Web Mail Blog

A couple updates:

First, and most importantly, we're listening to your feedback. Lots of people voiced an opinion about the new logout destination being inconvenient for them or otherwise undesirable. So we're adding an option to allow you to control that. If you want to have the old behavior of returning to the login page, you'll be able to do that. That option should be ready sometime in June. Thanks to everyone who commented on the change.

Secondly, we have fixed the issue that started yesterday, where links in some HTML emails were not clickable. That should now be be working again in all cases. Let me know if any problems remain.

And lastly, there are a couple other changes on the horizon that affect the impact of advertisements when using Web Mail. The change to the ad position yesterday got a mixed reaction, with some users liking it and some not. In Web Mail 6.0 (see preview here) you will have the ability to hide the left panel and gain a lot of horizontal real estate for your Inbox content. That recovers any width lost to the new ad position, and then some. And yes, I can confirm now that we will have an upgrade option in a few months that will provide an ad-free Web Mail. Look for more information on that later.

Thanks again for all the feedback.

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FIXED

The problem that began today with links in some HTML emails not being clickable, is fixed and being tested now. We should have the fix in production on Thursday afternoon.

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This morning in the wee hours we released Web Mail 5.16. This release has two main changes:

1. We moved the ad banner to a position that improves the usability of Web Mail. Instead of being across the top of the screen as it has been up until now, we moved it to a vertical location down the right margin. This allows your Inbox to start at the top of the page and reclaim that vertical space. We also made sure that the Inbox view (and every other view) has a minimum width that the banner must be outside of, so that users with a small display resolution like 800x600 will have at least the same amount of usable horizontal space as they did before, but now their content isn't pushed down off the page vertically. We still have about 15% of our users running 800x600 display sizes, so this should be a very welcome change for those users especially. And we believe all users will benefit from the change regardless of display size.

   Yes I know many users would love to see the ads go away completely (see the FAQ), but this change helps make them less intrusive for most users.

2. The "Sign-Out" link will now log you out of Web Mail just like always, but then load your myEarthLink page automatically, instead of going back to the Web Mail login page. I don't think many users got a benefit from going back to the login page, other than a visual confirmation that you had signed out. Now you'll get your customized myEarthLink page automatically after you're logged out, and you can use the handy Email Preview there to see when you have new messages and click back over to Web Mail. And if you are one who simply closes the browser when finished with Web Mail, that will still log you out too, just like it always has.

We're following this release immediately with final testing on some very important bug fixes that we're all looking forward to, and those should go out within 2-3 weeks. That build fixes the forwarding of attachments (and as a related bonus I'm told this also fixes some other troublesome MIME types that haven't worked quite right), fixes the spell-checker problem, fixes some issues with the Address Book import, and has some other welcome improvements. I'll provide a full list when we do the release.

I'll be posting an update soon on our new Web Mail 6.0 progress too, which includes many improvements throughout the application. You can see the early preview that I posted a couple of months ago in the Plans section. My next update will give some more detail for your feedback.

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( FIXED )

Some Web Mail problems that were introduced recently are close to being fixed. The two big ones in particular are:

• Forwarding attachments fails for some messages and the recipient doesn't receive the attachment.
  
• Sometimes the spell-check is deleting new text on a reply.

Your feedback and information has been essential to finding and fixing these problems. Thanks to everyone who provided information that helped us find the trouble. And thanks for your patience waiting for them to be fixed.

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( FIXED )

We are working on the problem where users attempt to re-forward attachments that had been forwarded to them, and the recipeint does not receive the attachment. In our testing, there appears to be very specific scenarios where this occurs, and I need your input to help us narrow this down for sure.

At this point the only scenario where we can reproduce this problem is as follows:

1. The message was forwarded to you from a Yahoo account. It was not an original message, but specifically was forwarded to you.
   
2. The message you received contained the forwarded original message as an attachment. That is, you had to click an attachment link in the message you received, in order to see the original content.
   
3. You then forward that message on to someone else, who does not receive the attachment.
   

Any information provided will be helpful, including confirmation of the above scenario. If the above is what happens to you, then comment and let me know. And if there is some other way to produce the problem, let me know that too. Please include your browser version and operating system.

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