July 2006 Archives

Well, its been a long time coming, but we finally rolled out attachments support for Mailroom last Friday! We’ve been testing it this weekend, and so far things seem to be working great. If you’ve been waiting on attachments to give Mailroom a try, now is a great time to give it another go.

In addition to attachments, we’ve also made some other major upgrades to Mailroom in the last few weeks. Our latest deployment adds forwarding to the Cc and Bcc support we added a month ago. We also moved Mailroom to new servers, sped up the UI, reduced the time it takes to receive new email to under a minute (for emails sent directly to Mailroom), and made some massive improvements to our spam filter.

We’re really glad to have these features finally out, and especially excited to get started on our next round of improvements. We have some new things planned with our UI, suggested replies, and assignment features that I think you are going to love.

Special thanks to Shanti, Peter, and Rob (at OCS Solutions) for all the hard work you put into making these changes the last few months. This has been a big project.

As always, thanks everyone for your tremendous support. We are anxious to hear your thoughts on our recent improvements. Please give it a try and drop us a line anytime.

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What a crazy couple of days for Mailroom. After a few teething issues last week, we made the Big Move for Mailroom this last weekend from New Jersy to Michigan. I’m glad to say everything went very well. In fact, Mailroom seems very happy in its new home. Pages take about half the time they did before to render (which was pretty fast anyway).

One of the things I am most excited about though is the improvements we made to Mailroom’s receiver – the component that receives your incoming email. On our previous setup, Mailroom’s receiving system would need to be reset frequently. Although no email was lost, it meant email would sometimes takes a lot longer to get delivered than we would like.

When we moved to the new servers, we took the time to install some new software components to fix the problems we had with our receiver. I’m happy to say that since we deployed on Sunday, our receiver has worked flawlessly. In fact, most email is being delivered faster now, often in under a minute.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us as we’ve worked to install these major upgrades to Mailroom. We’ve been working on this for almost two months now; it’s very exciting to see it finally work out.

We’re not done though. We have a number of long-requested features ready that will come online in the next few days, so stay tuned!

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You may have noticed some problems we’ve had with Mailroom starting on July 4. We are working very hard right now to correct everything, but I wanted to let everyone know exactly what is happening and why.

About a month ago we decided to move to a new hosting partner, data center and servers because we wanted to make sure Mailroom would stay up and run fast even as we continued to add new customers.

This weekend, we plan to finally make the Big Switch. On July 3rd, we deployed some changes to Mailroom to prepare it for the move. Everything looked good after the deployment so we went home for the holiday. When we got in on July 5, we found our deployment had actually failed in some subtle ways. This caused the problems many of you have experienced, including delays you’ve had with receiving email and problems with emails appearing on your Needs Attention page when they do not belong.

We have fixed the bad deployment and now we are working to get everyone’s account looking like it should again. This weekend we plan to move to our new server setup, which should help to avoid this happening again as well.

I would like to also say that as far as we are aware no email has been lost during this week. We are double and triple checking for that to make sure though.

I’m very sorry for any inconvenience this has caused. We know that a reliable service is very important if we are going to ask you to trust a key part of your business to us. We are making this change to new servers and a new hosting partner to ensure our service will be reliable as we go on.

In order to keep everyone as informed as possible, we are going to post regular updates over the next few days as we clean up from the bad deployment on July 3rd and move to our new servers. You can also email support@sproutit.com if you have any questions about your specific account. We all see and respond to messages to this account.

If you would like to talk to me directly about any of this, you can also email me at charles@sproutit.com. I will respond as soon as possible, though I am flying back to the States tomorrow to help with the move so I will be out of touch until I land.

Thank you as always for your continued support. We really love working with you and we look forward to providing a great quality service in the years to come.

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One of the best ways to make a product viral is to put your branding on your product or service so that when other people see your customers using it, they will learn about you also. Apple does this with their trademark white logo on the back of their laptops. Hotmail does this with the free ad at the bottom of their emails. DropSend does this with their website. (when you use it to share files, those you share with see the logo and learn of the service)

This biggest problem with this strategy for businesses though, is that most businesses don’t want your branding visible to their customers. Your heaviest users in particular – the ones who would most likely spread the word about your – are also the ones who are most willing to pay a little extra to have your branding removed from their site.

Carson Systems, the people behind DropSend, for example, recently introduced a new business plan that costs quite a bit more but offers the option to custom brand your site. Ryan says they’ve seen some great uptake for this new plan, but at what expense?

How do you get small businesses who use your service to tell others about your service without compromising on delivering your customers what they want?

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You may have noticed that our blog has been a little empty for the last month or so. For that, I am very sorry but we do have a good excuse (actually several). All of us have been very heads down the last two months working on some big changes for Sproutit and Mailroom both. We’ll be talking a lot more about these changes in the coming weeks, but here are a few of the things we’ve been doing:

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