We are bringing the new email system online around 11:00am CST on 12/9/2014.   We are bringing it online during the day instead of during a maintenance window so that we can better troubleshoot issues while people are using their email instead of possibly missing messages in the middle of the night when people aren’t using the system.    Also, we’ll have a full staff available to address any problems which may arise.

Fundamental Change in Dealing with SPAM

The new system brings with it a fundamental change to the way we deal with spam.   In the past, we have tagged messages our system thought were spam with *****SPAM***** in the subject line.   The idea was to leave filtering of the spam to the end user.   However, as global spam volume has increased, people are wanting to just not see spam at all.  Also, devices such as phones and tablets have become more prevalent and those devices generally don’t have good filtering capabilities built in.   So, the new system will concentrate on just keeping spam out of your inbox completely.   Spam messages will now be rejected back to sender by default.

What This Means to You

You will now be able to maintain your own “whitelist” (list of email addresses whose email you always receive) and “blacklist” (list of email addresses you always block).  Using these lists, you will be able to “tweak” your Inbox so that you receive very little spam.   We are also providing templates which will allow you to be more or less aggressive in your spam blocking – more aggressive if you want a cleaner Inbox and less aggressive if you want to insure nothing is ever missed by accident.   You can also set up a “quarantine” which is like a server-side junk folder to hold email which our server thinks might be spam.   However, we recommend you only use this quarantine to perfect your rules so you no longer even have to check that folder.   Messages which are quarantined will automatically be removed by the server after 14 days.

Known Issues with Migration

We’ve been working hard to make the migration as seamless as possible and to minimize downtime.  However, with any large change like this, there will be some issues.  Some of those issues we know about and some will be unforeseen.  Issues we do know about are:

  1. Webmail-based address books aren’t going to automatically transfer over.  If you have a large address book stored in the webmail, please drop us a line at support@internetpro.net and we will move it for you.   Please let us know if the address book is stored in the webmail located at https://webmail.internetpro.net or the one at https://mail.internetpro.net (Legacy).
  2. There will be an increase in spam email when the server first comes online.   We have relaxed our spam rules so that we can address any delivery issues which may arise from the new server.  We will be tightening those rules again as soon as we are sure everything is running smoothly.   Please bear with us during this transition as it will be worth the trouble!

 

We will be continuing to post more updates and documentation as we get closer to the Go Live time, so please keep checking our website.