Email Features

• Web-based email access from most current web browsers
• Contact manager for storing contacts, groups, and the company directory
• Select from several different interface languages
• Search messages within specific folders
• Folders, sub-folders, and nested folders
• Preview Pane (optional)
• Conversation View (optional)
• Flag messages for follow up
• Mark messages as read or unread
• Export messages to a zip file
• Mark messages as "urgent" or "low priority"
• Purge all messages in a folder
• Compose messages in Plain Text or HTML format
• Select a default font and font size for composing HTML messages
• View HTML messages in Plain Text format
• Support for Microsoft Rich Text
• Frequent Contacts for quick access to contacts while composing messages
• Address auto-complete
• Ability to request "read receipts" from email recipients
• View message and attachment sizes
• Signatures and multiple identities
• Ability to set vacation messages and preset timeframes
• Ability to set mail forwarding and preset timeframes
• Spam folder, Blacklist, and Safe List
• Mail filtering for sending messages to specific folders
• Ability to sort mail by sender, subject, or date received
• Ability to store sent messages in the Sent folder
• Ability to use emoticons to display expressions in messages
• One-click access to context-sensitive help documentation

We estimate that 85% of all email traffic on the Internet is spam. Spammers are growing wiser on a daily basis, learning new methods to manipulate common spam defenses and obtaining more sophisticated software to trick spam filters and penetrate email inboxes. In order to win the war against spam, businesses must evolve their spam defenses faster than spammers evolve their techniques.

Our Spam DNA Filtering© system accomplishes this by gathering real-time spam intelligence from a number of sources and then actively using this intelligence to block the spam. We track tens of thousands of live spam email characteristics ("DNA"), which alone identify the majority of spam. In addition, a number of third-party spam databases, several DNS checks, and several message-formatting tests are used when analyzing each email. We aggregate all of this data into a collection of several thousand constantly evolving spam tests that are performed on every email that enters the email hosting system. The results of these tests are combined together to identify more than 98% of spam with virtually zero false-positives.

There are two important factors to consider when dealing with spam:

• No single test can identify all spam
• Some tests will falsely identify legitimate email as spam

• Thousands of email characteristics ("DNA") are used to identify spam
• 25 third-party spam databases, several DNS checks, and message-formatting tests are also used when analyzing each email
• DNA and other data are used to perform more than 45 tests on every email
• Tests are combined into a weighting system and assigned a value
• When the total weight of an email is greater than a certain sensitivity threshold it will be flagged as spam
• Integrates with Return Path and Bonded Sender to minimize false-positives
• Sensitivity can be controlled by administrators and end users
• Email users can add senders to their Safe List to ensure that email from these senders is never filtered as spam
• Email users can add senders to their Blacklist to ensure that email from these senders is always filtered as spam
• Email users have several options for handling email once it is flagged as spam
• Email users can choose the exclusive setting, which allows them to block email from senders outside of their safe list
• Email administrators can also manage global spam preferences, Safe Lists, and Blacklists at the domain and the user level

Our dual scanning virus protection scans all inbound and outbound emails using a multi-stage, dual scanner process. The process is broken down into the following four stages:

• Stage 1: Restricted Attachments
  Here, emails are scanned for dangerous types of file attachments. When an email is sent or received that contains a restricted file attachment, the email is rejected and the sender receives a "bounced" email notification informing them of the restriction.
• Stage 2: Normalization
  This stage searches for email formatting vulnerabilities that can be used by viruses to hide from virus scanners. If any vulnerability is found, our system corrects the formatting of the message so that it can be thoroughly scanned for viruses.
• Stage 3: Decompression
  Next, if the email contains any compressed attachments such as zip files, the compressed attachments are temporarily unzipped so that the contents can be scanned for viruses.
• Stage 4: The Dual Virus Scan
  After the above preprocessing is complete; two separate virus scanners are used to scan the email and all of its uncompressed attachments. Everything is scanned twice to ensure maximum protection against new virus threats. ClamAV (www.clamav.net) and F-Prot (www.f-prot.com) are the current scanners of choice, although our system was designed to be able to plug-in any virus scanner on the market, should the need to do so arise.

The calendar is web-based and seamlessly integrates with webmail.

• Create calendar events, such as appointments, meetings, holidays, and special events
• Create recurring events (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly)
• Specify the specific start and end times for the event, or create an all-day event
• Attach notes to events
• Request an email reminder, which can be sent at specified timeframes before the event begins
• Request a pop-up reminder, which will appear on the screen when you are logged in to webmail
• View the calendar according to day, weekend, work week, week, or month
• Create tasks and track them in your Tasks List

The contact management section of webmail provides email users with the following capabilities:

• Create and store names, email addresses, mailing addresses, and other contact information
• Create group mailing lists from your list of existing contacts
• Add contacts to the Frequent Contacts list for quick access when composing an email message
• View up-to-date contact information for users within your domain. This information is specified by your email administrator within the Company Directory section of the control panel
• Import an address book from any email application (Outlook, Yahoo, Thunderbird, Gmail, etc.), and map the original fields to the corresponding fields in the webmail address book (e.g., mapping "Cellular Phone" to "Mobile Phone")
• Export your webmail address book for Outlook, Yahoo, Netscape, Gmail, Thunderbird, and webmail

The RSS Reader provides email users with the following capabilities:

• Subscribe to blogs and RSS feeds
• Unsubscribe from blogs and RSS feeds
• Manage RSS feeds through webmail the same way you manage email—you can flag them, file them, or forward them to someone else
• Read RSS feeds through webmail or your favorite desktop email software like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird
• Turn the RSS reader on or off
• Import or export OMPL feed lists
• Automatically delete old feed posts after a certain number of days or number of posts
• Automatically subscribe users to specific RSS feeds
• Turn the RSS reader on or off for all users