New Email Features

This past week, the email team added some great new features to the webmail and email service. A lot of these features came directly from requests that you made! I'm exceptionally pleased that the email team has been able to be so responsive to the needs of our customers.

• You will no longer be prompted to confirm that they wish to logout. Apparently this was driving a lot of you understandably crazy, so the webmail will no longer second guess you.
• Email messages with links will now be clickable. If someone sends you an email with an HTML link in it, the link will be clickable and the website that they want you to visit will load. This is a completely commonsense feature that we can't believe we missed in the first place.
• You may now choose to block images in the message view pane. The choice is remembered across sessions through the use of a browser cookie. Within the spam folder, images are always blocked by default. This will make it a lot easier to hide from spammers more effectively, but at the same time, ensure that you will be able to see the real content that you want to see.
• The link to webmail help is now displayed with a more universal question mark (?).
• The mailbox quota indicator has been moved into the mail settings area.

If you have any questions about any of these changes, please let us know in the comments.

Also look for some more information about our customer service improvement plan later on this week.

Comments

[Chris]

How about webmail support for the iphone or ipod touch?

[cimino]

One thing I would REALLY like to see is the option to stay logged in indefinitely on webmail. The session timing-out automatically drives me crazier than anything else at the moment. I have seen other users ask about this before but they never got responses. I realize this may be a security issue, but the option should definitely be available for people who use a secure computer with no other users.

[Brennan Young]

I noticed that I don't have to do anything 'special' to log in with Mac Safari anymore, and frankly, I prefer the 'simple' interface.

I mostly use a standalone mail program, rather than webmail. My mail program has a very nice bayesian spam filter (called 'SpamSieve' if you are interested), which catches 98% of all spam.

However, I've recently discovered that the spam filter is catching LOADS of false positives. Mail from mailing lists and people that previously has got through with no trouble at all in the past suddenly stopped arriving. People asking me "Didn't you get my mail?" "what mail"? So I had to go to the webmail interface, and sure enough a good 5% of the messages in the spam folder were false positives. I was pretty shocked - especially because I can see no way of turning the spam filter OFF. ARRGH!!

I have no idea whether the webmail spam filter 'learns' when I click 'not spam'. Apparently it doesn't because it's still catching a lot of false positives from addresses I have had to 'rescue' from its clutches. ABSOLUTELY INFURIATING.

So now I have to check my mail client AND the webmail to be sure that I get all my mail. PLEASE FIX THIS.

[Brennan Young]

I should point out that it is the webmail spam filter which is misbehaving, not Spam Sieve.

[Richard]

"Not spam" is a placebo.

The logout issue would be less of a problem if the webmail client did not outrageously delete, in an unrecoverable way, whatever you typed. Last night, I lost a message with a "Sorry we are unable to send this message at the moment" error.

Critical bugs like this should be the priority over "clickable links." How many months/years do we need to wait for a fix?