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New Features Blog

We at LuxSci are constantly upgrading our offerings to keep up with the cutting edge in email and web services and technology. We consider all customer requests closely, and, when possible, implement them quickly. Here is a selected list of recent events and feature implementations that have contributed to our comprehensive email and web hosting services.

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December, 2005

December 26, 2005

Several Small Updates.

LuxSci has released several small updates to its software. These include:

  • The "Move To New Folder" tool in WebMail is now more user friendly in terms of keyboard-only usage.
  • The "Email Composition" page will warn you when your WebMail session expires so that you can save your important email data and not lose it.
  • Account administrators can now easily review all WebAides in use in their account using a new "User WebAide" report. Administrators can also delete WebAides from this report.
  • Administrators with Private Labeled WebMail can now further customize their WebMail logins pages by hiding some content that was previously always present on these pages.

December 21, 2005

More Free Data Restores! LuxSci has revised its policy on free data restores. The previous policy was that each account gets one free restore from backup each month, period (additional restores were available for a fee). Now, unused monthly free restores accumulate as credits toward future restores. So, for example, a client who has been with LuxSci for 1 year has 12 free restores (minus any already used that year). This new policy is retroactive -- so most existing clients will have some restore credits.

December 17, 2005

Sending Ultra Secure Messages Just Got Easier! SecureLine-licensed users can add two new options to the cutting edge features of SecureLine email so that users can send and receive secure email messages directly from any email client without additional software to install!
  • SecureLine Automatic Outbound Encryption will automatically encrypt email messages sent from any email program if the recipient(s) are other SecureLine users or if information on how to secure their messages is stored in the sender's address books(s). Messages that cannot be encrypted due to lack of information about the recipient, can be sent normally [insecurely] or not at all. Additionally, the sender can be notified about what happened and why. Combined with the use of Enterprise WebAide shared address books, it is easy to share recipient encryption information (like public keys or Escrow security questions and answers) across all users in your account.
  • SecureLine Automatic Inbound Decryption allows you to automatically:
    • decrypt secure messages to you upon arrival at LuxSci,
    • apply additional filters, if required, and,
    • store as unencrypted messages in your email folders.
    This allows you to access these messages (securely over SSL) from any email client using POP or IMAP (as well as from WebMail).

    Both automatic encryption and automatic decryption can be configured on an account-wide, domain-wide, and per-user basis. Use of these features also enables "forced use of SSL" which will require all connections to email data via POP, IMAP, SMTP, and WebMail to be secure.

Enhancements to LuxSci's Forced SSL Feature: LuxSci has previously permitted account administrators to force everyone in their account to use only secure (over SSL) connections to POP, IMAP, SMTP, and WebMail. This feature has been extended to manage SSL use on a per-domain [Aor per-user basis. Additionally, LuxSci has improved the Forced SSL feature so that it supports secure SMTP usage on any LuxSci SMTP ports, not just ports 465 and 6465. Sending email securely on ports 25, 80, 2025, and 6025 is now permitted with "Forced SSL" enabled. Forced SSL is now compatible with any modern email client in combination with any other LuxSci outbound email features in use.
Account Administration Updates: In addition to the SecureLine and Forced SSL enhancements, a few other changes have been made to the Account Administration pages:
  • Users' "Email Encryption" preferences can now be viewed and edited by account administrators under the "Manage Your Users" section of the Account Administration pages.
  • The Theme Management tool for administrators with Private Labeled WebMail has been enhanced to allow more customization of the WebMail login pages. Administrators can now customize the titles of the login pages and optionally remove the "Forgot Password" link from the login page.
Custom Email Filtering Tool Enhancements: The LuxSci custom email filtering tool, available to all users, has been enhanced with two new features:
  • A new "action" has been added that can be used when a filter matches an email message. The "Send notification email to" action works like the "Forward message to" action, except that the subject of the message is prefixed with "[NOTICE; the body and all attachments of the message are removed. This makes the "notification" action ideal for sending very small alert email messages to addresses of your choice based upon specific parameters.
  • SecureLine users who also use the "Automatic Inbound Decryption" feature can determine when the decryption happens with respect to other filters in their account. In particular, this allows SecureLine users of this feature to perform some action on the message before decryption (i.e. such as saving backup copies), and some actions after decryption.

November, 2005

November 26, 2005

Increased email maximum message size: LuxSci now supports the sending and receipt of email messages up to 50 Megabytes in size. This is an increase over our previous limit of 30 Megabytes.

November 12, 2005

New Outlook Plugin For Synchronizing Address Books: LuxSci's new "WebAideSynch for Outlook" is a powerful synchronization tool allowing Enterprise WebAide-licensed users with Microsoft Outlook versions 2002 and later to synchronize their Outlook contacts with shared LuxSci Address Books at the click of a button. Upcoming versions of WebAideSynch will also allow users to synchronize their shared Outlook calendars and task lists with LuxSci. WebAideSynch is a COM add-in that integrates directly into the Outlook toolbar upon installation, making it easy to synchronize your data in a matter of moments.

October, 2005

October 27, 2005

Remote MySQL Access Supports TLS for Security: Web hosting users with MySQL databases can now optionally use TLS (Transport Layer Security) when connecting to their MySQL databases from remote locations. Use of TLS ensures that all communications between these users and our MySQL servers are encrypted.

September, 2005

September 17, 2005

Optional Forced Use of SSL for Email Services: Account administrators now have the option to easily force all of their users to employ only secure connections (over SSL) to LuxSci email services. This includes POP, IMAP, SMTP, and WebMail services.

September 3, 2005

SecureLine End-to-End Email Encryption Service:

SecureLine is a new service provided by LuxSci that allows its users to easily send and receive secure email messages to and from anyone on the Internet who has an email address - no matter what kind of email software or service that correspondent has and no matter how insecure that correspondent's current email services are!

SecureLine enables you to easily meet HIPAA (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and other communication security regulations and policies and it enables account administrators to optionally require that all users employ SecureLine and thus participate only in secure communications.

In order to meet the combined goals of ease of use, maximum security, and communications with anyone, anywhere, SecureLine seamlessly integrates two distinct modes of secure email communications: SecureLine Escrow and SecureLine PKI.

SecureLine Escrow: For secure communications with anyone, anywhere, you can use "SecureLine Escrow". When composing an email for escrow, the SecureLine-enabled sender will provide an authorization question and answer; something that is confidential and known only to the sender, recipient, and other authorized people. When sent, the secure email message is encrypted and stored in a special "escrow" database at LuxSci. The recipient receives an email notification with the password to the secure message. The recipient then follows a provided link to the "Escrow Portal" to pick up the secure message and to optionally securely reply back to the sender. In order to access the Escrowed message, the recipient needs both the password from the notification email and the answer to the sender-provided authorization question. Thus, SecureLine Escrow allows simple secure communication with anyone who has an email address.

SecureLine PKI: For secure communications with other users of SecureLine and with other people on the Internet who have compatible secure email services, LuxSci's SecureLine also supports a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) compatible with the S/MIME (Secure MIME) and PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) Public Key technologies. In a public key system, the encrypted message content is sent within the email message to the recipient, instead of being placed in escrow for later retrieval; the recipient can easily decrypt and read such secure messages from within his/her usual email program or WebMail. This mode of operation is more flexible and more like normal email usage than the "Escrow" system; however it requires that the recipient be another SecureLine user or someone who utilizes PGP or S/MIME email encryption technologies.

To read more about SecureLine, what features it provides and how exactly it is extremely easy to use, see the SecureLine description.

August, 2005

August 25, 2005

Additional Password Security: When logging into LuxSci's standard WebMail portal, users can now optionally use a visual keyboard to enter their password via their mouse rather than typing it in using their regular keyboard. This is be helpful to those using untrusted computers -- computers, such as those in Internet Cafes, that may be infected with spyware which could be capturing all of their keystrokes. Use of the visual keyboard can help mitigate the possibility that spyware programs running on your computer could capture your password.

August 20, 2005

Account API Additions:

LuxSci's Account API has been expanded to allow account administrators to perform many new functions in an automated fashion:

  • Add and delete domains
  • Add and delete email aliases
  • Get reports on the status of any or all domains in their account
  • Get reports on the status of any or all email aliases and email forwards in their account.

These new API functions are supported by both the Web Services and the CGI Account API interfaces.

New User API:

LuxSci has introduced a User API that allows users to access user-level information and perform user-level functions over Web Services. Currently, User API access is limited to users with an Enterprise WebAide license and it allows these users to: import, export, and synchronize address book data with their WebAide Address Books. It also allows access to some information from the user's current Private Labeled Theme to permit similar private labeling of remote programs and web sites.

July, 2005

July 9, 2005

New Web Services API: LuxSci has extended its Account Management API to support access via Web Services using your choice of RPC or Document Literal SOAP encodings. Detailed help and examples can be found in LuxSci's members' help. LuxSci still fully supports its secure form post-based interface to the same API.

Note that the API is available to all clients at no additional charge. Contact our support staff if you would like API access enabled for your account.

New API Function - Copy Preferences: LuxSci's account management API now supports a new command called "Copy Preferences". This command allows you to copy all of the preferences that one user has to another user in your account. Thus, it is easy to force a user to have the same regional preferences and WebMail behavior as any other user of your choice. User Creation Update: When an account administrator creates a new user via the LuxSci portal or via the API, the new user's complete preferences will be copied from the account's main administrator. Previously, just selected regional preferences were copied. Now, all applicable preferences are copied, making the new user's initial experience as close to that as the main account administrator's as possible.

Note that if you are creating new users via the API, you can optionally specify any existing user from which to copy the new user's preferences.

June, 2005

June 30, 2005

Private Labeling Updates: LuxSci has added a new optional feature to its Private Labeled WebMail that allows account administrators to perform level-1 support for all their clients and escalate issues to LuxSci support only if/when necessary.

Support tickets created by non-administrative users of Private Labeled accounts enabled for this would only be emailed to the account administrators and not to LuxSci staff. LuxSci staff would not generally see and would not respond to these tickets at all -- it would be up to your support staff to do so. If, however, your account administrator needs assistance with an issue, that account administrator can always create a normal LuxSci support ticket asking for help, referencing any existing tickets relevant to the issue.

June 25, 2005

New Email Defense Features: Email Defense has been updated with several significant enhancements. These include an improved user interface and full support for Mozilla FireFox. Additionally, this new release includes the following significant addition:

Sender Policy Framework (SPF):

  • We are adding a Sender Policy Framework classifier to the Spam detection system to help identify and block fraudulent "spoofing" emails – those sent by Spammers using forged "From" addresses.
  • For each inbound message, the SPF classifier will look up the sending domain's Domain Naming System (DNS) record and its list of authorized IP addresses (if such are specified). Messages that carry an IP address not found on the authorized list will be given a higher 'spam-likelihood' score.
  • By determining whether or not the relationship between the DNS record and the IP address is legitimate, Email Defense can more accurately filter out fraudulent spoofed emails. As a result, this reduces risk for end-users who might be duped by the email into divulging confidential personal information.
  • LuxSci supports the addition of entries to your DNS records which will support SPF -- to help make it harder for Spammers to forge email from your domain. If you would like us to add an SPF record to your DNS entries or if you would like help in determining what SPF records to add yourself, contact our support team.

June 19, 2005

Improved Searching of Online Help: LuxSci has improved the searching of its online help to sort and display search results in terms of relevance. This allows our users to find the right help documents faster.

May, 2005

May 28, 2005

New "Bounce" Email Filter Action: LuxSci's custom email filtering tool now supports a "bounce" action. Using this new action, users can make custom filters that bounce selected email messages back to the sender with a "User unknown" error. Other actions already supported by this tool allow you to forward messages, save messages to a selected folder, delete messages, add custom headers, and more.

May 21, 2005

New Inbound Email Forwarding Capability: LuxSci's inbound email capturing tool has always allowed account administrators to optionally forward copies of all inbound email to a single email address of their choice for auditing, archival, or backup purposes. This update to the inbound email capturing functionality allows account administrators to optionally forward copies of all inbound email to users of their domains to the respective users in any other specified domain. I.e. copies of all email to user.com could be sent to user.com for each distinct "user" in yourdomain.com. This features provides more flexibility in using our inbound email capturing tool for backup and archival purposes; you can enable user to user forwarding of this kind for tens, hundreds, or thousands of users with just seconds of total configuration effort!

May 15, 2005

All New Spell Checking Functionality: LuxSci has overhauled its spell checking functionality. The new spelling checker is fully interactive pop-up window allowing you to view errors locations, see suggestions, correct errors, view word definitions and synonyms, and add words to your personal dictionary. The spell checking experience is much like that you would have when checking spelling in an application like Microsoft Word.

In addition to revising the spell checking functionality available when you compose email messages, LuxSci has also enabled spell checking support in its WebAides collaboration tools and its support tickets tool.

May 1, 2005

Global Taglines and Disclaimers: Account administrators can now configure global tag lines and disclaimers that to be attached to all outbound email messages sent by all users in their domain(s). These can be in plain text or full HTML format and can be in any language. Administrators can configure this in the "Outbound Email Tools" section of their Domain Management pages; they can specify different tag lines for each of their domains.
Outbound Email Monitoring: Account administrators can now enable monitoring of all outbound email sent by all users in their domains for specified content -- keywords and phrases. Messages containing searched-for content are logged and can be BCC'ed to an auditing email address and/or blocked from being sent. Wild cards are supported and all subjects, bodies, text attachments, HTML attachments, and message attachments are searched (other types of attachments are not searched).

This feature allows businesses to enforce policies about what types of information can be sent by email from their employees. Users affected by this monitoring are notified in our WebMail interface for privacy reasons.

WebMail Feature Additions: LuxSci has added several new preferences to WebMail. These include:
  • BCC to me: This new preference causes the "BCC" field to be pre-filled with your email address when you send messages from WebMail making it easier to send copies of all outbound email messages to yourself. See this preference in your "Email Composition Preferences".
  • Wrapping long lines: A new preference has been added to your Email Display and Email Listing Preferences. It allows long strings of non-space characters to be automatically broken in certain places so that these long lines can be wrapped. Without this preference, very long lines could force your browser window to be very wide and require you to scroll your window horizontally to see your full message content. By default, long strings of characters are now allowed to be broken after every 80 characters; you can adjust this in your preferences.
WebAide Calendar Feature Addition: LuxSci has added a new preference to its Calendar tool. In your WebAide Calendar preferences, you can now configure the full week display of your calendar to look like the work week display of your calendar -- i.e. where each day is a vertical column and the events are aligned by time along the vertical axis. This is a very useful view if you have monitor large enough to effectively display all 7 days' events.
Account Administration Updates: LuxSci has made several enhancements to its account administration tools. These include:
  • Account administrators can now view and modify their users' General WebMail Preferences in their user management pages.
  • The monthly account bandwidth usage report available to web hosting clients in the Reports page now shows the monthly relative contribution of FTP bandwidth and HTTP bandwidth to the overall bandwidth usage.
  • We have added a new section to accounts' billing information page. For accounts who have opted into automatic credit card payments, this section shows you what billing information was used, who opted into these payments, and when. It also allows you to update the email address and phone number associated with these automated payments and to terminate these payments.
  • WebMail Session Timeouts: Up to now, WebMail sessions have had a 2 hour timeout. I.e. if you are idle for 2 hours or more, you need to re-login before performing a new action. Now, in their advanced account administration page, account administrators can change this timeout to be anywhere from 5 minutes to 8 hours. Users can also configure their own personal WebMail session timeouts in their General WebMail Preferences; this personal timeout will override the account-wide one. However, account administrators can force these personal timeouts to be equal or less than their global timeout if security policies require it.

April, 2005

April 16, 2005

New Web Site Statistics: LuxSci has always provided automated web site statistics that enable you to see your web site traffic in detail. LuxSci has changed the software used to generate these statistics from "WebLog" (which is no longer supported by the vendor) to the "Webalizer". All web site statistics files are now also saved in a directory accessible via FTP so that account administrators can download and archive their monthly web traffic reports (which are otherwise only kept on the server for 12 months).

April 14, 2005

White Paper: Read our latest security article: Recipe: Completely Secure Collection of Web Form Data Using SSL and PGP.

April 12, 2005

White Paper: Read our latest white paper: HIPAA Security Management in Electronic Communications.

April 6, 2005

Press Release: Lux Scientiae, Incorporated Unveils LDAP Shared Address Books; Service Allows Remote Address Book Access From Within E-Mail. Read press release

April 2, 2005

LDAP Address Book Access: LuxSci now supports LDAP access to WebAide address books for users who have Enterprise WebAide licenses. LDAP is a protocol supported by many email clients such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Eudora, and Pine, that allows remote access to address book information from right inside these email clients.

LuxSci's LDAP access features:

  • Access to all of your subscribed address books. This can include your personal address book, as well as address books shared with your by others. LDAP allows you to search all subscribed address books and view the results directly in your email client.
  • Access Auditing. View a complete history of your successful and unsuccessful LDAP accesses in your "My Reports > Access Auditing Reports" pages.
  • Secure. We support LDAP over SSL for additional security for email clients that support this, such as Mozilla Thunderbird.
  • Read Only. LDAP access is read only.

To setup LDAP for your email client, please see the LDAP configuration instructions available in our members' help section.

New WebMail Preferences: Two new preferences have been added under "My Preferences > Email Composition Preferences".
  1. "Automatically include signature text at the end of new email messages?" Enabled by default, turning off this preference will disable the default appending of your WebMail Signature text to the end of new email messages. The pre-existing preference "Automatically include your signature text when forwarding or replying to messages?" allows you to configure the same for forwards and replies.
  2. "Automatically include attachments in forwarded email messages?" Disabled by default, turning this preference on will cause attachments in email messages to be automatically included when you forward these messages to other people. When disabled, you must manually select which attachments, if any, you wish to forward.
Private Labeling Updates: Clients with Private Labeled WebMail interfaces can now choose to remove the list of languages from the WebMail login pages. To do this, simply change the new "Hide Login Languages Options" setting to "Yes" in the "Login Page HTML" settings.

March, 2005

March 26, 2005

General Usability Updates: LuxSci has released a major update to its members' web site. This update includes significant enhancements to improve the look, feel, and usability of LuxSci for both end users and administrators. It also includes a few feature enhancements. These are all described below.

In general, the LuxSci user interface has been changed so that it is "cleaner" and "lighter." Icons have been added to make it clearer. Also, we have re-organized some web pages and menu options into a more logical arrangement, and added additional, consistent navigation to all pages. Some of the pervasive changes include:

Help: We have replaced all "?" icons indicating "help" with the "Need Help? Click Here." links that are clearly visible next to all headings that have associated online help.

Go Icons: We have replaced all "arrow icons" that used to mean "Go" or "Select" with actual buttons that say "Go >" or "Select", in the interest of usability.

Return to: For web pages where it makes sense, we include a "Return to" link at the top right and bottom right of the page. This link is now in a consistent location and allows you to easily return to the previous page or the "next page up" in the site.

See also: For many pages where it makes sense, we include one or more links to related web pages on LuxSci in the "See Also" section on the upper right of the page. This allows faster navigation between related web pages and it also allows the easy discovery of related web pages by new users.


End User Interface and Navigation Changes: For all users, the following changes to their user interface and web site navigation have been made:
  • We have created a new web page called "My Reports" that is located under the "account" menu. This page includes the three reports that were formerly under "My Profile" - the Activity Auditing Report, the Disk Usage Detail Report, and the Recent Disk Usage Report.
  • We have created a new web page called "My Preferences" that is located under the "account" menu. This page consolidates all of the "preferences" pages that existed in various places of LuxSci. The "Regional Preferences" has been moved from "My Profile" to "My Preferences"; "WebMail Preferences" pages have been moved from under the "email" menu into "My Preferences"; the "WebAide Preferences" have also been moved into "My Preferences". Users now have one clear location for all preferences and settings.
  • We have created a new page called "My Email Tools", located under the "email" menu. This page consolidates all of the email tools formerly listed separately under the "Email Tools" and "WebMail Tools" menus. This page also now includes a separate tool for "Email Forwarding" which used to be considered a preference.
  • The User Interface for several of the Email Tools has been completely re- written to make their usage much simpler. The tools that have been revised include: the "WebMail Signatures Tool", the "Email AutoResponders Tool", and the "Fetch POP Email" tool.
  • The "More Options" menu in the Email Message Display and the Email Folder Display has been renamed "More Commands" for clarity.
End User Feature Additions:
  • The "Fetch POP Email" tool has been revised to support secure connections (using SSL) to the remote POP servers to which it connects to download your email.
  • The "Move" email command present in the Email Message Display and the Email Folder Display has been revised to pop-up a little window where you can select the folder to which you wish to move the selected message(s). In the window, you can also choose to create a new folder into which to move the messages. The "Move To New Folder" and "New Folder" commands that were under the "More Commands" have been removed as they would be redundant.
  • In the Email Folder Display page, the icon next to the page title changes to indicate if you have no messages, or if you have new unread messages. This is in addition to the text in the page body that also indicates this.
  • In the Email Composition Page, you can use the new "Spell Check" command to check your spelling whenever you want, rather than waiting until you send the message.
  • In "General WebMail Preferences" under "My Preferences", there is a new preference: "View illustrative icons in WebMail?". This is enabled by default. Turning this off will hide most of the icons that have been added to the Full Members' portal, producing simpler, more Xpress-portal-like pages.
Administrative Interface and Navigation Changes:
  • The Account Administration page has been completely revised. This page no longer shows detailed account information; it is now an easy-to-use index to all of the various account administration tools.
  • A new page called "General Account Information" has been created under your Account Administration page. This page consolidates all of the detailed global information about your account into one location. It contains: general account status, a list of all account limits, account quotas, service levels, permissions, services, and a list of servers to which the account has been assigned.
  • A revised "Web Site Management" section has been added. This section includes all of the features of the old section, but in a new format that is identical to the User Management and Domain Management sections of your account.
  • Your alternate billing address and billing email can now be configured in your "Billing Information" page.
  • The "Email Aliases" tool is now located directly under the "email" menu. It is also one of the main options in your new Account Administration page.
  • If you use our Theme Manager tool for your private labeled WebMail, you will find a link to this tool in your Account Administration page. The "Theme Manager" menu option has been removed from the "web" menu.
  • Users of our Account Automation API will find their API configuration tools under the new "Advanced Administration Tools" pages.
Administrative Feature Additions:
  • The User Management pages have been revised to grant account administrators more control over being able to configure their users without needing to login as the user him/herself. Among other things, account administrators can now review and configure the following email tools for their users: Email Filtering, Basic Spam and Virus Filtering, Email Forwarding, Email Folders, WebMail Signatures, and Email AutoResponders.
  • A new "Database Management" tool has been added under your Account Administration page. Administrators of web hosting accounts can use this tool to manually add and delete MySQL databases in their account.
  • A new "Reports" section under your Account Administration page consolidates all global reports and also includes information about current disk and bandwidth usage.
  • A new "Advanced Administration Tools" page has been added under your Account Administration page. This page gives account administrators the ability: 1. to configure their account's password strength checking rules, 2. to optionally disable the change password tool so users cannot change their own passwords, 3. to enable automatic deletion and/or disabling of users who have not logged in in a long time, 4. to change the main account administrator, 5. to change the default domain for the account, and 6. to change their account disk and bandwidth quota types. Accounts with access to our API will also find their API configuration tools here.

March 17, 2005

Better Business Bureau: Lux Scientiae is now a member of the Better Business Bureau serving Eastern Massachusetts, Maine, and Vermont, USA.

February, 2005

February 21, 2005

Email Guard: New Features Email Guard is a service that has been replaced by Email Defense, but which is still used by a very large number of customers. Changes have been made within the Email Guard Portal and the individual Spam Quarantine Reports to accommodate this upgrade. Users of our Email Defense service already have these features in their Email Defense Portal
  • User policy changes: Domain Policy and user lists can now be downloaded into an .xls spreadsheet format, including Exempt User Lists, Recipient Deny Lists, Anti-Spam Exempt Lists and Users Allow/Deny Lists. Also, after creating Spam Content Groups, messages that contain Spam keywords will be considered as Spam and put in a user's Quarantine. With this feature both current content keywords and Spam content filtering keywords can both be defined
  • User management changes: Administrators can adjust filtering policy actions for users, and can allow users to determine Spam reporting options. The upgrade also allows for the batch deletion of users.
  • Time zone management: Users are now able to select a preferred Time Zone setting, which will then apply to all information with time stamps in the portal.
  • Internationalization: Non-English characters within incoming email messages are decoded and displayed, and current content and Spam content filtering keywords in other languages are now supported.

February 16, 2005

Improved Shared Service Level Agreement: LuxSci has improved its Service Level Agreement (SLA) for shared email and web hosting clients. LuxSci now promises 99.9% or better service availability. For complete details, see our shared service level agreement.

February 15, 2005

Email and Access Auditing Updates: LuxSci has for a long time tracked WebMail logins, POP connections, IMAP connections, and email messages sent via your email servers. You can view reports on these under the "My Profile" section of your account with LuxSci.

LuxSci has made several updates to its facility for auditing user activity:

  • The "Login History Reports" section of "My Profile" has been renamed "Activity Auditing Reports" to reflect the more general nature of the reports that are contained therein.
  • LuxSci now tracks messages sent via WebMail. You will find a history of email messages that you have sent from WebMail under the WebMail reports in the "Activity Auditing Reports" section of "My Profile". This allows you and your account administrators to see when and how many messages you have sent from WebMail, and to how many recipients these messages were sent. As a user, you can also view the subjects of these messages in the auditing reports; however, for privacy reasons, the message subjects are suppressed in the account administrator and technical support versions of your reports.
  • LuxSci now tracks the messages sent from your web sites. You can view a history of the messages sent from each of your web sites under the Web Site Configuration page for each of your sites. Depending on what kind of web site script sent the messages, these reports may track the IP addresses of the web site visitors that caused the messages to be sent and the path to the scripts that sent the messages. These reports allow you to see when and how your site is sending email messages and can be used to make sure that it is not being hijacked to send undesired email messages.
  • LuxSci now tracks the messages sent by users of its web servers. This includes messages sent by users with shell access, by CRON jobs running as individual users, and all other user-specific messages originating on the web servers that are not associated with a specific web site. If you have any kind of web server access, you can view reports of your web server message sending history under the "Activity Auditing Reports" section of "My Profile".
Email Sending Limits on Web Servers: It is explicitly against LuxSci's Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) to send Spam, unsolicited commercial email, or bulk email or any kind from LuxSci's web servers. In order to proactively limit such unauthorized usage of our web servers, LuxSci will be imposing limits on the number of email messages that can be sent each day from the web servers by users and web sites.

Web sites will be limited to sending no more than 500 email messages per day. The web site owner, his account administrator, and technical support will be warned once the web site has sent more than 250 messages in one day and if the web site exceeds its limit.

Users with shell or CRON access will be limited to sending no more than 200 email messages per day. Both the user, his account admin, and technical support will be warned once the user has sent more than 100 messages in one day and if the user exceeds his/her limit.

Once a user or web site exceeds its limit, it will be blocked from sending additional email messages for 24 hours.

The sending limits on web sites can be raised without any additional fees if necessary. If you think that your web site may need to send more than 500 email messages in one day, you should make a support ticket explaining why and requesting a higher limit.

These user and web site sending limits and warnings will NOT go into effect for several weeks. In the mean time, we will be watching user and web site email usage and contacting those users or sites that would have reached these limits so that we can adjust the limits for web sites that legitimately need to send more messages before the limits go into effect for real.

Please feel free to review your user and web site email sending histories as they accrue via the auditing reports and to make a support ticket if you have any questions about these limits.

Technical Note: Our web servers now utilize the special environment variable "SMTPAUTH" to authorize and track your web sites' outbound email usage. Tampering with or removing this environment variable will result in either greatly reduced sending limits or the complete failure of all outbound email to be sent (once the limits are imposed). This is not an issue for PHP scripts, but can be an issue in Perl and other CGI scripts if you modify the environment passed to sendmail. You can tell if you have a problem with this by looking at your web site's email sending reports; scripts with this problem will not have their sent messages recorded there.

WebMail Folder Archival Updates: LuxSci's Folder Management tool (under your email menu) has always supported the "rolling" of folders to dated archival copies on a weekly or monthly basis. This tool has been revised to allow you to configure the interval for archival folder creation to be: daily, weekly, monthly, every several months (2, 3, 4, or 6 months), or yearly. This allows you greater flexibility in managing your email archives.
Password Strength Checking Updates: By default, passwords on LuxSci must be 6 or more characters long, be alphanumeric, and must pass the "crack" password strength checking library. LuxSci has supported additional weaker levels of password strength checking available upon request: 1+ characters, 6+ characters, and 6+ alphanumeric characters. Now LuxSci also supports the following additional levels of password strength checking: 8+ characters, 8+ alphanumeric characters, and 8+ alphanumeric characters that pass the "crack" password strength checking library. Accounts with "API Access" can revise their account's password strength checking level in the API control panel. Other accounts can request a different password strength checking level by making a support ticket.

January, 2005

January 30, 2005

Big Brother: Being Watched at Work and the Truth about Email Security at the Office: Article by Carrie Foor interviewing LuxSci's Erik Kangas about the need for Secure Email. Read this article here.

January 15, 2005

Revised Email Folder Management Tools: LuxSci has released a completely revised WebMail and IMAP Folder Management Tool. The new tool is much more user friendly and supports some new features such as the display of the disk space used by each folder and the ability to force a synchronization between your WebMail and IMAP folders to occur whenever you want. The Folder Management tool can be found in the member's portal under the "email > WebMail Tools" menu.
Revised Members' Help: LuxSci has restructured the layout of its members' help documents to make it even easier to find the documents that you need. The members' help documents are also now searchable! These help documents can be found in the members' portal under the "support" menu.
New "Empty Trash" Command: LuxSci has introduced the new command "Empty Trash" into its WebMail. This command, located under "More Options > Email Folders" when you are browsing the contents of your email folders, allows you to delete and expunge all messages from your Trash folder, no matter what folder you are currently browsing. Previously, to empty your Trash, you had to first switch to your Trash folder, and then use the "Empty Folder" command, then switch back to the folder you really wanted to work with. This "Empty Trash" command should simplify matters considerably.

January 03, 2005

New Affiliate Banner Graphics: LuxSci has released all new banner graphics for our affiliate program participants. Existing affiliates can review these new graphics by logging into our affiliate portal. You can become an affiliate and get commissions for client referrals by signing up here.

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LuxSci FYI Blog

Listen to Our Clients:

"It seems strange that anyone would rave about a 'simple' Email Provider? Seriously, what's there to do, other than pass along emails and house them on a server? Well, that's what I used to think, too...before I set up my account with LuxSci.

The tools offered by this company to handle enterprise and mail order emails are simply fantastic: custom filters that route your email seamlessly, backup/restore services, aliasing and a set of Junk Mail tools that truly makes the SPAM disappear before I even see it. My incoming mail has been reduced from 300 per day to 30 with no 'False Positives'. No email program has ever come close to this level of accurate SPAM filtering.

Perhaps more important is the Customer Service. You're far more likely to wait a matter of minutes, rather than days for a response to a problem. You'll never hear from a Robot, and they actually provide REAL answers to your issues. I've yet to receive the typically condescending, 'Well you need to contact your Email Software Provider'. These guys know their stuff and are more responsive than a 9-11 call.

Am I raving? You betcha. They deserve it."

Rich Lucibella, Publisher, S.W.A.T. Magazine

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