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.

On Friday of this week users with banners turned on will notice a change to the banner layout in Web Mail, which is coincidental and unrelated to the new Ad-Free option. 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.

Again, to choose the Ad-Free option 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 see all your upgrade options there, and Ad-Free Web Mail is the first one at the top. Just click on Enable or on More Info and follow the instructions. Note that if you are already logged into Web Mail when you browse to MyAccount, you'll be automatically logged in under the same email address. If that is not your master or primary address, you'll have to log out and then back in using the master before you can make account changes.

Please continue to provide feedback and we'll continue to make Web Mail better for you. Lots of things are coming up this year.

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:

If we count all the respondents who say they have used Web Mail for over 3 months, AND use Web Mail at least 3 times per week, AND use Web Mail at least as regularly as POP (Outlook or similar software), we get 77% of all the respondents. That's a high percentage of regular and heavy users providing the data. This "self-selection bias" of respondents means we are hearing from engaged users who have an opinion.

28% say they "usually" or "regularly" use Web Mail over dialup. This is a very important group that has specific needs, particularly speed optimization (more on that later).

• 15% use Safari, which is a unique browser shipped on Macs that sometimes has different behavior than IE and Firefox.
• 19% use Mac OSX.

• 9% are using a Windows version older than XP or Vista (at least sometimes, users could choose more than one answer).

These are significant population segments that must be supported.

Next we asked users about general satisfaction.

I've graphed the responses. Here's the results for all respondents combined.

Here's the results for only those users who said they usually use Web Mail over a high-speed connection in question #4.

And for the dialup users:

Both high-speed and dialup users rated "speed" and "features" the lowest overall score of the categories listed. The best overall scores were for "reliability" and "ease-of-use".

High-speed users rated features lowest.

Dialup users rated speed lowest.

High-speed users are generally a little happier about everything, with top 2 boxes averaging 79% vs. 72% for dialup.

Next we asked users to rank the importance of several enhancements we are already considering, in order to help us prioritize them.

The top ranked responses, in order, are:

1. "Auto-save while writing messages so the text isn't lost if I lose my connection."

2. "Never flag a message as spam if the sender is in my Address Book ."

3. "Save my default font settings for writing messages."

4. "Put common tasks in a toolbar across the top of the page."

Some others that were highly ranked by users are:

• "Insert pictures inline in the body of a message."

• "Allow more than 3 file attachments on outgoing messages."

• "Allow easy switching between mailboxes while logged in."

• "Improve searching and sorting in the Address Book."

We then asked three open-ended questions:

74% of respondents answered one or more of these, and 52% answered two or more. Here's the top 20 responses for each one. Some of the same general responses show up in each of the questions (we'll combine them in a minute).

Now let's put it all together, combining the feature questions with the open-ended responses to come up with a top 10 list of what most users want.

Before I get to the top 10, here are a couple things worth noting. In the open-ended responses, a number of users said don’t change anything, they like it a lot just like it is.

A significant number were concerned that "changes" or "improvements" might mean making things fancier at the expense of speed and simplicity, like they’ve seen some other major email providers do. Most users want Web Mail to be fast and simple, rather than trying to imitate a desktop email program inside a web browser.

The most common comparison made to a "good" example, was to Gmail, which is full-featured but still clean and uncluttered. Only a very few users would like Web Mail to be more "like Outlook" or more "client-like" and attempt to behave like desktop software (which tends to hurt performance a lot in a browser-based application). I agree, and we aren't planning to go down that path.

Also note that in all three open-ended questions, a number of users requested a feature or setting that already exists. We released an update in April (right before the survey ran) that has a completely reorganized Preferences section, making it much easier to find the setting you are looking for. If you haven't looked at it lately, click Preferences and see what is available there.

Here's the overall top 10 user needs or concerns:

1. Advertising - in the way; slows me down; animation interferes; I object to it in general.

2. Speed - particularly login time; top issue for dialup users; ads perceived as a contributor too.

3. More personal control of spam - higher block list limit; allow blocking top-level domains; allow custom filters.

4. Storage space is insufficient.

5. Improve the rich text (HTML) compose - save compose font settings between sessions; don't require a toggle; don't lose text when toggling; make it work on Safari; allow inserting pictures inline.

6. Improve the layout - including a toolbar at the top with major tasks.

7. Auto-save text during compose and allow inline re-login if session is lost so no composed text is lost.

8. Improve overall reliability.

9. Allow whitelisting - so that email from my contacts never goes to Known Spam.

10. Improve the Address Book - including searching, sorting, ease-of-use, and syncing.

From the list above I can tell you that we are working on doing something about all of them, and I can make a few specific comments about some upcoming changes.

• There are several changes coming soon that will improve speed. One involves a quicker login step due to a change in how our servers are set up, and that will happen in the next few weeks. We're also doing some things to make sure advertisements don't slow you down. Ads already load last on the page (except login page) for users of any up-to-date browser, so that the pages are ready to use before ads begin loading and you should be able to click anything you want without waiting. A few older browsers don't obey this, so update your browser if you can. We're also working hard to enforce file sizes on banners, and using a stricter standard for dialup users, so that they load quickly. And, we have a new layout coming later this year that should display most pages quicker.

• Advertising - other than the things mentioned above, we're also about to change the main banner placement to one many users have suggested. Up until about a year ago the banner was at the top of the page, and we moved it to the right side. That is being moved back in early June. Not only is the top placement seen as a lesser evil by many users (not as in the way), it is also smaller and will load faster. And finally, the Ad-Free Web Mail option I've mentioned before is almost ready, and it will be available to subscribers in June. More details will be provided soon.

• Items 3,5,6,7 and 10 are on our roadmap for this year and should show up in updates over the coming months. Some other requested items that didn't make the top 10 are also going to be included. We're still working on #4 (storage) but I don't have any update for now. We're working on #8 (reliability) all the time. And I'm trying to get #9 (whitelisting) implemented and should have more news on that soon.

Thanks again for your participation in the survey. You're welcome to comment here on the results or the preliminary plans I've mentioned.

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: