We’re pleased to announce that our new Webmail system is available. You’ll find many improved features:
- A flexible search feature that lets you search through subjects, senders, and more.
- The ability to optionally view “unsafe” images in HTML messages.
- Preferences that permanently remember things such as your time zone and date format.
- An easier-to-use address book.
- Optional threaded message display.
- Message filters (sorting incoming mail into certain folders) and highlighting.
- Automatic conversion of many foreign-language character sets to UTF-8 display, making it easier to read messages written in other languages.
- And much more…
If you’re already a Webmail user, you’ll see the new pages the next time you login. If you haven’t tried Webmail before, this page explains how to get started.
By the way, we’ll be keeping our old Webmail system around for a couple of weeks at this special address, just in case anyone experiences any problems and needs to temporarily “downgrade”. If you have any trouble with the new system, do let us know right away so we can address it before the old pages are permanently removed.
We’d also like to thank the more-than-200 people who helped us test the new system over the last few weeks. The new system is better because of your efforts.
We’ve updated phpMyAdmin to version 2.11.2. (In case you aren’t familiar with phpMyAdmin, it’s a Web-based system for managing MySQL databases without requiring you to use the command line; you can find more details on the phpMyAdmin home page.)
We’re pleased to announce that our new Webmail pages are available for public “beta testing”. The new Webmail system is a modified version of the popular SquirrelMail software, which has many features the older system lacks.
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In response to customer suggestions, we’ve changed the appearance of Mailman invitation/address verification messages a little. Most notably, the messages now include your domain name in the subject, which should make it easier for people to recognize who you are and why you’re sending them the message.
You can see a sample on our page describing Mailman invitation messages.
In an earlier post, we talked about how we use a monitoring system that forwards test e-mail to other large ISPs, then checks to make sure the message was promptly delivered.
We already check delivery to AOL, Comcast, GMail and Verizon, and we’ve now added AT&T/SBCGlobal and Yahoo mail. We’ll continue to expand it in the future.
An extensive monitoring and alert system is at the heart of our reliability, really; it’s what allows us to know that things are working properly. We can guarantee that if our customers send mail to those ISPs right now, it’s being delivered. That’s something few other companies even bother to check.
We’ve updated phpMyAdmin to version 2.11.0. (In case you aren’t familiar with phpMyAdmin, it’s a Web-based system for managing MySQL databases without requiring you to use the command line; you can find more details on the phpMyAdmin home page.)
If you write your own PHP scripts that allow file uploads, we’ve discovered an unusual issue that might affect you. The “permissions” PHP gives to newly uploaded files aren’t always the same — and a recent change to our servers may have altered the permissions your script sees.
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This coming Saturday (August 4th), we’ll be upgrading the MySQL database software on all our servers from version 4.1.11 to version 5.0.32 (plus appropriate security updates). MySQL 5 adds many features that customers have requested, and some Web site scripts now require it.
The upgrade will take place between 11:00 PM and 11:59 PM Pacific time (the times will be slightly different for each server). We’ll be making a full backup of all databases on each server before the upgrade, and as a result, customers should expect MySQL to be unavailable for about 15 minutes during this period. In addition, large databases may be slow for several minutes after the upgrade, because MySQL automatically converts databases to the new version format the first time they are accessed, which can be time consuming.
If your site doesn’t use MySQL databases, it won’t be affected at all. If it does, you almost certainly won’t see any effects other than the 15 minute outage. That said, we do recommend checking your scripts for MySQL 5 compatibility.
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We have installed Midnight Commander on all of our servers. Midnight Commander is a file manager program which runs in a shell window and lets you manage the files on your Web site. Midnight Commander splits the screen in two, letting you select different directories on each side. You can then move, copy, and rename files and directories, and perform many other operations.
Midnight Commander is designed for users who connect to the shell but may not be fully comfortable with typing commands on the command line.
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Our Web-based MySQL interface, phpMyAdmin, has been updated to version 2.10.2. This version includes some security and general bug fixes. Customers should not notice any major changes.
