Anti-Spam: A revised version of our basic anti-Spam filter has been installed.

Email Guard: Several new Email Guard features have been added:

• The Email Guard portal for end users will now support versions of Netscape 4.x.
• Users can associate multiple email addresses ("alias email addresses") to one primary email address. The Spam quarantine information for a set of associated email addresses is combined in a single Spam Quarantine Report sent to the primary email address, managed through one login in the portal, and controlled by one set of user configurations (for example, Allow/Deny lists). A single quarantine area is created and managed for each set of associated email addresses. All reporting information for each set of associated emails is combined in each report type.
• The Always Deny Link on the Spam Quarantine Report and the Always Deny Button on the portal is now optional, i.e. it can be disabled at the domain level for all users in the domain by the administrator. By default it is disabled.
• If you have multiple domains with the same users in each, we can now protect the additional domains at no additional charge using "domain aliases".

Private Label: LuxSci announces two new additions to our private labeling tools:

• Tag-lines. You can optionally create a tag-line that will be appended to all messages composed in WebMail by users of your private labeled theme. This tag-line can be any arbitrary text and is very useful for advertising or disclaimers. The tag-line can be specified in the "content block" configuration page in your theme manager.
• Logout Destination. You can optionally specify a link to redirect your users to when they logout. If specified, the logout links will redirect to these URLs instead of the standard private labeled login page. This URL can be specified in the "login pages" section of your theme manager.

Concurrent IMAP: LuxSci has just updated the file format used for all of your email folders. This new format has several benefits, including: 1. faster access, especially when you have lots of messages in the folder, and 2. concurrent access. Concurrent access means that you can access the SAME email folder from multiple email clients concurrently without issue. So, for example, multiple users can be connected via IMAP to the same email account at the same time!

Free Restores: From now on, each standard account may have data restored from backup free of charge up to once per month. Additional restorations incur our standard backup restoration fees ($25.00 or more, depending on the quantity of data to be restored and the time it takes).

Fetch POP: LuxSci's "Remote POP Email Fetching" tool, which allows you to have your email automatically downloaded to your LuxSci account from other POP accounts, has been modified to retrieve your email more frequently. From now on, email will be automatically retrieved on an hourly basis instead of every four hours, as had been the case in the past.

Automatic Payments: LuxSci can now automatically charge your credit card to pay for your LuxSci monthly and yearly service fees. Note that if you enable automatic payments, your credit card information will be encrypted using PGP and stored in a secure database.

Anti-Spam: A revised version of our basic anti-Spam filter has been installed.

Anti-Virus: LuxSci has also added system-wide filters against the W32/Swen and W23/Dumaru.a email viruses. All users, even those who do not use our basic Anti-Spam or Email Guard services, are now be protected against these. Email Guard users have always been protected.

Automated Account Management: LuxSci has new automated account management features. Use a simple API built upon secure HTTP posts to create and manage users in your account remotely from programs or web sites. This facility allows you to tightly integrate your private labeled WebMail with your own web site(s) and user base. These automation tools enable you to programmatically perform actions such as creating and updating users, changing passwords, changing disk quotas, enabling, disabling and deleting users, and retrieving user data reports.

Security: LuxSci has just implemented a more secure and more granular model for managing users' access to your web server. Now, administrators can, at any time, select each individual user's access to the web server from the following possibilities:

• No account: The user has no account on the web server at all
• No access: The user may have an account, but has no way of logging into or accessing it
• FTP access
• FTP and SCP (Secure Copy) access
• FTP, SCP, and SSH (Secure Shell) access with the tcsh shell
• FTP, SCP, and SSH (Secure Shell) access with the bash shell

Note that SCP access is now available independently of SSH access, and SSH access is granted only in special cases.

WebMail Login Updates: You now have the choice of logging into WebMail either securely over SSL (which you have until now been forced to do), or insecurely without SSL. This applies to both the Standard portal and to the Xpress portal. If you are on a very slow connection or find that SSL security makes WebMail access too slow for you, you can opt to not use security and thus achieve faster access. Note that if you choose to not use a secure connection, your username, password and all data will be sent in plain text over the Internet and could be intercepted by a third party. If you choose to use insecure access, you should change your password often.

Private Label Updates: LuxSci has released a new version of its private labeling tool. The major changes include:

• Much more user friendly
• Your private labeled site can require SSL, make SSL connections optional, or not use SSL at all.
• You can have your users login directly to their INBOX, rather than to the standard Welcome Page.

Email Aliases: LuxSci has just implemented many enhancements to its Email Aliases and Email Forwarding tools:

• Email aliases can now be explicitly configured to delete all incoming email.
• Email aliases can now bounce all incoming email with a custom bounce error message
• The Email Alias tool now has more advanced search and selection facilities.
• The Email Alias tool now supports a "view only" mode where it is easier to view the current settings for all of your aliases.
• Personal email forwarding, configurable though your WebMail Preferences, also supports the new "Bounce" and "Delete" delivery actions.

Auditing: LuxSci now provides user-level reporting of IMAP, POP, SMTP, and WebMail login histories. Reports include the source IP address, if the connections were secure or not, and more. Reports are available to both individual users and account administrators.

Email Guard: Several new Email Guard features have been added:

• We have updated the Spam Report and Quarantine User Index pages to include updated options:
  • There are new options for when end-users receive their Spam Quarantine Reports: Never, Every Day, Every Weekday, Every Monday, Monday & Friday, Monday, Wednesday & Friday.
  • We added a Spam Exempt Users list, accessible under the "Anti-Spam" section of the "Policies" tab. This feature allows end-users to opt-out of spam filtering (via their Spam Quarantine Reports) if the Administrator enables this option.
  • We have added the ability to send Spam Quarantine Reports only to selected end-users in a given domain, instead of all or none.
• We have updated sorting for the following pages to support ascending and descending sorting including an up/down arrow: Domain, Customer, Reseller, Host, and User.
• We have updated all Quarantine pages by adding new up/down arrows for sorting to the header bar, and we have made the header bar style match the style used in similar pages, such as the Manage Customers page.
• We have added a new attachment policy for high-risk zip attachments (e.g. mod-arbomb). The actions associated with the policy include allow, quarantine, and deny.
• We have added an "accept" action for content filters. When a message triggers a content policy violation, and the policy action is set to "accept", spam filtering will be skipped for that particular message.
• We have added an explicit "Do Nothing" action selection for "attachment type" policies. Now "Do Nothing" can be selected like any other action.
• We have added a file upload option for your "exempt users" list. You are now able to upload lists of exempt users directly from the Exempt Users page.

SMTP Proxies: LuxSci has added a set of new servers whose sole purpose is to receive incoming Internet email for our clients and to perform all basic anti-Spam and custom email filtering before forwarding the messages on for delivery into the client accounts on separate servers. This has several benefits: 1. Your email server will not need to spend as much effort on email and Spam filtering so that your IMAP, POP, Outgoing SMTP, and WebMail experience is faster, more responsive, and more robust. 2. Future email worms like "SoBig" which flood the Internet with email will have much less effect on your quality of service as the barrage of incoming email should be intercepted by the proxy servers, leaving your IMAP, POP, Outgoing SMTP, and WebMail services responsive and reliable. 3. Incoming email proxying can be load balanced across multiple servers.

Anti-Spam: A revised version of our basic anti-Spam filter has been installed.

HTML Messages: LuxSci's WebMail client has been updated for improved handling of email messages that are purely HTML, i.e. where the message body itself is HTML, as opposed to the message merely having HTML attachments. These types of pure HTML messages are now automatically detected and links are provided so that you can view the complete message HTML in a separate window. For security and usability reasons, we do not render HTML from email messages inline in the message display screen itself.

Anti-Virus: To support our clients who have not subscribed to our basic anti-Spam or Email Guard services, LuxSci has just instituted system-level email filters that apply to all email messages (except those coming via Email Guard). Currently, these filters are configured to automatically delete messages from the SoBig.F virus. (However, they will only detect some of the auto-replies that these viruses cause). These system filters do not constitute a true anti-Virus or anti-Spam solution; they are merely designed to help block email worms and other events that would otherwise inundate our user's email boxes.

LuxSci Acquires Email Outsourcing Service from EMUMail: LuxSci has acquired the email outsourcing services formerly provided by EMUMail. This acquisition provides Lux Scientiae with EMUMail's entire outsourcing client base as well as certain advertising arrangements. Read the complete press release.

Upgrades: The online upgrade account tool has been completely revised and is now much easier to use and more powerful. Among other things, account administrators can now add per-user licenses for IMAP, SMTP, and basic anti-Spam filtering if they have not purchased these on an account-wide basis.

Anti-Spam: Administrators can now disable basic anti-Spam filtering on a per-user basis.

Anti-Spam: A revised version of our basic anti-Spam filter has been installed.

Rename Users: Account administrators can now rename any user in their account. Both the user and the domain name part of the user can be changed without affecting the user's existing account and data.

Web Hosting: We have updated the "Web Site Manager". You can now specify the "Server Admin Email Address" for your web sites. This is the email address that the web server displays to visitors when errors occur. The default email address is "support@luxsci.com". You can now also enable your CGI scripts to run with the permissions of the script files' owner. This "SuEXEC" permission can enhance the security and privacy of your web site (it does not apply to PHP scripts).

Email Auto-Deletion: This new feature will help you manage the size and content of your email folders. In the "Email Folders" tool, you can now enable auto-deletion for any of your email folders.

Message auto-deletion happens nightly and examines all folders that you have enabled for this service, removing all "old" messages. It does this by your choice of either A. by removing old messages until the folder is less than or equal a specified size in megabytes, B. by removing all messages older than a specified number of days, or C. by removing all but the most recent N messages, where you specify N.

Important Note - Messages in your TRASH folder will now be automatically deleted once they are more than 30 days old, although can adjust this timing using the auto-deletion settings in the Email Folders tool. We have instituted this auto-deletion of TRASH to help reduce the disk space used inadvertently by the deletion of messages in WebMail.

Email Guard: Several new Email Guard features have been added:

• End user-level deny lists: This new feature allows end users to block email from unwanted senders. This feature compliments the existing end user-level allow lists (aka white lists). When end users add an email address to their personal deny list, messages sent from that address will be refused and will not be delivered to the end user. End users can access their personal deny list by logging on to the Email Guard portal. Administrators can access all end-user deny lists the same way they access end-user allow lists, from the User Management tab in the Email Guard portal.
• Silent Copy policy action: This feature enables administrators to be alerted when an email violates a specified Attachment or Content policy. Administrators will be able to have silent copies ('bcc:') of messages that violate Attachment and Content policies sent to a specified distribution list. Administrators can specify which Attachment and Content policies will have the Silent Copy feature activated. This feature is activated on both the Attachment and Content policy configuration pages, located on the Policies tab of the Email Guard portal.
• Recipient Shield Policy: This new feature allows administrators to add domain recipients to a deny list, blocking incoming mail sent to those addresses. This feature was created at the request of customers who wanted the ability to deny incoming mail sent to specific email addresses (such as the email address of a former employee). This feature also allows administrators to determine the action to be taken when a recipient is on this deny list. These actions include: Accept and bounce the message, Accept and silently discard the message, and Deny delivery.

Email Guard: LuxSci's new Email Guard service protects ALL of the email coming to your entitled domains from Viruses, Spam, Unwanted content and much more. We have partnered with MXLogic to provide this best-in-class email protection solution.

• Stops up to 98.5% of Spam: Sophisticated multi-layered Stacked Classification Framework(sm) that leverages an advanced heuristic engine combined with statistical Bayesian analysis
• Maximum Virus protection Leverages the leading anti-virus engine from Sophos that is updated every 5 minutes.
• Around-the-clock threat monitoring and email protection updates Easy to define and enforce corporate / account email policies
• Intuitive policy-based Control Console for service configuration and reporting

eJournals: eJournals are massively versatile information storage and collaboration tools. Here are some of the common applications:

• Diaries: Create private (or shared) diaries or personal journals. This is much like the popular "web logs" or "Blogs", except that your journal is not visible on the public Internet - you decide who has access!
• Bulletin Boards: Create "Yahoo! Groups-like" and "Google Groups-like" bulletin boards and determine who has permission to view and/or make entries.
• File Storage: Create an annotated online file archive.
• Corporate Documentation: Store corporate documents, information, internal notes, etc. online. You determine who can read the information and who can add to or edit it.
• Collaborations: Collaborate on documents, projects, specifications, or anything. Create a forum where people may edit or comment on each others contributions, add new categories of thought, etc.
• Your Custom eJournal: You can configure your eJournal settings to meet your particular needs in terms of usage, display, and access control.

SMTP Limits: LuxSci has placed a limit on the maximum number of email messages a user can send per day through its SMTP servers. This limit is 200 messages per user per day and is designed to be more than large enough for most users but small enough to make our services useless for spammers.

This limit does not apply to messages sent via WebMail. Also, a message destined to multiple recipients is considered only a single message for this accounting purpose. This sending limit applies only to authenticated SMTP connections from email clients like Outlook. We can increase the sending limit on a per-user or per-account basis if a good reason for the requirement is given.

If you reach you sending limit, you will be denied the ability to send additional messages. This denial will last until midnight GMT, when the "day" changes and the count of messages that you have sent is reset to zero. Note that even if you are being denied the ability to send messages from your email client, you can always send email messages via WebMail. We are trying to help limit SPAM and not trying to limit legitimate email usage.

Bookmarks: Users can now bookmark or link to pages within the LuxSci members' web site. When a user attempts to go to these pages, s/he will be asked to login first, then, on successful login, will be taken directly to the desired destination page. This allows one to, for example, go directly to the INBOX, bypassing the "Welcome" page, or to link directly to help documents.

DNS: If you have your DNS Managed by LuxSci and pay on a yearly basis, then we have some new features to offer you. We now support dynamic DNS for your domains and subdomains - so you can use your domains with non-static IP addresses granted by cable or DSL providers. If you would like direct control over your DNS settings (to create and edit your aliases, SOA settings, etc.), we can also give you access through your own login to our Enterprise DNS portal.

WebMail: Now users can check the status of multiple email folders on their "Welcome" page. Use the "Email Folders" tool to subscribe to folders in addition to your INBOX and the status of these will be checked and displayed in the "Your Email" section of your Welcome page. This feature is perfect if you want to monitor your SPAM folder or other email folders in addition to your INBOX!

WebMail: LuxSci has added a feature to its WebMail that allows you for format your email messages for easy and clean printing. When viewing an email message, you can click on the printer icon in the upper right corner of the screen (Standard portal), or click on the "Printable" button (Xpress portal). This will display your message in a separate window without any of the graphics or menus and on a white background, making it much easier to print and friendlier to your ink supply!

HTML Attachments: If you receive email messages that include HTML attachments with embedded images (or other objects), LuxSci now displays these embedded images within the HTML document when you view it in the WebMail message display.

DNS Information: LuxSci has greatly improved the "Domain Information" tool. The improvements include:

• Lookup DNS information for any domain
• Display SOA (TTL) settings for your domains
• Automatically detect problems in your DNS settings and provide more help for DNS transfers.

Xpress: LuxSci has produced a new alternate web interface for your WebMail and account management. The Xpress members' portal differs from the standard "Full" members' portal in that:

• It does not use cookies at all
• It does not use JavaScript at all
• It uses only minimal graphics
• It is compatible with more types of web browsers.

So, the Xpress members portal is useful for you:

• If you have a slow Internet connection, it will be much faster than the Standard portal
• If you use an old or non-mainstream web browser, it may look better and work more correctly than the Standard portal
• If you are worried about security issues involving JavaScript, you can turn JavaScript off and the Xpress portal will work just fine.
• If you are worried about privacy issues involving cookies, you can turn cookies off and the Xpress portal will work just fine.

The only down side of the Xpress portal is that is somewhat less user friendly and does not support all of the features of the Standard portal, because of the explicit lack of JavaScript.

Auditing: LuxSci now records the IP address from which you login to our member's portal. You can view the last IP address used to login to your account on your Welcome page, and can view a history of IP addresses used in your "Login History" reports. This type of IP address tracking is a security measure for your benefit.

FTP Bandwidth: Your web hosting bandwidth quota has always implicitly included bandwidth usage by both your web sites AND bandwidth usage from FTP. Up until now, however, we have not been actively monitoring FTP bandwidth usage. Staring with this month, March, 2003, we will be explicitly including your FTP bandwidth usage in our measurement of your total bandwidth usage. You can see the breakdown of FTP vs Web bandwidth usage in your account administration page.

WebMail: You can now choose to have the time a message was sent displayed along with the date it was sent when viewing the list of messages in your WebMail Folders. Simply enable the option "Show the time of day that a message was sent in the message index?" in your WebMail Preferences.

Auto-Responders: Now, if you have any auto-responders enabled, there will be a message to this effect on your Welcome page when you login. This is intended to help you remember to turn off these auto-responders when they are no longer needed.

AUP: LuxSci has updated its acceptable use policy (AUP), adding a section explicitly stating the acceptable use of our shared email services to better protect ourselves and our shared email hosting clients from abuse or excessive use of services by other clients. These updates consist of the section "Shared E-mail Hosting Responsibility".

Web Hosting: We have upgraded the version of PHP that runs on our shared web servers to the newest version and included IMAP, GetText, and XML support. We have also enabled SuEXEC in our web server which allows the server to run as you rather than as the web server user. This has implications for improved security and management of your web site files. If you would like SuEXEC to be enabled for your web sites, please contact support.

WebMail: We have released a completely new version of the LuxSci members' web site. It includes many new features:

• If you download email from remote POP3 email accounts, you can now enable automatic downloading of your email from these accounts into your LuxSci folders every 4 hours.
• You can now choose to download plain text attachments in your email messages rather than just viewing them.
• You can now enable or disable display of full email message headers while viewing the email message itself.
• There is now a "Check spelling before sending messages?" WebMail Preference allowing you to enable spell checking by default on all of your email messages.
• Delete all addresses at once from your WebMail Address Book with the new "Delete All" option.
• Use the new "Mark as Not SPAM" option in your folder index page under "More Options". This feature adds the email addresses of the senders of all selected messages to your SPAM Filter's "white list" and then moves the selected messages to your INBOX.

WebMail: Reverse the order headers are displayed in your email message index! Now, with the new preference "Display message headers in reverse order?" in your WebMail Preferences page, you can reverse the order in which messages are displayed in your message index pages. In this way, for example, your new messages would be displayed at the top of the list rather than at the bottom, and you would view the beginning of the message list rather than the end by default. This is provided to allow people can choose the message sorting style that they are most comfortable with.

Email Filters: Filter messages that have attached files with specified extensions like *.exe and *.vbs. Our Custom Email Filter Tool supports finding and filtering messages based on the filenames of included attachments. See the Email Filter tool's help pages for a recipe to implement this type of filter.

Auditing: Now you can view graphs of the detailed disk usage by your users and your account as a whole for the past month. Disk usage is measured hourly; these reports allow you to see how your recent disk usage has changed over time.

New Password Rules: All new user passwords must contain both letters and numbers and be not easily guessed by modern password guessing programs for enhanced security. We can relax these requirements on a per-account basis if necessary.

Secret Question and Answer: You can now supply us with a secret question and answer in Your Profile. We will use this secret question to authenticate you if you forget your password or need other special administrative work done for you. This helps us protect your account. We encourage all users to supply a secret question and answer.

WebMail: You can now sort your messages by size, read vs. unread status, and flagged vs. unflagged status. You can also use the new "Attach More..." button to add more attachments to your email message. By repeating this process, you can add any number of attachments to a single email message.

Aliases: The LuxSci alias manager has been updated to automatically detect infinite loops in your aliases so that you can correct them before they become a problem. The alias manager also supports domain forwarding aliases of the form *@domain1.com -> *@domain2.com, so all email to one domain is simply forwarded to another domain keeping the same usernames!

Anti-Spam: The basic anti-Spam filter has been updated. We have added two filters to the Spam Filter Configuration Tool so that you may enable them manually. Privacy: LuxSci's updated privacy policy is now available at http://luxsci.com/extranet/privacy.html.