Categories
Announcements Changes

Office Phone System Changes

We’ve made a couple modifications to our office phone system that we hope are improvements based on our experiences.

  • The “support” and “sales” options in the voice prompt menu are now using Asterisk call queues. It will keep you in queue for 5 minutes and then prompt to keep waiting or leave a message. It’s still relatively rare that we see multiple simultaneous calls, but the intent of switching to a call queue is to have callers to wait a bit for one of us to answer instead of being dropped directly to voicemail.
  • Time based routing. Our business office for non-critical operations is Pacific time zone daytime business hours. We don’t have someone here answering sales calls 24-hours a day and likely never will. General tech support also isn’t 24-hours since our customer base is pretty self sufficient and doesn’t call for help often, so we can’t justify 24-hour phone staffing at this time. (Although that could change in the future.) So to that end we’ve added time checks to play an “after hours” message and a reminder about the hotline for true emergencies.
  • The hotline is unchanged and continues to work as before, although we have updated the intro message. Our hotline system has been extremely successful in practice.

If any issues come up we’ll adjust and reevaluate as needed.

Categories
Announcements

Webmail Support for YubiKey Two Factor Authentication

We’re pleased to announce the addition of YubiKey OTP support to both webmail clients. This option is disabled by default, but can be enabled in preferences.

  • For Roundcube: Settings -> Preferences -> Server Settings: “Require YubiKey OTP” and “YubiKey ID”
  • For SquirrelMail: Options -> Personal Information: “Yubikey Options”

Two factor authentication is a security method of combining something you have (your YubiKey token) with something you know (your regular username and password). Both must be used together to gain access. But don’t lose your token: a lost token means you’re locked out even if you know your password, so make sure your token is kept in a safe location at all times.

For more information on YubiKey hardware go to: http://www.yubico.com/products/yubikey-hardware/yubikey/

Categories
Announcements

ActiveSync Push Mail Service

For a few years now we’ve had a stealth ActiveSync push service available. It’s existence has been buried in the forums, if you were looking. But now we’d like to give it a wider announcement. ActiveSync support is available with hosted email boxes. The main reasons why we’re not charging for access to this feature are:

  1. We’re simply using the open source Z-Push project to provide ActiveSync support.
  2. Z-Push is stock: we haven’t made any Rollernet specific changes to the original source code.
  3. You could just load Z-Push on your own server, we’re just hosting it on our infrastructure.

Since we’re not making this a extra cost feature that also means it doesn’t have any special support to go with it. If it doesn’t work for you there’s probably not much we can do about it other than clean your ActiveSync profile from the server. We are aware of it working successfully for many customers with complaints limited to things Z-Push simply doesn’t support.

In the future if we do any of our own development work or Rollernet specific enhancements to Z-Push it will most likely become a paid add-on feature. Or if it becomes popular enough that we need to dedicate infrastructure resources to it (since infrastructure isn’t free). But for now, it’s available at no additional cost for all paid accounts.

If you’ve read all of this you’re probably wondering how to use it. It’s simple; just add a new ActiveSync/Exchange account on your device with the following settings:

Server Name: activesync.rollernet.us
Domain: (leave blank)
Use your IMAP mail box login name and password as normal.

The related topic in the forums is: Push Email Support for Cell Phones

Categories
Announcements Changes

Webmail Upgrade: Roundcube 1.0.1

We’ve upgraded our Roundcube webmail option to its latest stable version: 1.0.1. All basic functionality has been verified, but if you encounter any issues please reload or clear your browser cache before reporting them to us.

Categories
Announcements

No Spamhaus DNSBL Support

We have regretfully removed support for Spamhaus from our mail service DNSBL filter. Our paid account structure model unfortunately doesn’t correlate with how DNSBLs like Spamhaus (and SURBL and URIBL) charge for their data: they assume user counts, but at Rollernet we don’t count domains, mailboxes, valid users, features, etc. This is somewhat unique. Most similar providers charge for these items individually or have package limits. In our case our uniqueness of not tracking per-user stuff (which means we aren’t charging for things like total number of mailboxes) and allowing full customization to DNSBL settings (where customers can exclude DNSBLs entirely) is incompatible with other subscription services that assume this cost has been accounted for.

To bring services like these back in the future we may consider adding a special subscription option to allow use of these DNSBLs so that we can track their costs and only apply them to that accounts that are using them. This will allow us to match their pricing models without raising our prices across the board or switching to a per-user model ourselves. If it pans out we’ll post an update. But for now, the removal of support is final.