News & Information

Domain Direct Billing System Improvement

In this day and age of escalating identity theft, we are taking further steps to protect our customers.  Identity theft can be very hard to determine by online providers, as those who have your information can easily appear exactly the same as you would online.

Using our over ten years of experience, we have revamped our fraud detection system to better protect you.  The only difference that may impact our customers will be a change in the way we handle the billing email contact.  From this time forward, our system will not accept billing contact email addresses using a free email provider.

Many criminal organizations use networks of free email addresses to launder stolen identities to make them appear legitimate.  We believe that we have not only a responsibility to our business interests, but a moral obligation to ensure that our system thwarts these efforts by every means possible.

We will continue to ensure our system remains a place where this type of unethical activity cannot flourish.

Upgrade Update and New Webmail Features

NetIdentity Upgrade
Later on today, we are moving the final batch of data for all remaining customers. This work will run throughout the evening and into tomorrow morning. By this time tomorrow, all customers should have all of their data located in their inbox on the new mail system. Once we have confirmed this, we will be removing access to "mailarchive.netidentity.com". There is some additional cleanup work that will continue throughout the remainder of this week related to the upgrade, but for all intents and purposes, the upgrade will be completed by tomorrow as far as what our customers will see.

General Bug Fixes and Features Launching Today
The email development team has scheduled a software upgrade for later today that will see the following bugs fixed and minor features implemented.

New Webmail Features:

• The "Check POP mail" drop down from the "Check Mail" icon has now been eliminated from the interface, POP mailboxes will be checked automatically when the "Check Mail" button is pressed
• There is now a status column that shows read and unread icons, and is sortable by that field (in the Standard webmail interface only)
• The Safe Sender button is now available in the spam folder for faster safe sender management

Webmail Bug Fixes:

• When people hit back/refresh from the Basic webmail they will be returned to the Basic Webmail as expected
• Blocked and Safe Senders list in webmail now support *, and *.tld as expected. By adding the "*" wildcard to the Safe Senders list, you will be effectively turning off spam filtering your account. We do not recommend this setting unless you have a specific purpose for doing so.
• Folders with spaces in their names (such as "Sent Items" or "Cycling Club") now function properly in the Basic webmail.
• The "Attach" button has been moved to the right of the "Cancel" button to account for long translation strings in other languages.

These features and fixes will be available to All NetIdentity and Domain Direct customers who have moved to the new mail system. As always, please let us know if you have any comments or questions.

E-Mail System Maintenance Notice

When: Saturday November 10th @ 11pm EST to Sunday November 11th @ 3am EST

Webmail will not be available for Domain Direct customers that have been upgraded to the new Domain Direct E-Mail system for 1 - 2 hours during this maintenance window.

For the remainder of the maintenance, webmail customers may experience intermittent login issues.  IMAP and POP3 may be intermittently unavailable for the duration of the window.  Inbound and outbound mail will continue to flow.

This maintenance will be to put in place the new webmail features that Ross spoke about in the New Webmail Features & Upgrade News post.  You will also find that after the maintenance the fully featured webmail that is currently being used, will be loading faster when you login.

New Webmail Features

Even though the mass majority of you haven't been upgraded to the new email system, we have introduced a few new features to the webmail service that you will be especially pleased with.

In this latest update, rolling out today, we've added a full spam management capability to go along with the spam and virus filtering that was already included. In addition to the spam quarantine folder that lets you review any messages that our system has flagged, you can now can mark as "not spam" any message that has been mistakenly flagged as spam. You will also have the ability to report missed spam so we can continue to improve the accuracy of our spam filters. We've also brought back the capability to create and manage white and black lists -- block or allow messages from a single email address or even an entire domain regardless of what the spam filters say -- from right inside the webmail application.

Keep in mind that these features are only available to users that are using the upgraded mail system, but take heart that we are diligently working on getting everyone switched over to the new service as quickly and safely as we can.

Stay tuned for more improvements to the email service coming at the end of this month.

Domain Direct Mail Upgrade: Get Accelerated

In reading through the comments on this blog, I'd really like to be able to help out a few of you get onto the new mail system sooner than was previously scheduled. To help with this, I have reserved a few spots in the upcoming upgrade batch scheduled for next week specifically for customers reading this blog.

If you are a Domain Direct customer and would like to move immediately to the newly upgraded mail system, please send me an email that includes the domain name that you would like to have migrated and we will include you in the next upgrade batch scheduled for next week. If it is possible to move your domain, you and the rest of the users on the domain in question will receive more specifics concerning the upgrade once you have been scheduled into the batch.

Unfortunately, I can only make this offer available to Domain Direct customers at this stage. I would love to start moving some NetIdentity customers over as well, but because the domain names are shared and not solely registered to specific individuals, we need to move all mailboxes on the shared names at the same time which requires a different level of coordination than we are currently engaged in with our Domain Direct customers.

Update: In order to ensure that the batch is properly created and tested, etc. so everything goes smoothly for the next round of account upgrades, I will need to know that you are interested before 10am EST tomorrow morning. Sorry for the short notice, but if you do miss this opportunity, don't worry - I will reserve some space in a future batch as well and make sure that I send out more than a days notice as well.

Update #2: Thanks for the great response. We've scheduled everyone that sent me an email requesting to be added. We have to close the batch now to any new additions so that we can can start the upgrade preparation. If your account gets the green light for the upgrade, you will receive a note from the upgrade team with more specifics. If there are any issues that might prevent you from being upgraded in this batch, I will send you a note directly in the next day or so explaining what next steps look like. Thanks everyone!

General Customer Service Update

I just wanted to pass along a little bit more information about the current status of our customer service quality improvement projects.

There are several facets to this project, but they center around improving the number of trained staff that are available to help our customers, improving the quality of the tools they have available that makes it easier for them to help you, and improving the general skill level of the team so that they are able to provide you with better answers in a timely manner.

In broad strokes, this has meant that we have made a number of changes to our general internal infrastructure - for instance, we have recently completed a total re-examination of our telephone systems and are now in the midst of implementing several changes that will make it easier for you to get in touch with our telephone customer service staff and make it easier for them to help you. One of these changes will be to get rid of the voicemail options. We have noticed that this option has turned into a crutch for us. Long hold times meant that our customers were almost required to leave a voicemail if they wanted some help. By eliminating the voicemail options, we will be forced into a position where it is mandatory for us to answer the call in a timely manner and provide the assistance you are looking for. We will also be working on eliminating the "tree" - the list of menu options that tries to screen and categorize callers before they can talk to a person. The goal here will be to provide near instant access to customer service reps with broad enough skills that they can help you with any issue you might have, rather than making you figure out which buttons to press in the hopes that you might eventually reach some person that might be able to help you.

We are also turfing our existing customer service ticketing systems in favor of a new unified system that will give us a better range of options to help us help you. These options will eventually include a full knowledge base, customer service bulletin board forums, file repositories and much more. For instance, it will allow you to log in and view the status of any question you have ever asked us. We are in the final stages of testing out this new system and we will be rolling it out in the coming weeks. At first, it will only be managing your email questions, so you won't see much in the way of obvious change - except that our responses should come faster and include better information to help you. Over time, we will start introducing the other features that I mentioned. This should happen fairly quickly - I'm not talking about years or months before we roll out the entire system to you.

Part of introducing this new ticketing system means that we have to clear up the existing questions that you have previously sent to our customer service team. 6 weeks ago, there were over 12,000 of these questions outstanding and we were receiving almost 1000 new questions per day. Since then, through our general system stability improvements and a new approach to our customer service activities, we have managed to reduce the outstanding backlog to less than 2,000 total requests with fewer than 500 new ones received per day. We are currently projecting that this backlog will be completely eliminated by the end of this month. This means that we will finally be in a position to live up to the response guarantees that we had previously committed to - 24-48 hour turnaround in answering your email based questions, and less than 5 minute response times for telephone inquiries. My goal is to move to same day response times for email and instant response for live interactions before the end of the summer.

We have also been hiring like crazy. We have held a number of job fairs to recruit new talent to help us with our customer service and we've seen some great results. The second batch of new recruits will soon be coming out of their probation period and will be fully ramped up to help out. The first batch is already doing a great job and are largely responsible for many of the improvements that you've seen in the last 6 weeks or so.

Finally, we have completely restructured the customer service organization. New folks have been brought in to help out, new positions have been created and new operating methods have been put into place. The combination of all of these is really start to show promising results.

If you have questions that you had previously asked, but need help with, please let me know via email and I will make sure that we get you a proper response. If you have any general questions about any aspects of the customer service improvement projects, please feel free to send me an email or use the comments section below.

Domain Direct: Webhosting customer service bulletin

We've made a few adjustments to how we support our webhosting customers that will make customer service operations more efficient and effective so that we can answer your questions in a more timely manner. Previously, our webhosting customer service was provided by our upstream webhosting provider. We believe that we will be able to better support our customers if we do it directly with you rather than outsourcing it.

The details of these changes were sent to all of our Domain Direct webhosting customers yesterday. The following is an excerpt of that announcement:

Our hours of operation are 8am to 8pm EDT (1200 to 0000 GMT). To contact us via telephone, please use 1-877-988-3773. Please note that our email address for web hosting support is changing. Effective immediately, please email us at support@domaindirect.com only. The old email address will be phased out at the end of June, 2007.

If you have any questions about these changes, please be sure to drop us a note in the comments!

General Update

Its been a while since we've done a general update and there's quite a bit of news to get caught up on.

Domain Direct Email Defense Quarantine
As previously announced, this feature has been permanently disabled. The team that was formerly working on trying to keep this feature alive has now been refocused on improving the overall email infrastructure, including deploying the new "spam folder" feature that will replace the old quarantine tool.

New Datacenter

A big chunk of April was spent migrating all of Tucows technical infrastructure to our new home at Q9 Networks. We literally picked up hundreds of servers and installed them in our new facility. The move was an overall success and we saw no negative customer impact as a result of these changes. This was a great demonstration of "how things ought to be done" and I really want to thank the entire team for making some really massive improvements to our overall infrastructure without inconveniencing our customers. By moving to this new datacenter, we are gaining access to some great infrastructure and facilities which will go a long way towards providing more stability and reliability in the services that we offer to you.

New Email Infrastructure

As some of you have noticed, Tucows is in the process of doing some massive upgrades to its email capabilities. After the issues associated with our Critical Path and Communigate based email systems over the past year, it was clear to Tucows management that radical change was necessary to ensure that Tucows customers had access to better technology, infrastructure and service than what our current platforms and systems were capable of providing.

Development of this new email infrastructure started in early November 2006. The first release of this system went live to Tucows staff the first week of January 2007. We have all been using it for our day to day business since this time. Initially we had planned on rolling out the system in the early spring, but it became clear to us that we needed to spend more time working on the webmail aspects of the system than originally planned. This lead us to scrapping the entire original webmail interfaces and working closely with another firm here in Toronto on developing a new set of webmail interfaces that are truly world class (Note: If you are a tech head, Tucows published a great "under-the-hood" look at the new infrastructure on their blog...definitely worth checking out, but pretty technical.)

For us to say that the new system is really cool and better than our existing email services is one thing, but I'd much rather hear that from all of you. To help get this feedback, we will shortly be launching a preview program that will allow you to demo the features and functions of the new webmail system in advance of its launch to our customers. We are also designing a test-drive program that will allow a subset of our customers to upgrade their accounts early and fully experience the new system in a production environment. For those of you that don't want to get involved kicking the tires this hard, we will also be releasing some screencasts and other materials that will help you get a taste of the new features and capabilities without diving in too deep.

We have not yet scheduled the dates for these upgrades to your accounts. We are hoping that this will happen in phases over the summer, but we really want to get your feedback before we turn any of these new features on for your accounts. The goal is to get all of our customers upgraded as soon as possible, but certainly no sooner than is appropriate.

Customer Service Changes
We're making a ton of improvements in the area of customer service. First off, we've managed to get our "question answering" capabilities stabilized. Email tickets and telephone inquiries are all being answered within reasonable time periods. Email and web-submitted questions are being answered within 2-3 days of their receipt by our team, and telephone hold times are well below 15 minutes in peak times, with calls often being answered within 2-3 minutes during slower periods. Our outstanding backlog has dropped by 25% and we are well on our way to reducing it to zero. In the past four weeks alone, we have eliminated 75% of the outstanding backlogs for both NetIdentity and Domain Direct.

We have received complaints from some of our customers that our telephone system is disconnecting them. To deal with this, we have decided to disconnect the phone system. Over the next couple of months, we will be implementing a new telephone system which will a) stop disconnecting you and b) hook into our back-end systems so that we can serve you better.

On a similar note, we are in the process of retiring both the NetIdentity and Domain Direct customer service ticketing systems. Both of these tools are getting long in the tooth and don't let us help you as much as we'd like. Our new integrated system will feature not only a more useful email ticketing tool, but also a full-featured web ticketing system, knowledgebase, IM support and many other great tools that will really help our staff help you better.

Finally, we have ramped up our hiring as well. We have a number of new staff starting over the next 10 days, and we're still looking for more to bring on over the next few weeks. If you know any career customer service people in the Toronto area that might be interested in joining us, please make sure that they get in touch with me. We've got a great work environment, pay well, and have an excellent benefits package.

NetIdentity Changes

We've recently fixed a whole bunch of bugs in the NetIdentity control panel, including a particularly nasty one that was causing login issues for customers using Internet Explorer. Some of the old NetIdentity team sent us a note letting us know that this particular bug had actually been around for years. I'm really glad that it has finally been fixed.

The next big step in our plans for NetIdentity is to allow NetIdentity customers to login to manage their account via Domain Direct. The two systems share a lot of the same features, so it really makes sense for us from a customer service perspective to simplify everything as much as possible. While it makes complete sense for us to continue to allow our NetIdentity customers to login via www.netidentity.com, integrating other aspects of the two systems will make it much easier for our team to provide you with support and service related to the products you purchase from us.

The Last Word
We have a lot of work ahead of us in the next few months, all of which is geared towards putting the customer service and product quality headaches of the past year behind us. We aren't launching new products, we aren't building new features, we're not advertising to new customers. We are 100% focused on making sure that you get what you paid for when you signed up - great customer service, great reliability and great features that work when you need them to.

As always, please use the comments for your feedback and questions and I'll do my best to get you the answers you need.

Domain Direct: Removal of Spam Quarantine Feature for Domain Direct Email

Effective Friday May 4th, the spam quarantine feature in your Domain Direct email accounts will no longer be accessible. We will continue to filter your incoming and outgoing email for spam and viruses.

As of today, you will no longer receive spam reports via email and the various quarantine related settings will be removed from the Email Defense Control Panel. Effective May 14th, you will no longer have access to the quarantine portal.

Background
The move to the updated Email Defense service in March was a failure in some respects, and success in others.

We know that you have experienced significant performance issues with the quarantine reporting and management features. This is the single biggest failure of the new system. Pages take too long to load, error messages are consistently popping up and no one is happy with the results.

Our objective has always been to replace the quarantine system with an easier to use alternative that we could make available to all of our customers. Therefore, rather than attempting to continue to apply patches to a failing system, we have decided instead to focus on building a spam folder directly into your IMAP email and webmail interface. The target for the launch of this feature is the summer of 2007.

What this means to you
If you are like most of our customers, you don't use this feature. If this is the case, then nothing will change for you.

If you do use this feature, it will no longer be available. You have until May 14th to clear out your existing quarantine. After May 14th, all spam and false positive email in your quarantine folder will no longer be accessible and will be unrecoverable.

If you have spam filtering enabled, which most of our customers do, all messages flagged as spam will be automatically bounced back to the original sender but you will not receive notification of this in the form of the spam report.

We realize that a very small percentage of our customers who rely on our email for mission critical applications need a greater degree of control over their spam filtering than our interim solution will allow. If this applies to you, we are strongly recommending that you rely on the desktop email filtering provided by your email client software and turn off our server side spam filtering. Your account will retain ability to turn spam filtering off both for your entire domain and on an email-account by account basis. For instructions for how to turn spam filtering on and off, please see:

Individual account settings:

http://www.domaindirect.com/antispamfaq/account-anti-spam.html

Domain wide settings:

http://www.domaindirect.com/antispamfaq/domain-anti-spam.html

In order to assist you with setting up desktop spam filtering using your regular email software, we have created special instructions to assist you. Please see:

For Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express users:

http://www.domaindirect.com/antispamfaq/filtering-outlook-anti-spam.html

For Mozilla Thunderbird users:

http://www.domaindirect.com/antispamfaq/filtering-thunderbird-anti-spam.html

We remain committed to providing the most effective email and spam blocking solutions available. While we are disappointed that our most recent efforts were not perfectly successful, we believe that this change to the quarantine system will allow us to properly focus on more quickly delivering the more useful spam management features that you have been asking us for.

Domain Direct: Further Updates

We are currently having problems with one of our outbound email servers. If you are experiencing this problem, you will receive the following bounce back message:

“Message delivery to 'email@domain.tld' delayed SMTP module (domain [216.40.35.254]) reports: connection with 216.40.35.254 is broken.”

Email is being queued and will not be lost. Our email administration team is working on resolving the issue as quickly as possible.

Reminder
On Saturday April 28th, 2007, the Domain Direct email servers will be moved to a new data centre. This is expected to occur between the hours of 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM, EST. As a result, Domain Direct's email will be down. Customers will not be able to access their email account but provisioning of new accounts and renewals will still be available. The move to the new data centre is to increase the reliability, redundancy and overall network availability of our services. We apologize for any inconvenience these outages and service delays may cause while we work to improve your user experience.