Tag Archives: webmail

Webmail is using Amazon Web Services

In my previous post regarding Amazon Web Services, I asked “where shall we start?”  i.e. Where would it make sense for Webmail.us to start using this sort of new infrastructure service?

That was a rhetorical question.  We have been building a replacement for our tape backups system using Amazon S3, SQS and EC2 for several months now, and today we have announced it’s release.  It is fully deployed, and working wonderfully.

Below are some links to the details, but hit me up with questions if you want more:

Technical Details from our website

Amazon S3 Success Story

Amazon Web Services Blog Post

Webmail.us Blog Post

What’s the big idea?…

…see for yourself:  http://ideas.webmail.us

We launched this "Idea Central" website last week to allow our customers to tell us the features that they would like us to build.  Webmail.us customers (or anybody) can post an idea, and then other customers can vote on that idea.  Popular ideas rise to the top of the list.  Currently Admin access to all mailboxes is the most popular, with 14 votes.

Popular ideas will get built.  I’ll say it twice… Popular ideas will get built.

We are gearing up for Hackathon 3.0 on Saturday, October 28th.  Get your ideas submitted to Idea Central soon so that other customers can vote on it, and perhaps entice one of our software developers to choose that as their Hackathon project.  (check out the cool stuff we built at previous Hackathons: 1.0, 2.0).

If you have really big idea, one of our programmers may even take it on as their 20% project.

Summer of Spam

As the summer winds down, I look at what one of Webmail’s newest stars has been able to do with our anti-spam system in just 3 months.  This summer Mike T:

(1) built new software that integrates customers’ existing sender safelists with Postfix so that mail not only bypasses spam content filtering (as it always has), it also makes sure that the mail doesn’t get rejected during the SMTP session.  (and the reverse for blacklists);

(2) enhanced our safelist and blacklisting system to allow customers to block or accept mail from specific IP addresses; and

(3) added selective greylisting capabilities to our SMTP servers.

#1 and #2 have been released and we began rolling out #3 last week.  As of Friday, we are greylisting mail that arrives to catch-all mailboxes and everything that hits our mx2 servers.  Soon we will also be greylisting mail sent from dynamic IP ranges such as computers connected behind DSL and Cable networks.  And in a few weeks customers will have the option to turn on greylisting for all mail they receive from new sources (this will be disabled by default).  Fyi, much of this was built around a great open-source project called Policyd.

Anyways, I am damn proud of Mike.

When will Gmail reach 5GB?

Gmail advertises:

  • Don’t throw anything away.
    Over 2750.162469 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you’ll never need to delete another message.

…and their megabyte counter grows continuously.  But when will Gmail reach Webmail.us’s 5GB?

Well, Gmail’s current growth rate is 0.4 MB per day.  That means Gmail will reach the 5GB milestone in 5,925 days — October 21, 2022.

Please test the beta proxy (again)

I think we have finally worked out all of the bugs with the new POP3/IMAP Proxy Software.  The main symptom was when using SSL, saving to the Sent folder would occasionally break.  Here were the fixes.  Thanks Timo!

So, if you’re a Webmail.us customer and you’d like to help us test, please switch your POP3 or IMAP server to:  beta.webmail.us

You should expect everything to work normally.  If you see any differences or encounter any problems, please shoot me an email.  In the email include whether you are using POP3 or IMAP, and connecting with SSL, TLS or plain-text, and also what mail program and version you are running.

If you try it and do not encounter any problems, I am also interested in hearing from you.

Thanks!