The first version of custom branding on quarantine digests is done.  This version incorporates the custom logo, URL, and from email address, but uses a “plain” grey color scheme.

We’ll be making some changes to the branding in the next couple of weeks to replace the custom CSS that we currently have with specific color selections.  This will allow us to use those color selections to customize the HTML version of the quarantine digest and to generate custom CSS for the website on the fly.  It will also be easier to modify than the CSS for those that are not familiar with CSS.

We had a couple people contact us with concerns about their number of messages and I just wanted to clarify a couple of things.

If you’re looking at your reporting and seeing a large spike on the last day of each month, this is a known issue.  The report data that we get from the MailFoundry appliances has a bug in it when sending daily reports in that it sends the complete month’s data on the last day instead of just the daily totals for that day.  Until this bug is fixed we will simply be discarding the last day of the month from the totals we use for overage billing. To see what type of totals you generated for March, for example, set the end date to March 30th.

The second issue is in the “totals over time” graph in the bottom right.  These numbers are WAY out of whack.  This is a bug on OUR end, not MailFoundry’s.  I’m trying to track it down and get those numbers fixed, but in the meantime, please ignore those numbers.  The easiest way to total up your usage is to total up the slices of the pie chart in the upper left until I get the monthly totals graph fixed.

We’ve had requests for additional reporting data.  It’s high on my list of things to do.  If you have ideas for reports, changes to the existing reports such as how the data is presented, etc., please contact support@interjuncture.com so that we can take them into consideration as we expand our reporting.

Beginning May 1, 2008 we will begin counting messages blocked by RBL towards the total number of messages per account for billing purposes.  As many of you know, we have not been billing for overages at all, so this will not immediately impact anyone.  We are doing this, however, so that you can see total messages eligible for billing starting in May in preparation for us beginning to bill for overages.

Beginning with your July bill (we bill on anniversary, so the date will be relative to your start of service date), we will begin billing for overages.  This will be based on your previous month’s message totals.  Example: Your renewal date is July 10, 2008.  Your overage calculation will be based on service from June 10 – July 9, 2008.

We have always intended on billing for overages.  It’s always been on our product/service pages.  Unfortunately the billing system we use has not made that easy for us to do from a technical standpoint.  We’re moving to a new billing system in the next month or so, however, that will alleviate this problem.

As for the reason behind the policy change on RBL messages, it’s very simple.  Our original intent was to not count RBL messages because they do not require as many system resources to reject as content-based spam filtering.  While that is true, we’ve been making some decisions regarding our infrastructure lately that require us to change how we do things to make our system more reliable for you.

These changes are the direct result of the pure number of SMTP connections our gateways handle, about 70% of which are blocked by RBL.  We have significant capital investments to make in order to make these changes.  It is obvious to us now that RBL messages don’t put as light a load on our systems as originally thought.

Additionally, we use the SpamHaus RBL service as our RBL.  We’ve stretched the limit of how many connections their free, publicly available feed will allow, and its time for us to purchase a commercial copy of their feed.  Again, this serves to remind us that RBL checking does indeed have more of an impact than we imagined.

So what does this mean to you?  For many of you, nothing.  A large percentage of our customers will not go over their base allotted message count, even with the RBL numbers added in.

We will also be increasing the base allotment for ServerProtect to 750,000 messages per month and DomainProtect to 30,000 messages per month, which will put a number of other customers under the base amount.

For those that go over the base allotment, the fees remain the same as they’ve always been published: $15 for each 250,000 messages over for ServerProtect, $2 for each 10,000 messages over for DomainProtect.

With the increase in the base allotment amount, you’re essentially getting an extra 250,000 (ServerProtect) or 10,000 (DomainProtect) messages free.

We wanted to announce this early so that there is time for comments, questions, concerns and suggestions. Please direct these to support@easyantispam.com.

Thank you for your patronage and we look forward to continuing to serve you.

George A. Roberts IV
President & CEO, Interjuncture Corp.

We’ve enabled the new quarantine branding system for our users.  To custom brand your quarantine, log in to the Account Manager and click the link to enable custom branding.  Once you’ve done that, edit your branding settings and input your custom URL, “from” email address, custom CSS, and upload your logo.

A few notes:

• Custom URL: You must DNS this hostname.domain.com to point to the appropriate IP address.  The IP address is listed on the branding screen
• Custom CSS: The default CSS will be entered when you first enable branding.  Feel free to modify as necessary.
• Quarantine Digests are not branded yet.  We should have this finished in the next couple of days.  I’ll post here when they’ve been updated.

Please note that branding is NOT restricted to your domains in any way.  In other words, the “face” of the site is updated with your branding but the internal workings of the site haven’t changed.  All Quarantine users can log in to the site, regardless of the “branded” url they use.

Please let us know if you have any questions.  Please remember that this is still sort of a “beta” feature, so there may be some bugs.  I haven’t found any in my testing, but you may come across some.  If so, please let us know.