Web Mail Blog

I was out of the office last week and I'm catching up the pending comments now. I should have them caught up tomorrow. Thanks for your patience.

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Yesterday we added a new option to allow Ad-Free Web Mail for any account.

Click on MyAccount at the top of any EarthLink page and log in there using your master account or primary email address. Then on the left side of the page click on "My Plan Details".

You'll then see all your upgrade options displayed on the right, and Ad-Free Web Mail is the first one at the top. Just click on Enable or on More Info and follow the instructions.

Regular readers of the blog know this is something I've been working on for a while but didn't have specifics of how it would ultimately come out. Many users have asked for this option and have been eagerly waiting for it. I got you the best deal I could (details below), and I know many users will find it attractive. EarthLink allows you the freedom to access your mailbox using any email software of the your choosing, and Web Mail is one convenient way to manage your email. Web Mail doesn't require you to install any software and it can be accessed from any computer and any browser. But Web Mail has always displayed banner advertising and some users object to that. See the FAQ for more discussion on that topic.

If banner ads cause you any trouble or slowness when using Web Mail, or you just find them annoying, or you have a small display and would benefit from recovering that extra screen space, now you can. For 99 cents a month, all Web Mail advertising will be turned off for all your mailboxes, no matter how many mailboxes you have on your account. Most users have 2 or 3 mailboxes, many have 8 or more. The upgrade is just one flat price for all your mailboxes, and it's $0.99. You can make a couple of clicks on your MyAccount page and turn the ads off, and if at any time you want to discontinue the upgrade, you do that the same way.

        Continue reading "Ad-Free Web Mail option now available" » »

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Tomorrow, users with banners turned on will notice a change to the banner layout in Web Mail. About a year ago the main banner on the Inbox page was moved from the top of the page to the right side of the page. At the time that move was made, 15% of our users were running an older 800x600 display size on their computer, and those users benefit from the side placement. There are fewer of those users today, but it is now being put back for two other reasons as well. We now think it is more intrusive on the side for most users, after having it for a while and getting feedback. And, the banner industry is fickle and they are moving away from that skyscraper style now, and they prefer the top placement again.

There were no other changes in this release.

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Thanks to everyone who participated in our recent survey.

I received thousands of responses, and statistically the sample size indicates a 99% confidence level that the quantitative responses (multiple choice) fall within +/- 2.5% of the mean for the entire Web Mail user population. That means the answers should fairly represent most users. There was also great participation in the open-ended questions, where you could describe what you need or would like to see in Web Mail. I added all those answers up too (thousands of open-ended answers and I read every single one) and there were a lot of repeated themes that I'll summarize and rank.

As promised, I'm publishing the full results here. We're still digesting all the information internally and formulating plans to try and better meet the top needs of our users. But you can count on a lot of this information leading to specific solutions.

The survey gathered 3 sets of useful data:

• Web Mail usage by tenure, frequency, connection type, browser, and OS.

• Web Mail satisfaction for reliability, speed, features, storage, and ease-of-use.

• Unmet needs and desired improvements.

We asked 8 required multiple-choice questions for quantitative and ranking data, and 3 optional open-ended questions for additional data on user needs and problems. Here's the results, and some comments summarizing what we learned:

        Continue reading "The Web Mail Survey Results" » »

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We updated Web Mail today, adding a few improvements and fixing a few bugs. Here's a list of the changes you'll notice.

1. One big change is an improvement to the Preferences views. We've organized them into a tabbed view, making it much easier to find the setting you're looking for and making it faster for dialup users. Clicking Preferences in the new release, you'll see this:

   

   All the same settings as before are present, but they're just better organized and easier to get to. Click on any of the four tabs and the related settings will be listed immediately without having to load a new page.

   
   

2. We also updated the pagination control to make it easier to use. That's the buttons at the upper right over your Inbox list, where you navigate through the pages of your Inbox list.

   

   
   

3. Many users who use spamBlocker set to High wanted the default action in the Suspect Email folder to be Delete, since that is used a lot more than the other selections in the drop-down list. So the default selection is now Delete, but the list of options is unchanged.

   

   
   

4. You'll also notice some minor changes to the Date column format in your Inbox list. We made this column a little smaller to give more room for the Subject, and made the display format a little more friendly. Instead of seeing a full date including a 4-digit year, now you'll see something like "Apr 11" for any messages received in the past year, and the full year format will only be shown for messages older than 11 months.

5. And we fixed a few bugs in this release.
   • On the login page, if you have used the checkbox to remember your email address, the cursor will now come up in the password box automatically.

   • Some users couldn't edit their Blocked Sender List, getting an "internal error". That problem is fixed.

   • The setting for "Sign-out Destination" wasn't always being honored, and if certain actions were done during the session (including column sorting) the sign-out would always go to MyEarthLink regardless of your setting. That is now fixed.

As always, please let us know if anything isn't working right, and keep the feedback coming.

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Some users have reported that messages they want to receive in their Inbox are sometimes being flagged as spam and going to the Known Spam folder. This is called a "false positive" when our spam filters mark a message as spam but you don't consider it to be spam and want it to be delivered. There are several reasons this can happen. I'll describe some of those and then describe a solution you can use to help us reduce the number of false positives.

Some common causes of false positives are:

• You have signed up for a mailing list or announcements from a bulk email sender (a company or organization), but many other users are reporting messages from that sender as spam using the "This Is Spam" button in Web Mail. When a sender has a bad reputation as reported by thousands of users, this can result in their messages being filtered for all users.

• A person that you correspond with may have a compromised computer that has become infected with a virus created by a spammer, and their computer is sending out thousands of messages unknown to that user. When that happens, that sender can get listed as a spammer and all their messages might start getting flagged as spam.

• In a few cases, regular message correspondence that is not spam might be incorrectly flagged because it has similarities to actual spam and gets caught by a filter. Your reports help to refine the filters to be more accurate.

If messages that you want to receive are being flagged as spam, please follow these steps and we'll try to get it cleared up:

        Continue reading "When messages you want to receive are flagged as spam" » »

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UPDATE: the survey is now closed. Thanks to all who participated. We'll publish a summary here soon.

  We want you!

Your opinion is needed! I want to make sure we spend our time working on the things that are most important to you. Please participate in the Web Mail survey to let us know what you think. It's only 10 questions, and you can complete it in less than five minutes.

Access the survey by clicking here.

When I have enough responses I'll publish a summary here on the blog.

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A number of users who are using Norton Internet Security 2008, have reported getting certificate errors when navigating to Web Mail. The error will inform you that "Revocation information for the security certificate for this site is not available".

When using Norton 2008, the problem can also happen on other web sites, not just EarthLink Web Mail. Norton has published a support bulletin on their site here. The instructions say that running Norton Live Update will fix the issue.

A similar problem happened last year with Norton 360, and Norton fixed it with an update to their product. So perform the update function built-in to the Norton software and see if that resolves it. A Google search shows me that it is happening to users of Norton 2008 on other web sites, not just here.

But Web Mail is safe to use. The same certificate check is built in to the IE7 browser (Tools / Internet Options / Advanced / Check for publisher's certificate revocation) and if you allow IE to do the check without Norton running, it will pass and not give a security warning.

Again, Norton's instructions to fix the problem are here.

UPDATE: based on a report from user David Schwartz below, there apparently are two separate problems going on here. If you use IE6 without Norton, this problem can occur if you have changed the advanced security settings in the browser. But if you use IE7 (which has that setting enabled by default), the problem only occurs if you do have Norton (not updated). We're working on the IE6 issue now to find and fix the cause if it is on the EarthLink side. Thanks for the report.

UPDATE: the IE6 problem is fixed.

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Currently when Internet Explorer users compose an HTML message in Web Mail, the Return (Enter) key on the keyboard inserts a paragraph space instead of a single line feed. You are using HTML compose (as opposed to plain text) by default when replying to an HTML message, or if you have started a new message and selected "Color & Graphics" on that screen. This allows formatting the text in your message.

The "doublespace" problem has been reported by a number of users and we intend to get it fixed soon. In the meantime there are a couple of things you can do. The best solution may be to use the Enter key only when you want a new paragraph, and otherwise just allow the compose window to wrap your text automatically as you type. Then it will be single-spaced. Any email viewer your recipient is using is going to wrap the text for them too.

If you need to insert a single line feed, a couple of clever users pointed out on this blog that you can do so by pressing Shift-Enter instead of just the Enter key. That will put in a regular line break instead of a new paragraph. Incidentally, it isn't actually "double-spacing" as some have referred to the problem; if there were simply two line feeds you could backspace off one of them. You can't. It is actually an HTML paragraph tag being inserted.

As far as we know the problem does not occur on other browsers, just Internet Explorer. But it will be fixed soon.

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We're investigating recent reports of Apple Safari 3.0x crashing when using Web Mail.

UPDATE: I'm seeking more reports of this problem and we need some specific information to help isolate it. Please provide your OSX version, and your Safari version, and describe the action you took that preceded the crash.

When Safari 3.0 first came out, it crashed on many web sites including EarthLink Web Mail. Then Apple pushed out a software update some time in January that fixed it for a while. See this blog article for more information.

In the past week or so it appears Apple may have pushed out another update that created new problems. We haven't changed anything in Web Mail for several months that would be likely to affect the actions where users are reporting crashes. But a lot of reports have come in the past few days where Safari users are experiencing crashes. I checked Apple's support forums and I see that many users are experiencing these problems on lots of other web sites too. Some users say that the more recent updates from Apple caused this. Some users say they have reverted certain updates to earlier versions to clear up the trouble. We're going to do some tests to see what we can figure out.

In the meantime you might find help and information here:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=876&start=0

My suggestions are:

Make sure you have the latest updates from Apple, and see if that clears up the trouble. If you have a new Mac with the first version of Safari 3.0 on it, it definitely has to be updated to stop Safari from crashing. This is a well-known issue not just affecting EarthLink users. Or if you just have the earlier versions of Safari 3.0 and don't have the recent updates, that may solve the problem. It has for some users.

We're working on tracking down any compatibilty problems that we may be able to control.

UPDATE: A little research seems to indicate that these problems might be related to the Flash player used with Safari. There is a discussion thread about the problem here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6631475

Some users have reported fixing the problem by uninstalling the Flash plugin and then reinstalling the correct one from Adobe. Several users on that Apple forum report that this solution works (copied from the Apple forum, not verified yet):

Adobe FlashPlayer should first be uninstalled using the appropriate uninstaller available here: http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14157&sliceId=2 and then the latest version obtained from here: http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash and installed.

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