We have released several minor, but useful feature updates today.  These include:

• New Email More Visible: When you have new messages in your current email folder in WebMail, not only will the “get email” button slowly pulsate, but now the title of the window will slowly alternate text indicating that “New Messages Have Arrived”.  This makes the presence of new messages visible even if your window is minimized or if WebMail is not in the active tab of your web browser.
• Empty Trash Tool Bar Command: A new “Empty Trash” tool bar command is available for adding to your WebMail tool bar.  If you find yourself performing this action frequently, you may want to add this tool bar command via your Preferences.
• Auto-Responder Reply-To address: The “Reply-to” email address for email auto-responders is no longer “mailnull@luxsci.net”; it is now the same as your configured “From” address.  This means that “luxsci.net” will not show up in your auto-responders (unless that is part of your email address), and it means that replies to your auto-responders can make it back to you.
• Preferences: The User Preferences pages in the LuxSci web interface have been updated to look better, be easier to navigate, and to make it easier to find the more popular preferences.
• SecureForm: The SecureForm service for securely emailing  the results of secure form posts to you has been augmented.  You can now have any kind of file pre-filled and emailed to you with the form data filled in your configured place holders.  I.e. upload XML, RSS, Text, HTML, or other file types with place holders where your form data should be placed.  These place holders will be replaced with your form data and the resulting file emailed to you.To use this feature, simply follow the same instructions for pre-filling an HTML file and use the “pre-filled HTML” file option with your arbitrary file type.

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.