Professional Email Services Company Takes Over EMUmail’s Outsourcing Business

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.

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.

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.

Blogs 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 Blog: You can configure your Blog settings to meet your particular needs in terms of usage, display, and access control.

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.

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.

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.

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.