The staff here at Purity Networks has been working hard on some new features and functionality that we’ll be rolling out over the next few months. I wanted to take a few minutes and tell you about some of the things that are coming and approximate timeframes on when you’ll see them roll out:

New Integrated Live Quarantine

We will soon be integrating the Live Quarantine system into the Account Manager.  This will allow us to integrate the logins into one site, rather than having two separate sites as there are now.  One of the advantages of this is that the ability to theme the Account Manager is much more robust than the current Live Quarantine system.
Planned Release: February 2010

Additional Admin Accounts and Fine-grained Access Control

When the Live Quarantine is combined into the Account Manager, one of the major advantages is that we will also be rolling out the ability for our customers to give accounts access to administrative functions.  This access control will be very flexible and will allow the customer to give access to various areas of the Account Manager and even restrict access to specific domains.
Planned Release: February 2010

New Backend Technology

We will soon be replacing the backend scanning technology that we use with a completely new system.  The new technology we’ll be using is the same technology that will be going into our forthcoming antispam appliances.  Many of you know that we currently use technology from MailFoundry as our scanning engine.  We’ve used their products as the core of our service since we launched in 2005, and were extremely happy with their technology until recently.  Unfortunately, we feel that they have not been keeping up with changes necessary to effectively combat spam and other threats.

The core scanning technology we’ll be using in our new backend services and in our appliances is from Cloudmark, and we’ve been testing its effectiveness for several months now.   We’re happy to report we are extremely pleased with the performance and effectiveness and are beginning integration work now.
Planned Release: April 2010

We have some more things planned for this year as well, but I’ll leave those for a later message.  I think the things I posted above are enough to keep us busy for a little bit!

Please let us know if you have any questions or thoughts about our forthcoming changes.

Just a quick note to let everyone know that we’ve made some visual changes to the ReportCenter functionality of our Account Manager, making the graphs quite a bit easier to decipher as well as better color coding.

Over the next few weeks you’ll see some more changes, most notably behind the scenes with the report data itself.  We’re working on expanding the data that we capture and have available for reporting as well as fixing some issues with the data that we’re gathering currently.  We’ll likely also be adding some additional graphs and reports to the ReportCenter.

Have ideas for data you’d like to see, or different ways to present data?  Comment on this post or email us at support@purity.net so that we can take the ideas and suggestions into account as we build out new reporting features.

We’ve made some changes to the login system for the Account Manager that are now live on our production Account Manager.  I’d like to outline what those changes are and the reasons we made them.

What the changes are

• The next time you log in to the Account Manager (or go to the Account Manager if you had your account set to “Remember Me”), you will be prompted to migrate your password.
• During this migration you will be prompted to enter your current password, followed by a new password two times.
• You will also be prompted to enter a Security Question and a Security Question Answer.  The question is a freeform text field that you can put whatever question or other information you like.  This “question” will be given to you as a prompt during the “Forgot Password” procedure.  The answer is the data you will be prompted to enter as the answer to your question.

Why we are making these changes

There are a number of reasons why these changes are being put into place.  First of all, we are using a new method of storing user passwords that provides additional security and utilizes a different hashing mechanism than we used before.  Some additional reasons for this change are:

• We are consolidating user records in our system.  When this process is complete, customer admin accounts and end user accounts will be consolidated into one system to allow for consistency across our systems.
• We will be adding in functionality to allow customers to designate additional administrators.  These additional administrator accounts can be set up as full-fledged account administrators or can be given access to various areas of the Account Manager, including fine grain control down to the server and/or domain level.
• We will be consolidating the quarantine system into the Account Manager, making one place where users log in to see their quarantine and manage their account.  Since we released custom branding options for our customers, the need for a separate quarantine site that is under a different brand has diminished.

At this time, the only changes that have been made have been to migrate existing customer admin accounts to the new user system and add the additional security measures surrounding logins to the site.  As we release additional changes we will post about them here on the blog.

Please comment here or contact support@purity.net if you have any questions or issues with the new system.

Just a quick post to let you know some of the plans for our infrastructure as they stand right now.  We’re open to thoughts and comments on these plans.  We think they’re solid, but other sets of eys/thoughts may come up with something we haven’t thought of.

We’re currently in the process of building out what we call our Edge, which is a multiple server cluster of servers which will handle RBL checking.  The servers that make up this cluster are virtual instances that are part of a grid.  We will be able to automatically add/remove instances to the grid as load requires.  They will be accessed via DNS round robin to distribute load across the cluster.  Messages that pass the RBL checks will be delivered to the appropriate MailFoundry appliance for additional checks.  Messages that pass those checks will then be delivered to your mail server.

We’re also in the planning states of building out a Backup MX service, which will have MailFoundry appliances located at a separate datacenter facility and will be served by a second Edge cluster.  This will be an add-on service, likely for $20-25 per month per ServerProtect account and $2-3 per DomainProtect account.

The primary Edge is up right now and we’re doing testing on it.  We’ve still got some work to do on it, building some reporting tools for it as well as the monitoring and automatic scaling system.  We don’t have a specific release date for it yet, but we’re hoping to have it ready for customer testing within the next few weeks.  The backup Edge will be easy, since it will essentially be a duplicate of the primary with different targets for the MailFoundry appliances.

The Backup appliances and infrastructure are still being planned.  We’re researching datacenters right now.  We’re thinking it will be a couple of months before we’re ready to go with this service.

Any thoughts and ideas are welcome.