A complete update will be made early next week to provide details of the plans for the seven commitments we made in the Webmail incident report. We had hoped to post this earlier, but have not yet completed scoping and scheduling. In the mean time, our very own Portal Pete has blogged about the work his team have been doing in relation to Spam.
By way of a reminder (And a little bit of commentary), these items were:
1) The ability to change your username
- This has been a real headache to plan. The current thinking is that we will allow a special new "email" account (A bit like a PlusNet PAYG account) to be attached to an existing account, and then customers will be able to choose to use either email address. There is plenty to take into consideration here though and we need to balance a complicated ideal solution against one that customers can take advantage of quickly.
2) Get a free .uk domain name
- This shouldn't take too long for us to provide, but we need to make sure we have any common questions answered, like will the system try to bill for the domain in 2 years time or not (We want to let people have these for free for as long as they remain a customer, but our systems need to know not to pass on the renewal costs Nominet will charge us)
3) SSL encrypted connections for POP3 and IMAP email and FTP
- Extra hardware is needed to support the additional load encryption adds to a server, and this is being scoped out now.
4) Improvements to the ‘Manage my mailbox’ tool
- There are 26 items that we are currently prioritising and documenting fully. Some of these are very quick wins, while others will need some serious software development. We intend to publish this list and an expected time-scale for each item on Monday, but we think we have captured most of the requests customers have made.
5) The ability to blackhole username@username.plus.com
- This is a priority for us, and will be conducted alongside Item 4!
6) Publishing our spam detection rates on our website for comparison with other ISPs
- We are beginning to collect this data and will use it to ensure we are doing everything we can to ensure our spam detection systems are among the best.
7) Publishing our new Privacy Policy and Data Retention policies on our portal.
- This is on track, and is something we want to make sure is shared with customers in the next few weeks.
Apologies that we don't (yet) have any firmer detail just yet....
Ian
