LuxSci FYI

LuxSci has released several significant enhancements to its email and WebAides collaboration tools services that enable users to use “tags” more extensively to manage, categorize, and sort through their information.

For a long time, LuxSci has provided users with the ability to use tags to label and color code email messages, address books entries, documents, etc.  For details on LuxSci’s tag usage in general, see:

• Email Message Tagging  and Color Coding in WebMail
• Tag, you’re it! Productivity through tagging and color coding

Tags at LuxSci have been enhanced with the following features.

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LuxSci has made some notable enhancements to its web-based user interface:

• LuxSci now supports some of the new features of FireFox v3.5 and Internet Explorer v8.0 that improve the speed of our web interface (native JSON processing).

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To address the request of many clients, LuxSci has simplified the process of picking up SecureLine Escrow encrypted email messages.  This change makes message pickup faster and easier and improves the usability of the SecureLine service overall.

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LuxSci has updated the optional Quarantine Reports that are sent to users of its Basic Spam and Virus Filtering service.  These reports, once enabled, send users a daily email listing any new Spam and/or Virus messages caught by the filters and saved in separate Spam and Virus folders.

In addition to an improved look and feel, several new features are now available in these reports.

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LuxSci has added a new “Account Setup Wizards” area to its administration control panel.  This area brings together all of the various tools for “adding things” all into one place.  Additionally, the tools for adding users, domains, web sites, and databases have been completely re-written to make the administrator’s job easier, faster, and more intuitive.  Lets hear it for usability!

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LuxSci has long supported and recommended the use of security questions for users.  When a user has a security question and answer, LuxSci support can use this as an alternate method of verifying the user’s identity.  This is important when the user has forgotten his/her password or certain types of requests need to be verified.

While we have allowed users to provide a security question for many years, and have asked new account administrators to provide one at sign up for about the last year, use of a security question has never been mandatory.  Starting today, all account and domain administrators are required to have a security question.  Those who do not will be automatically prompted to choose one the next time that they login to the LuxSci WebMail user interface.

Users can choose a pre-defined question, or enter a question of their own.

We hope that this change improves the security of accounts and assists account administrators in recovering access quickly in cases where passwords are lost or where there is a dispute about account ownership.

If this change goes well, we will extend the security question requirement to all users.

LuxSci has added support for the Zend Optimizer to its web hosting services.  The Zend Optimizer:

• Runs PHP applications encoded using Zen Guard.  This is the “most widely accepted PHP encryption product on the market, it protects your application from unlicensed use and reverse engineering.”
• Runs normal PHP scripts faster than would otherwise be possible.

All web sites on LuxSci that use PHP are now automatically being optimized for performance by the Zend Optimizer.

LuxSci also supports the ionCube PHP Loader.

LuxSci’s High Volume Outbound Email Sending Service, released earlier this year, has been a notable success.  Our service permits the sending of legitimate bulk email messages and also provides reliable “smarthost” services.  However, the offering is restricted to SMTP services and does not include the many outbound email processing tools present in LuxSci’s Premium Email service.  I.e. see  LuxSci Outbound Email: 5 Sending Options Compared!

Since High Volume Mail was offered, we have had many requests to send HIPAA-compliant bulk outbound email, i.e. newsletters and notices that contain protected health information (PHI) .  In such cases, SecureLine should be used to encrypt the outbound email in a way that can be opened by any recipient, but which is still secure.  Unfortunately, integration with SecureLine is not a feature of our Basic High Volume service.

LuxSci has responded by releasing Premium High Volume Outbound Email Service.  This is essentially Premium Email hosting with:

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LuxSci has expanded its administrative disk space usage controls to domains.  Administrators can now optionally impose hard disk space limits on a per-domain basis, such that all users in a domain are suspended from using more space once the total space used by the domain reaches a pre-defined limit.

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LuxSci’s email services are versatile, as well as secure. We offer solutions to many problems and meet a diverse assortment of specialized needs.  One important niche well-served by LuxSci’s flexible and highly configurable system is that of parental control — specifying exactly what email should be sent and received by children and keeping tabs on that email, while not restricting the parent’s (administrator’s) email usage.

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