Here's a sneak peek (click image to view full size):

I'll be providing more details about which new features get included in the first round when we get close to the release date. The obvious change is a much more usable layout, with tasks on a toolbar at the top and a re-organized folder tree. There will be some other goodies too, so stay tuned. Some of what might be included is listed in this older post, when 6.0 was just a concept. We've refined it a bit since then.

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.

There were no other changes in this release.

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:

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.

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:

  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.

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.

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.

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.

If your sender from Mac Mail attaches the file before they enter the message text, you sometimes won't be able to see the attachment in Web Mail. It seems to only fail on plain text messages, not on HTML text. If they reverse the order and enter their text before they add the file attachment, you will get the attachment just fine. This problem is unique to messages sent from Mac Mail.

There is a related problem where if the Mac Mail sender attaches a file, and then enters HTML text afterward, then sometimes you will get the attachment but won't see the text. Reversing the order when sending fixes it, and it also doesn't seem to occur with plain text, only formatted text. This problem is NOT unique to viewing messages in Web Mail, but happens in most (or all) non-Mac email programs when viewing these messages from Mac Mail, and this one is definitely a bug in Mac Mail. It will happen when viewing the messages in Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, and most other email programs.

Both of these are due to the unique non-standard way that Mac Mail constructs multi-part messages, and these don't happen with email from other sources. We will try to get it fixed, at least the attachment problem. The text problem mentioned second is in Mac Mail and we may not be able to do a workaround for it. Apple should fix it.

In the meantime, ask senders using Mac Mail to enter their message text first before attaching files instead of the other way around, and there shouldn't be any problems.

Here's the two bugs:

• ( FIXED ) - When you have checked the box on the login page for "Remember my login" this prefills your username when you navigate to that page. When you use that feature, the input cursor should load in the password box automatically so that you can begin typing, but it isn't. The cursor is coming up in the username box whether you have that saved or not. So you have to click the password box or press the tab key to put the cursor in the right place. It will take that extra step until we get this fixed.

• ( FIXED ) - When you have changed your Preference setting for the "Signout Destination" and set it to go to the Web Mail login page, that's what you expect to happen. There is one circumstance where this is failing, and the logout is always going to the MyEarthLink page (the other option in Preferences). If you have used the column sorting feature during that session, by clicking on the Sender or Subject column header (or any column) above the message listing, then when you sign out it will go to MyEarthLink regardless of your preference.

I've awarded this second one our "Bizarre Bug of the Year" prize, which began just this year (just today in fact). What does column sorting have to do with the logout preference? I'm sure the developers will figure it out.

Thanks for the reports that helped us find these.

Today's release was actually a big update for our domain hosting customers who access Web mail at webmail.hosting.earthlink.net, since they have not gotten the past few releases and were still on version 5.16.4, while the regular consumer Web Mail at webmail.earthlink.net was already up to version 5.53. So our hosting customers are getting all the updates released in the past five months, all at once. Hosting users can read the prior release notes for 5.50 and 5.51 to catch up on the changes (other release numbers didn't have significant user-facing changes).

The changes included in release 5.54 today are:

1. We fixed problem that would sometimes cause the cursor on the login page to jump back to the username box while you were typing the password. This caused quite a few complaints from users who inadvertently had their password saved in plain text in the username box. It's fixed now and that shouldn't happen anymore.

2. New accounts will now properly save the user's "From Name" entered on the first time user screen. This was not being saved properly since the last release, and is fixed now. The "From Name" is what appears on outgoing email with your email address.

3. Users who have a blank "From Name" saved had been unable to update it and save anything, and that is now fixed. All users should now be able to set and save a "From Name". To set it, just click Preferences / Web Mail Options and scroll down to the From Name setting.

4. Fixed a bug where the Preference setting for Sign-out Destination was not always being honored correctly.

Stay tuned for more updates coming soon, and continue to let us know about any problems, either here or by using the Feedback link in Web Mail.

Web Mail is one convenient way to access your EarthLink email, but like many other Web Mail services (browser-accessed email) EarthLink Web Mail does not currently have a feature to insert pictures inline in outgoing messages. We will be adding the ability to do this in an upcoming release. Currently you can only attach pictures as files to be opened by the recipient. To add attachments to a message, click on Browse at the bottom of the compose window.

You can put pictures inline using most installed email software with your EarthLink account, including EarthLink Mailbox or Outlook Express. You can download EarthLink Mailbox software here, and get setup instructions for that and other email software here.

Like most other users, I look forward to having this feature added to Web Mail and I'm pushing to get it done as soon as we can.