News & Information

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.

Email Preview Program: Webmail UI Changes

I wasn't quite happy with some of the look and feel of the webmail we're using for the new implementation, so I've made a few small changes that hopefully make it easier to use the service. I've increased the base font size by 3 points and slightly modified some of the color configuration for greater contrast and legibility. I've also changed the default font set from Arial to Verdana, which I've always found slightly more pleasing. I'm really interested in any feedback you have on these changes as we will be using the final iteration of the interface from webmailpreview.com for all of our webmail customers.

Also, everyone that has requested a preview account has received one. We still have a couple of spots left in the preview program, so if you are interested, send us an email to "signup@webmailpreview.com" with your NetIdentity or Domain Direct account information and we'll set you up with a free preview account.

P.S. "UI" is techspeak for "User Interface" i.e. what you see when you log in to your webmail.

General: Email Update

Tucows has finally launched its next generation outsourced email service today, which means I can finally share some much delayed detail with all of you about how we are going to make the benefits of all of this new infrastructure available to all of you.

I will post separately about some of the new features that we will be making available as part of this upgrade. This post is specifically intended to provide some much needed detail about the timing of the upgrades.

Our primary goal is to move through these upgrades as quickly and safely as possible. We are well aware of the risks associated with this type of activity and we're bound and determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past. We are also well aware how awful our existing mail experience has been - especially for the NetIdentity webmail customers who have had to suffer with that terrible system for almost a year.

We will be working through these upgrades in several phases -

Phase 1. Starting early next week, new Domain Direct customers will be set up using Tucows new email service instead of the existing system. Unfortunately we are not able to start provisioning new Netidentity customers on the new email service until we complete the full upgrade for Netidentity customers. This is because the entire domain must be enabled for the new service and NetIdentity names are shared. If we provisioned a new NetIdentity customer on the new service, all customers using the old service would be cut-off.

Phase 2. At the same time, we will be announcing an "early upgrade" program for Domain Direct customers. This will allow qualified customers to immediately start using the new mail system in a process that will see their old account shut down and recreated on the new system. This is not intended to replace the thoughtful upgrade process I described earlier, rather, it is solely intended for use by customers who are so unsatisfied with their current email arrangements that they do not wish to wait for the managed upgrade process we are implementing throughout this summer. Details on this program will be made available to qualified customers next week.

Phase 3. Starting July 26, we will begin the process of upgrading customer accounts on a staged basis. We will be upgrading customers in small batches on an ongoing basis over the period of several weeks. We will only move to the next batch of customers once we have determined that the prior batch was properly upgraded and that there are no issues that could potentially cause problems or issues with your email service (i.e. data loss, lack of delivery, etc.) The first few batches will solely consist of Domain Direct customers, but we will quickly starting including NetIdentity customers in these batches as well. The reason for this is that our team has much more familiarity with the Domain Direct system and we believe that if there are any issues related to the upgrade, that we can use the experience we get from doing a few Domain Direct specific batches first to help us better understand any issues we encounter with upgrading NetIdentity accounts.

Of course, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave us a comment.

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: Updates

Quarantine

As mentioned back on the 4th of April, the archived email in the quarantine folder was due for deletion as there should only be a rolling 7 day period.  At that time, there was approximately 30 days of quarantined mail waiting for deletion.  The deletion began on the 18^th.   All Quarantine Messages older than 7 days will be deleted. The former Email Defense System is now retired.

Portal Slowness

The portal has been very slow for the past couple of days. This will be adjusted when queues are flushed of quarantine older than 7 days.  Drive space that is meant to hold 7 days of quarantine was holding 35–40 days worth of email.  The requirements to process the deletion of email along with the drive space usage factors caused the overall slowness to occur.  This would result in mail delivery delays due to the processing power of the system as it passed email through the antispam solution.  We apologize for the inconvenience.

New Manager On-site

Over the past week I have been transitioning from the Retail Services group to the Wholesale Services group.  This means that I will be supporting your services one layer deeper into the Tucows fold.  I would like to take a moment to introduce Tony, who will be taking over as Manager for Customer Service for Tucows Retail Service team.  Tony has been with the Tucows organization for a little over two years and is looking forward to his new role of leading the customer service team into the future. 

General: Customer Service Update

Introduction...
Taking a moment to come out from behind Ross' November introduction of myself under the name Geoff A. My name is Geoff Assing, Manager for Customer Service for Tucows Retail Service team. At various points of my two year trek with Tucows, I have managed the support teams that handle the resolution of your issues at all levels, and have been able to appreciate the challenges presented at all levels of the escalation chain. I came back to the Retail Services group to help lead the customer service team into the next generation, where the first step to improvement involves cleaning up the past.

While this is not an excuse, it is an explanation...

The staff for the Retail Services group are very excited to move towards the future projects laid out to improve your overall customer service experience, but we all know that there is a hurdle to pass before we can proceed. We have been working through the support tickets of the past quite diligently.

Reading the prior posts, I am aware of the commitments that were made, the targets that were expected, and unfortunately, we continue to work through the backlog at this time. Our target of March 10th posted by Ross back in February was applied with the proviso "barring no major issues", and while all escalation levels at Tucows are working hard to fix the known issues, the support staff did experience tidal waves of support inquiries in the past week relating to Email Defense, Domain Forwarding and email services in general.

To give you an idea of the numbers, at the beginning of February, Domain Direct was operating at approximately 5000 messages awaiting a response. One week ago we managed to reach 150 outstanding inquiries, with the latest support request dating back to March 8, 2007. While we intended to declare this week the "all clear" with normal support levels and response times, we have been working to address these outstanding issues. This has impeded our abilities to meet the target response times.

I should also mention that Netidentity in this same time frame moved from 5500 outstanding tickets to 3000. Please keep in mind that these are net values not demonstrating the volume that entered the queues in the past month. These values represent outstanding email requests. Our phone queues received close to 9000 calls during the same time frame. Our hold times have been excessive, with times exceeding an hour depending on the time of day.

Expectations...
As mentioned, this is an explanation, not an excuse. We want to reassure you that we are not ignoring your requests or our commitment to you. We do care and we are doing our best to return your messages. Unfortunately, our staff faces an uphill battle that will require some time. Our aim for March is to handle your current inquiries within 96 hours, and clear up the remaining outstanding items in both email support queues.

As for phone support inquiries, we continue to work on improvement measures to get to your call. If it is possible to have the issue addressed over email, I would strongly recommend taking this route. While our support hours are listed Monday to Friday, 8 AM to 8 PM EST, we have been working 24/7 to complete our catch-up initiative.

For the best visibility of your inquiry, please send your escalations through the appropriate support forms. For Domain Direct, visit http://www.domaindirect.com/supportform.html and for Netidentity, visit http://www.netidentity.com/Support/SupportMain.aspx.

New staff have arrived and have completed their training. This involves ticket handling and an in-depth review of our products, how to support them, and how to resolve your issues in as quick a time frame as possible. Over the next month, we will be working towards improved knowledgebase and self-serve areas. If you have any ideas or suggestions for material that you would like to see, please pass along your feedback as it is always welcome.

As always, thank you for your continued patience and support.

General: Fixing Customer Service

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. (Loosely translated - "My fault, my fault, my most grievous fault")

For those of you that just tuned in, and to make sure that we're all on the same page...

Our customer service stinks.

You know it, I know it and everyone that works here, from the front office to the corner office, knows this as well.

We've got great people and they've got great answers for you, but we haven't been able to get you these answers in anything remotely resembling an appropriate period of time. This is not an acceptable situation and we must fix it. This post outlines how we got you into this mess, and what we're doing to get you out - hopefully in specific and meaningful terms.

First, some history...

Summer 2006 - Customer service was doing pretty good. We introduced telephone support for Netidentity customers and were able to maintain a 24-48 response time for email (weekends and holidays notwithstanding) and telephone inquiries were answered in the order of minutes (as long as 15 minutes during peak times, not hours). In the June, July, August time frame, we received approximately 60,000 inquiries.

Fall 2006 - The wheels fell off the wagon. Because of the myriad of issues associated with the email migration from Outblaze to Tucows Hosted Email service, we received close to 100,000 inquiries between September 1 and October 31. We were only able to answer approximately 60,000 of those. We attempted to try and deal with this volume by bringing in temporary contractors, but the quality of the responses dropped so drastically that we were essentially embarrassing ourselves by letting inexperienced temporary workers answer your questions. We ended up doing a ton of overtime just to get us through the 60,000 we did answer.

Winter 2006 - The volume of inquiries decreased dramatically to approximately 50,000 and we answered almost as many of them - answering 50,000 questions means that we only answered 10,000 questions from the Winter period because we still had 40,000 that we didn't answer in the fall period. This means that very few of you actually got good answers to your questions in a reasonable period of time. We experimented with answering questions by sending out FAQs as mass mailers, but your feedback was quite clear - you wanted a more personal response than an FAQ could provide (and you wanted answers much quicker). It was also during this time frame that we changed management of the customer service team and brought back as many of the old Mailbank customer service staff to help us respond more effectively to NetIdentity customer service issues. We took drastic measures to deal with the extreme circumstances that we had caused for ourselves.

Winter 2007 - Knowing that we were carrying over 40,000 inquiries into the New Year didn't sit well with anyone. Hiring efforts were well under way, but it takes time to find, hire and train good people and even if we got lucky had all the new representatives manning the phones and inboxes answering your questions, the average rep can only really handle 100 or so inquiries per shift! 40,000 tickets would take a full person year to answer. This lead us to the realization that we had to take drastic action to deal with all of your questions. We needed a better plan.

The Plan
Typically, we divide up our customer service reps into groups, roughly 1/2 of them work on Domain Direct issues, and 1/2 on NetIdentity issues. Some of each of those focus on email, and some on telephone calls (the numbers assigned to each vary based on volumes and other factors). This arrangement has proven to be the best way to deal with the regular amount of questions you have for us - typically about 500 or so a day, 7 days a week. BUT, it doesn't permit us enough flexibility to deal effectively with unexpected volumes.

In early January, we implemented an aggressive plan designed to deal with the backlog of outstanding inquiries and get us back to full quality of service for the customer service group for both Domain Direct and NetIdentity by the beginning of March. Put another way, the team is working aggressively on the following guarantee:

Back to normal by March 10.

Normal means:

- no more than a 24 hour average response to email and web-submitted questions
- no more than an average of 10 minutes on hold for telephone inquiries
- all existing questions answered

In order to implement this plan, the team is required to focus almost exclusively on specific channels of support, sometimes at the expense of other channels. The simple fact is that it takes much longer to answer a telephone inquiry properly than it does to answer an email inquiry properly, so as we re-allocate resources to best answer the most questions in the shortest period of time possible, those less efficient channels will see a corresponding drop in the quality of service. This means that telephone hold times are crazy long right now, but it also means that we've dropped the number of outstanding NetIdentity questions down to approximately 4000, and roughly 2500 for Domain Direct. Once the Domain Direct queue is down to zero, most of those folks will then start focusing on the NetIdentity queues to get us back to our Summer 2006 performance levels.

Behind the scenes, we are also working extremely hard to implement new customer service efficiency programs to make it easier for our customer service people to answer your questions more effectively. For instance, the Domain Direct team and the NetIdentity team have historically used two different support systems to help manage your questions. We will be merging these two systems by the end of this month. This will let us be more responsive to your questions. We are also adding more customer service staff beyond those that we've already brought on board.

Tucows has two priorities right now - one is fixing the product quality issues associated with the Email platform. I addressed this yesterday. The other is fixing our customer service quality problems. This has the highest degree of attention inside the company. Last week, Elliot stood in front of 200 Tucows employees at a company wide meeting and asked our staff to volunteer to help answer customer service email questions or provide us with any other assistance that we might need. In response, we now have people from all over the organization help us deal with these inquiries, including Elliot himself. Not a day goes by without someone from our senior management team asking me how the situation is progressing and whether or not they can do anything else to help us help you.

We are fully committed to fixing the responsiveness of our customer service team. We are fully committed to doing this by March 10.

As always, your feedback is welcome. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

General: A (Long) Email Update

Hi everyone,

First off, thanks for your patience since the last update. As I've mentioned fairly regularly, I'm trying not to talk about things we have done yet. You've been completely clear that you are looking for action, not promises, so sometimes updates might not be as frequent as we'd all like (making promises is quick and easy, getting things done takes time...:-)

In this particular case, I was slightly ham-strung by a few factors that limited how much I could talk about - those factors have now been resolved. In any case, its not exactly a secret that few of you are happy with the email service we've been providing. I'm not going to give you yet another review that confirms what you already know - our email service has been substandard for the past few months. We've tried to do as much as we could to make it more palatable. And I think we've made some fair progress, but our general quality is still not as good as it needs to be to ensure our customers get the experience that they are looking for.

As I've mentioned in some past messages, we've been prepping for a major upgrade to the mail service that will address these quality issues. Tucows Hosted Email group has been working on the details of this upgrade at a technical level since October, 2006. Their primary goal was to eliminate the product quality issues that have been affecting Tucows Hosted Email customers who are ISPs, web hosting, telecommunications companies - operations that are very much like Domain Direct and NetIdentity in many respects.

Their work is mostly done. All email sent to or from "@tucows.com" addresses have been using this new system for the better part of a month. The entire Domain Direct/NetIdentity team is extremely happy with the stability, reliability and delivery certainty that has come along with this upgraded system. Now that we are satisfied that this upgraded mail system is going to be beneficial for our customers, we are in the midst of planning out how we get from where we are today - with you using a substandard system, to where we want to be tomorrow - with you using a great system.

So far, the general steps look like this;

1. Tucows Hosted Email team will open up the test environment for use by its resellers (the ISPs, web hosters, etc. including Domain Direct and NetIdentity - we operate on a pretty arms-length basis to the rest of the Tucows team).
2. Domain Direct and NetIdentity then announce their customer preview program (or whatever we end up calling it). The general idea is that all of you will get to use the upgraded system before we roll out the complete upgrades. You will be able to access a fully working version of the upgraded system at the same time as the old system. (I'm sure this will make for some interesting comparisons :) We will use your feedback to improve the product and ensure that it is as ready for you as we think it is. If it turns out we're wrong, then we won't do the upgrade until it is.
3. After the preview program completes, NetIdentity customers will be slowly upgraded in small batches. This will let us perform closer quality control of the upgrade process and if issues do develop, we will be able to address them immediately, or fall back to the pre-upgrade system that you are all using now.
4. When all of the NetIdentity customers have been upgraded, we will do the same for Domain Direct using a similarly iterative approach. Again, we're going to take the time to make sure that each step is performed smoothly to ensure that we don't cause problems for you.

We still don't have our timing down, there are still some details that we're working out that will dictate what the exact dates look like (details that I'll outline in a second), but we believe that step 1 (above) will happen in March. This will lead to the general preview happening shortly thereafter, with the upgrades following that.

General features haven't been announced yet, but I can pass along the following;

1. The upgraded system will feature an entirely new antispam/antivirus system. I don't believe that the Hosted Email team has publicly announced who the new provider is but I can say that its not the Brightmail or MXLogic technology that you are currently using. I expect that the improvements in this area will be an very important improvement for all of you.
2. The upgraded system will feature an entirely new back-end mail processing system that we've architected from the ground up. It will no longer consist of the email software system provided by Critical Path. This means that the Tucows Hosted Email team will not have to depend on a third parties release schedule to fix problems with the core mail service. This will allow them to be much more responsive to our needs, and therefore, allow us to be much more responsive to you. This will put us in position to be fully accountable to you. Even with the old email system that we migrated from in September, we relied on a third party to provide services to us - when these third parties don't deliver, we can't deliver. By implementing this core system ourselves, the buck will stop here, and we're happy and eager to step up the challenge and regain your trust.
3. The upgrades apply equally to Domain Direct customers as well as NetIdentity customers. Once we've completed the preview program and upgrades, all of our customers will have access to the same features. This will eliminate any disparity between the email provided by each of the services, and allow us to be much more responsive in how we support you.

Elliot Noss, Tucows CEO, talked a little about these upgrades from the standpoint of the Hosted Email team in Tucows investor conference call last week.

I've extracted some of the more interesting bits from the transcript for you to read his view of the situation directly. Keep in mind that the audience for these conference calls are the investment community and the content of the calls is tightly regulated by the SEC, so it might not be as informative as you might like, but I'll pass it along for general flavor to give you a better sense of how a priority this all is for Tucows and the Domain Direct/NetIdentity team right now...

"...one of the key highlights for the fourth quarter was the development of a new email platform. We set three goals for our email platform in general -- reliability, operational simplicity and ease of integration.

Reliability is about customer satisfaction. Operational simplicity is about managing operating expenses and being price competitive. And ease of integration is about most effectively bringing on new business.

We've recognized that in order to meet these long-term objectives, we needed to build our own platform. And as a result, we will be moving away from Critical Path as our supplier. The good news is this was not a starting from scratch exercise. Our offering will be mix of three things.

First, there were important elements of provisioning software that we owned as a result of the acquisition of the Critical Path Hosted email assets. Second, we were able to take advantage of important components from our existing provisioning platforms. And third, as was virtually every massively scaled email system, there will be some important components from the open source software work.

We wanted to provide a higher level of responsiveness reliability in anything that we've seen in the market today... We've been using this new system internally for the last month or so. And so far it has exceeded our expectations.

We expected to be available to customers in our test environment sometime in March. The next big we forward, now that we've dealt with the backend, we'll be to address some of the usability issues so that the next advantage you'll see in our email service will be with respect to significantly enhanced webmail.

In the next week or two, we will also be releasing our new anti-spam service. There are two specific benefits to us in the business. At the customer level, it will improve service. We will see catch rates improve plus positive decline and you'll also see a higher level of reliability and performance.

In the short term, we expect to see the biggest and quickest beneficiary of our email and anti-spam systems to be the retail business in general and the NetIdentity portion of that business in particular. Folks running our retail business are extremely eager to take advantage of the new system as soon as we will let them. And we feel that we will have a real and immediate impact on that business.

Summing up, we identified the challenge and we stepped up to it."

- from the Seeking Alpha "Tucows Q4 Investor Conference Call"transcript

Tucows is 100% focused on making this work for you and I'm really looking forward to providing more details in the coming days as they become available. The entire Domain Direct/NetIdentity team is focused on resolving two key items in the first three months of this year - email service quality issues, and customer service quality issues. I've explained some greater detail around what we're doing to improve the email service quality issues in this post, and tomorrow, I will post another message outlining exactly what we're doing to resolve the customer service quality issues, what our renewed service commitment is to you, and when you will start seeing results from these initiatives.

In the meantime, I will be answering some of the questions that have been asked in the comments over the past couple of weeks. I apologize for not spending more time in the comments. As a 7 year blogger, I've never spent a lot of time in the comments of any blog and its taking me too long to work the comments from this blog into my day to day routine. Thanks for continuing to remind me of the importance of taking some time each day to read your messages and respond to them.

General: The Grand Spam Experiment - Update

Back in November, we saw an increase in the number of spam complaints which we had attributed to the general rise in spam coupled with some operational deficiencies associated with our software configuration. Internally, our general belief has been that the anti-spam protection provided to our NetIdentity customers is roughly equivalent to what you can find elsewhere, but that it wasn't necessarily as good as the protection that you get from the big players like Google, and it lacks certain important features like a decent spam reporting function and a quarantine/spam folder. Our view of the Domain Direct spam controls wasn't quite as kind. Tucows has been working on a major upgrade to its wholesale "Email Defence" service for the past year. Tucows Email Defence forms the basis of the Domain Direct anti-spam controls and while it has a great spam reporting tool and a very useful quarantine/spam folder functionality, we didn't believe that it was catching enough spam.

Incidentally, Tucows internal corporate mail has traditionally been filtered by the Email Defence service, and not the anti-spam system that NetIdentity subscribers are using. The NetIdentity anti-spam filtering service is provided by Symantec and is in use by providers like Earthlink and many others.

So with the increase in complaints - a very strong and vocal increase I might add - I grew concerned that the situation might have been far worse than we had thought it was. Finding out how bad the situation really was lead me to start thinking of how we might best figure out what the real answers were - which lead me to implement "The Grand Spam Experiment".

This experiment was designed to test the effectiveness of the NetIdentity and Domain Direct antispam system compared to Hotmail, GMail and Yahoo! Mail. My thinking is that our email service needs to be at least as good as the services provided by the big three, and our overall service needs to be much better (customer service, control panel and the other additional services that we offer above and beyond core email).

What I did was set up brand new fresh accounts with each of these mail providers and then published the new email addresses to exactly one location that I know spammers harvest email addresses from. From there, it was just a waiting game to see which account setup let the most spam into my Inbox.

Here are the relative results....

(you can click on the image to get the full view)

The surprising thing here isn't that the NetIdentity anti-spam measures are more effective than the Domain Direct anti-spam measures, but moreso, that the NetIdentity anti-spam measures were identically effective to the GMail anti-spam protections, which were a lot better than the protection offered by Yahoo!

You will notice that Microsoft's HotMail didn't register any spam at all. This isn't because they caught all the spam, this is because they shut down the account after 30 days of inactivity. A classic case of "you get what you pay for". No account, means no spam! :)

Of course, none of this is scientific, so your individual results will definitely vary. The single biggest variable when it comes to the amount of spam you receive are your personal email habits. If you share your address at all, it will get spam. The more you share it, the more spam it gets. Simply printing it on a business card or signing up for a web service is usually enough to get the spam wave rolling in.

I will continue to monitor these results and will post another snapshot of the data in the not too distant future. We also have some news coming about a massive upgrade to the anti-spam system that will drastically alter these results. It will be interesting to see exactly what the snapshot looks like after the upgrade.

As always, we're keen on getting your feedback. Please feel free to use the comments to let us know what you think.

Tip: URLFixer for Firefox

If you aren't a great typer and spend more time looking at parking pages or browser errors instead of your favorite websites, you might want to check out URLFixer. This great little plugin for FireFox corrects common typing mistakes that you enter in your address bar. For example, if you type in http://mail.netidentity.co or http://mail.netidentity.con instead of http://www.netidentity.COM, this handy little plugin will automatically detect and correct your error.

This is a really handy tool.

You can download URLFixer by following the instructions at this link.

- originally via "Lifehacker"