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.

Thank you all for making 2009 such a great year for us! We’re looking forward to continuing to help you keep your mailboxes clean in 2010.

In the next couple of weeks we’ll be releasing the new API version 2.0, which will make integrating Purity Networks services with your infrastructure much easier. Keep an eye out over the next couple of months for some really exciting integration news as well!

Over the next 6 months we’ll be launching some great new services, upgrading our filtering technology significantly and expanding our infrastructure as well. We’ll keep you all in the loop here on the blog, but be sure to let us know if you have any ideas for new features or services you’d like to see from us!

We wish you all a Happy New Year and hope that it brings you much joy and prosperity!

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.

With the release of UserProtect, we’re working on a new version of the Purity Networks API to incorporate functionality to work with UserProtect and DomainProtect accounts.  We’re still in the early design and development stage, but we’ve started working on the documentation on the Wiki at the same time to give our users input into the design.

Please see the new wiki section to take a look at what we’re working on.  The new version of the API is not going to be a SOAP API like version 1.0 is.  It’s going to be a RESTful API, which is much easier to work with.

Please give us as much feedback as you can so that we can take it into account as we develop the new version of the API.  Have thoughts or comments?  Let us know in the comment section below or in the discussion section on the wiki page.

We’re happy to announce that our new UserProtect service is now available for ordering! See our services page for detailed information.

We’re working on a new version of our API that will include UserProtect functionality, but at the moment it’s not available yet.  We’re hoping to have this available for use in the next couple of weeks.

Please be sure to let us know what you think about the new UserProtect service!

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.