that email providers run into when managing messaging services. One of the most challenging aspects I called out was managing spam.

That’s all well and good, but some email providers aren’t ready, or don’t want to move to a fully-hosted email service right now. So we came up with an alternative that allows us to provide that same level of spam and virus protection, while allowing providers to continue to use their own email infrastructure.

The benefits are threefold:

1. You’ll sleep better at night: you can focus on running your email servers, without having to worry about things like spam filters, or blacklists.
2. Your servers will thank you: nine out of ten messages is spam, and we’re taking care of that before you have to. As a result, your server loads drop significantly.
3. We’ve got your back: Tucows has a dedicated Abuse Team that is actively engaged in the battle against spam. We have experience managing abuse and we’ve forged strong relationships in the industry through organizations like the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG).

Our Tucows Email Service is built for ISPs and hosting companies. The goal with this filtering only option was to provide effective filtering for our customers that ‘just works’. Resellers have the option to provide a web-based spam quarantine where users can review email flagged as spam, and manage safe- and blocked sender lists.

Our Services website has more information including a screencast demonstrating the web-based spam quarantine.

The team’s efforts to enhance and improve the Tucows Email Service continue to accelerate as more and more customers make the move from our older platforms onto the new service. As that happens, we’re learning a lot about how Tucows Email Service handles the load in the real world (really well, as expected) and we’re also taking in feedback and comments from users, through resellers like you (thanks!).

As a result, we’re continually tuning hardware and software for even better performance, and the technical delivery team continues to work to make things like the webmail interface better and easier to use.

Tomorrow we’re rolling out what we call the “Email Winter Release” – a bunch of enhancements and upgrades that make the service even better. A full list of those changes was sent out to customers on Tucows Email Service last week. If you want a sneak peek at how things are progressing, the upgrade has already been rolled into our Test environment. We’ve also released updated Tucows Email Service documentation that includes the latest changes and all the details you’ll need. A detailed summary of the changes can also be viewed in the release notes.

The enhancements encompass everything from minor user interface improvements inside webmail, to the creation of a new user account level within the MAC. Here’s a brief list of what’s changing Tuesday broken down into three main categories:

Reseller Tools:

• Domain Aliases at the Company level are now available
• Company Administrators are now able to suspend accounts (and shortly will be able to do so through the APP)
• Mail Administrator account level has been created.

Webmail Enhancements:

• Users are now able to sort on the Read/Unread column.
• POP mail accounts (if added by the user) are checked automatically during webmail check.
• Contacts can now be dragged into and out of groups.
• Users can choose between plain text and HTML email composition.
• The add contact group button in the contact area of the sidebar has been replaced by a pair of more intuitive icons.

WAP/Mobile Email Client:

• We now offer a WAP client for email access via mobile phone.

One of the neatest additions that comes along with this release is the WAP version of webmail. A recent survey by Webcredible, a UK-based web usability and accessibility consultancy, showed that 33% of mobile phone users said email was their most requested feature.

Our WAP-enabled webmail works on over 5,000 different phones (including the iPhone, although it has an IMAP email app that works great with Tucows Email). It lets user see their inbox and messages, send and receive mail, and even view contacts. All the information on how to access the WAP browser including how to set a CNAME to enable a custom URL (like wap.yourdomain.com) is in the email documentation.

The WAP browser is a standard feature of Tucows Email Service – just like IMAP, POP and our AJAX webmail application. It’s available today in the Test environment, and will be live for all users tomorrow.

Back in December we told you that the replacement for our Email Defense service was in QA, and that we were planning to go live with the new service in January. True to our word, I’m happy to report that the newly minted offering we’re calling “Tucows Email Filtering” will be live the week of January 29th.

We have a lot to share with you in the coming weeks, and Email Filtering is just one part. I’ll follow up this post soon with a full explanation of how it works, including the thinking behind some of the changes that we’ve made. You’ll quickly understand why we’re calling this “new” once you see it in action.

In February we made a decision to nuke the portal for our Email Defense Service and move to filtering only for the time being. Back then, we promised to build a new and improved service to replace it. We’re pretty close to being ready, (it’s in QA now). It’s expected that we’ll go live with it in the first couple of weeks of January, after the holiday and our December code-freeze.

We took a look at Email Defense as it functioned back in February and decided to re-focus on simplicity. Making our services easier to use and administer is a mantra around here these days. The original “spam portal” had every bell and whistle imaginable, but just like lots of other web services and software packages, it was over-engineered. In reality, very few of those features were actually being used. Here’s what we found:

• End Users only used the quarantine, and the blocked/sender lists
• 95% of Resellers used the default settings
• Fewer than 5% of Resellers branded the portal for their end users

Based on these findings and what we learned last winter, we concentrated on delivering the features people actually use.

We created a new spam quarantine that has two main functions:

1. Reviewing spam and, if required, releasing email from the quarantine
2. Managing safe and blocked sender lists

For Reseller management, the service has been integrated into the interfaces for the Tucows Email Service. At the domain and user level, Resellers can set up domain level blocked/safe sender lists, and even reject spam outright, if they choose. If Resellers choose to use the Tucows Email Service as well, filtering only accounts can be instantly upgraded to a full mailbox through the same interface with the check of a box.

We’ll provide more details about the specific changes and time frames in the new year.

In the meantime, here is a preview of what the spam quarantine will look like to your end users (click any of the images for a full sized view):

The list view shows all the messages caught in the Spam Quarantine:

In the message view, users will be able to see each spam message and take one of three different actions: tag the message as “Not Spam” (message is released from quarantine); add the sender to the Safe Sender list (messages from that sender will no longer be filtered) or add the sender to Block Sender list (messages from that sender will be automatically deleted):

Users can manage their Safe and Block Sender lists easily with the push of a button:

As providers of a high-performance, low-cost, robust and convenient email service, we’d be remiss if we didn’t provide some tips on using email more effectively.

If you’re trying to get the most out of your email (or any other “productivity tool”, for that matter), I strongly recommend the tips provided at 43 Folders, Merlin Mann’s excellent site devoted to “personal productivity, life hacks, and simple ways to make your life a little better”. Merlin’s a follower of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system, and in the article Five fast email productivity tips, he’s got these simple tips that should help you better manage a ballooning inbox:

1. Turning off your email client’s “auto check” feature, or slowing it down so it checks for new mail less often — perhaps every 20 minutes or even only once an hour. “If you’re doing anything with new email more than every few minutes, you might want to rethink your approach.”
2. Pick off easy ones. “If you can retire an email with a 1-2 line response (< 2 minutes; pref. 30 seconds), do it now. Remember: this is about action, not about cogitating and filing. Get it off your plate, and get back to work."
3. Write less. “Stop imagining that all your emails need to be epic literature; get better at just keeping the conversation moving by responding quickly and with short actions in the reply. Ask for more information, pose a question, or just say “I don’t know.” Stop trying to be Marcel Proust…”
4. Cheat. If you find yourself constantly sending emails that have the same general structure, consider creating some “form letter” templates that you can fill in quickly. See if there’s software like MailTemplate for your operating system.
5. Be honest. “If you know in your heart that you’re never going to respond to an email, get it out of sight, archive it, or just delete it. Guilt will not make you more responsive two months from now, otherwise, you’d just do it now, right? Trust your instincts, listen to them, and stop trying to be perfect.”

If you’re not the sort of person who likes to change their routine all at once, I suggest you try tips 2 (”Pick off the easy ones”) and 5 (deleting any mail that you know you’ll never respond to or for which you keep putting off responding). These two alone should take care of a significant chunk of your inbox and make you feel less anxious about what David Allen calls “open loops” — those undone things that keep tugging at you throughout the day.

If you sell email from Tucows, you can expect to receive an email message  and/or a letter in the mail shortly about migrating to our new and improved email service. The message will direct you to a website to select an option for your migration. This site is chock full of information for you. It includes details about the features of our email service, documentation, information about how the migration is going to work and resources for you and your end-users.

We’ve been using the new email service here at Tucows for a number of months, and our team is confident it will exceed your expectations.

If you have any questions about email migrations, please contact your Account Manager or Support.

For your viewing pleasure, we've posted a larger version of the screencast (it's a QuickTime video) from yesterday's article, Introducing the Next Generation of Tucows' Email Service off our new and improved Tucows Email Service. Click the image above to watch it!