Advanced Capabilities and Benefits
Email That Works is not only about reliability. We
also offer all of these advanced capabilities and their benefits:
Of IMAP and central storage:
Of using your own domain for email:
Of reliability:
Of security and privacy:
Of collaboration and customization:
Manage multiple computers
With IMAP your email is stored on the central server,
not merely passed through it to your desktop or laptop.
Your email will never be stranded "on the other computer".
This includes all your folders, not just the inbox.
You can reach it all from any computer, whenever you
need it. Yet
each has a local copy, under your direction, for good
performance.
IMAP makes upgrading, replacing, or adding computers easier,
since there is no email stored only on the client.
Travel with ease
IMAP can disconnect from the server and operate
offline anywhere: airplane, beach, or mountain-top. With
synchronization, you work on a copy of your email -- reading,
filing, deleting, replying -- and all your actions are
played back to the server when you connect.
Your mobile devices see the same stored email as all your
other machines. With our relaying service, you can send
email even from inside SMTP-restricted networks such as hotels and
coffeeshops, without changing configurations. And if you're stuck
with dialup, IMAP clients are smart about downloading only
the part of a message you want to see, leaving large attachments
untouched until you need them.
Send email from anywhere
Does your ISP or wireless hotspot restrict
outgoing SMTP? It's an increasingly common practice. You can
use our alternate port for SMTP submission, and since we
support SMTP AUTH, you can use this same setting everywhere
you go.
For security, we only give this information to customers. Just ask us.
Stop worrying about crashes and other disasters
Since your email is safely stored on the server, it doesn't
matter if your email program "becomes corrupted" and destroys its
local files. Remove and re-install it, and all the email will still
be where it belongs.
Our server-side anti-virus scanning protects
all your computers from infection via email. Our
server-side anti-spam keeps unwanted email under control without relying on one or another client cleaning things up.
We will keep these things up to date so you don't have to.
And just in case you accidentally delete an important folder
from the server, we do daily backups, and on-demand
restores.
Try new email programs at will
Email programs are constantly improving. Want to try a new one? Watch out! Programs based on old-fashioned POP might burn your
bridges without asking you, hide (or destroy) all your stored
email, and make going back to the old program a nightmare.
But IMAP programs play well together, and you can even leave
several running at the same time.
Use your own domain
Use your own domain for email as well as the web. Create separate,
named mailboxes for individual people, plus aliases
and list addresses as needed.
Our
advanced domain administration features let you set policies, control
resources and costs, and diagnose most user issues without waiting for
someone else to respond to you.
Create aliases and distribution lists
Create as many extra addresses (aliases) as you need.
Use aliases to misdirect and track spam by giving out a different address to
each supplier or correspondent.
Create unique, temporary addresses for special purposes, such as marketing
campaigns.
Create distribution lists, with one or more entries
(destination addresses) to send mail to a group with a single address.
Entry addresses can be within the same domain, or in any Internet domain.
Role addresses, for instance sales@yourdomain, can abstract roles from
individuals. Role addresses can be set up
as distribution lists, with one or more entries; or they can be real login
users, each with a separate password, INBOX, and set of user-level filters,
e.g. for antispam. Given the proper
ACLs,other users in the domain can then read messages in
this INBOX and move them to another place for processing or storage.
Manage your own domain
Full control over your domain. Easily add, modify, or delete users and distribution lists using a simple web interface. Resolve many email problems yourself, without calling in IT support.
As a domain administrator you can directly:
- Add and delete users and aliases
- Force user passwords (when they forget)
- Set a catchall address for the domain
- Set disk quotas for users, and view usage reports
- Set mailbox ACLs for sharing folders
- Create domain-wide content filters
- View and search SMTP logs, to find that "missing" message
- Delegate admin authority to any domain user
- Set a domain-wide signature to append to all outgoing messages
- Manage anti-spam black/whitelists
Keep a domain-wide address book
We now offer LDAP read access to a domain-wide address book, so your
IMAP client can use auto-completion for common addresses. Ask us for more
information.
Schedule people for a meeting
Our group calendar is accessible via the web, and also from a special
MS Outlook plug-in that can synchronize your local calendar with the server.
Rely on us to keep the system available
Since inception in May, 2001, our service
availability, that is 100% minus unplanned downtime, is
99.990%
(updated hourly).
A lot of people in IT throw around the term
"five nines", meaning 99.999%. That's about three and a half hours of downtime
in forty years.
Almost no one can actually acheive it, especially measuring the
entire service (not just a single component or subsystem), or
counting an outage for any given user (not only the big wipe-outs
that affect all the users). We measure this where it counts: from
the customer's point of view. And we think it important to satisfy every
customer, not just an average.
We also strive to maximize total service
availability, that is 100% minus all downtime, planned or
unplanned. This is currently
99.958%
.
Though of course we announce outages in advance, when you can't read your
email, it hardly matters to you whether this was a surprise to us.
So far as we know, we are unique in measuring this, or even thinking about it.
Even better, here's the raw data so you can
check our math. We dare any other provider to publish even the percentages,
let alone substantiate them with this kind of transparency.
Depend on us for backups and restores
We backup all the email, and will restore it on request.
Weekly full dumps and daily incrementals mean we can retrieve any message
that came in the previous day or earlier. And our undelete feature
can let you recover (on your own) recently-deleted messages even if they
are too new to have been backed up yet.
We know IMAP is a storage business, and we are asking you to trust
us. So we will never hold your data for ransom, even if there's a
dispute. Read our
user agreement. It has many uncommon
features designed to protect you as well as us.
Don't vanish from the net.
We provide high-reliability DNS service at no extra
charge. Technically, this is how your correspondents' email finds its way
to our server, so reliability is terribly important, but it's often overlooked
and poorly implemented. If it fails, your domain disappears from the
Internet and your email bounces. We eliminate this problem by providing
multiple, geographically separated name servers.
Keep spam under control
Our anti-spam scanner and security features keep your inbox
as nearly free of spam as possible, with an extremely low false-positive
rate. The velocity-of-attack approach isn't
fooled by misspelled "w0rdz" or legitimate uses of widely-abused terms like
"mortgage".
Incoming messages are filtered on our server, reducing network traffic and eliminating the need for anti-spam software on client computers. Customize the filtering for the domain and/or for individual users.
You control whether this feature is enabled at all, and you can manage
both per-user and domain-wide white- and blacklists.
Avoid email-borne viruses
Our anti-virus scanner protects all the users in your domain, and
all your IMAP client computers, from email-borne viruses.
Incoming messages are scanned on our server. Detected viruses will never reach your corporate network, eliminating the need for email anti-virus software on your server and/or client computers. This results in a lower chance of infection and a lower burden on your network and computers. We rely on anti-virus software from industry leader Sophos, and keep the pattern files up to date.
File incoming email automatically
In additional to standard forwarding and autoreply features,
as well as aliases (distribution lists),
you can manage per-user and domain-wide server-resident filters
to direct email to specific folders, or take other special actions.
Filters are easy to set up with a graphical user interface, yet they have
powerful capabilities: Rules can search any header, including common ones such as From, To/CC, or
Subject, or examine an attachment or the entire message. They can look for
certain strings -- including regular expression matching -- and they can
be combined in boolean expressions, and act by filing a message in a mailbox,
forwarding the whole message or just an excerpt to another address, or even
discarding the message. Each filter can cause processing to stop, or it can
continue, letting further filters in the ordered list run in their turn.
Domain-level filters can even reject a message
before the server accepts it, causing the sending host to generate a
bounce (DSN).
Share email folders
IMAP clients can see not only their own folders (since these are kept on
the server), but, if permitted, folders of other users in the domain.
Use them for collaboration, or archiving of lists.
Permitted users can create domain-level folders, not belonging to any
one user, with the same access-control list (ACL) security. It's a better
practice for shared folders that might outlast the user who created them,
or just so the name makes more sense.
Mail directly to a shared folder or subfolder
We support addressing
using the '+' character, e.g. <user+mbox@domain> to send email straight
to a user folder. In this example, mail to <joe+work.list2@domain>
is delivered directly iff the mailbox exists and its ACL is set properly.
Ootherwise it goes to Joe's INBOX, user.joe (read more).
Or use <+shared.sub@domain> to mail directly to shared folders, i.e.
those not under any individual user's inbox. For instance, create an archive
folder for each distribution list (read more).
Extend and script the server's capabilities
Alone among email providers, we let you directly at the
server at the command-line level, for common management tasks
that are faster done with a CLI than with a web browser. And we let you
reach the server's admin protocol so you can write external scripts to
automate management tasks and even to add external capabilities.
For the CLI,
just use SSH and login with your username (user@domain); regular users
and domain administrators can see an appropriate set of commands for their
privilege level. For protocol access, ask us for more information.
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