Rackspace Email & Apps Blog

The folks at Pingdom.com posted some interesting stats a couple weeks ago on what the Internet looked liked in 2009 in terms of numbers.  Who would have guessed that in 2009 over 90 trillion (yes, trillion) emails were sent across the Internet?  Compare that to The United States Postal Service (aka snail mail) that delivered just over 200 billion total packages in 2008.

There are a lot of other interesting numbers from Pingdom on the Internet in 2009 over on their blog.  For your enjoyment we decided to pull out some of the interesting stats below on Email numbers in 2009.

Thanks to Pingdom.com for the stats below.

Email

• 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
• 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 100 million – New email users since the year before.
• 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
• 92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
• 24% – Increase in spam since last year.
• 200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam)

Calling all Rackspace Resellers (and those interested in our Rackspace Reseller program) . . . we’re gearing up for the 2010 Rackspace Reseller Conference in Atlanta, March 8-10, and we’d love to see you there!

We’ve designed this program based on feedback we’ve heard from YOU. And we’re bringing along our best and brightest subject-matter experts, so you can learn to:

• Position your business for success, by understanding the future of Email & Apps.
• Market and support BlackBerry® service
• Help your customers streamline business processes, save time, and manage communication more effectively with the power of Exchange® & SharePoint®
• Generate more revenue at the time of sale and create more value in your install base
• Lead in the File Sharing Revolution by understanding why businesses are moving file sharing and backup to the cloud
• Infuse your business with Fanatical Support® for customer retention and referral generation

For complete information, check out our Rackspace Reseller Conference site. We look forward to seeing you in Atlanta!

Being a Project Manager, I schedule a lot of meetings with members all across our company. Before the new “Group Scheduling” feature, I would have to type in each member’s email address in order to add them to the invite list. This is fine for a handful of people, but when you are consistently inviting 10+ members to meetings, it can really feel like a waste of time.

Here is what it looked like:

But now I simply create a group from my Contacts list and invite the group to the get together.

And it looks like this:

Saving me time and creating a much more efficient way to get my work done.

There’s been some buzz lately about the fact that Microsoft has decided to fully document the Outlook PST storage format and open it up for developers to freely code against.  So what does this mean? . . .

Well, in the short term there are two immediate impacts we’ll see by software developers having deep access into Outlook PST storage format: (1) faster development of Outlook plugins such as Xobni, and (2) easier migration of mail data out of Outlook and into services such as Rackspace Email and Google Apps.  This move by Microsoft will drastically reduce the time it takes to develop these products because developers no longer have to reverse engineer the Outlook storage format.

Longer term, Outlook could become an apps platform where we see all sorts of third-party apps being developed that add value to the core feature-set of Microsoft Outlook, similar to what you see with Facebook Apps today but on your desktop.  However, in order for this to play out, Microsoft will need to do more than just open up the storage format.  They will have to also redesign Outlook with apps in mind so that apps can be easily developed and can feel like an integrated part of Outlook.  They’ll also need to launch some sort of an “app store” model for third parties to distribute their apps, such as what has worked so successfully for Apple’s iPhone apps.

Or this announcement could simply be part of a less-sexy initiative where Microsoft is releasing more of their proprietary specifications in order to make lawyers in the EU and elsewhere happy.  We’ll see.

For many businesses, especially startups, cost is sometimes the unfortunate bottom line when it comes to business expenses. And, even when it’s obvious that the less-expensive product or service is of lower quality, it may be all that the business can afford.

That’s why it’s no surprise that some businesses are attracted to free (AKA “freemium) business apps. Even though decision makers realize that the freemium option is likely going to be unreliable, unsupported, and may even become obsolete, they are often willing to take the chance, in order to save money.

This week, 16 Ventures published The Reality of Freemium in SaaS, and it has resulted in a lot of online discussion about the role of freemium—and, specifically, freemium apps for businesses. Phil Wainewright provided an insightful addition to the discussion in his blog post, Why freemium is bad for business. In his post, he presents four arguments for why businesses should not be “lured into using free” for their business. We believe that one particular point is especially persuading: with freemium apps, vendors don’t invest in instrumentation that is vital for business customers.

We hear from businesses every day who are leaving freemium email services, in particular, for this exact reason. When there’s an email server outage, their business communications come to a standstill—and there’s nothing they can do about it. No one they can call. They are left without their vital communication channel. And if the business experiences data loss, there’s often no backup or disaster recovery system, and no SLA to fall back on. Data loss is a real risk with freemium services, and the inability to recover email data could be a catastrophic loss to some businesses that rely on email for records, documents, and contract management.

At Rackspace Email & Apps, we believe we have a solution that works for even the most budget-conscious businesses. At only $1/mailbox, businesses can have a full-featured, email-with-your-domain email solution, with best-in-class spam and virus protection, collaboration, mobile access, automatic backups, easy data recovery, and the industry’s most competitive SLA. Complete with our award-winning Fanatical Support, available 24×7x365 by phone, chat, or ticket.

So, even though freemium apps may seem attractive in some situations, business users should tread carefully. As Phil Wainewright states, and we couldn’t agree more, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

I love the idea of organization.  But, somehow, the reality of it never quite works for me.  Until now.  My New Year’s Resolution this year is to get organized and I’m starting with my email.

Like you, I get tons of email.  Email from my boss.  Email from my wife.  Email for some service I signed up for and have just been too busy to opt out of.

To help organize all this email, I’ve set up rules in Outlook.  Rules are a like having an awesome secretary who knows when to put your calls through and when to tell the person calling that you’re at the dentist.  Really, besides using Hosted Exchange to get rid of the headaches associated with running your own mail server, Outlook rules are one of the simplest things you can do to get back to doing the things that matter.

Top 8 Rules You Can Use To Get Organized in Microsoft Outlook

• File any email where my name is CC:d in the “My CC:’d emails” folder: Download Rule
• File any email where I am the only recipient in the “Me, Myself and I” folder: Download Rule
• File any email sent with high importance in the “Quick, the house is burning down” folder and flag for follow-up (just in case you missed it coming in) : Download Rule
• File any email from my wife or husband or significant other or, oh…you get the point, in the “Love of My Life” folder : Download Rule
• File any email with the word “Project” in the subject in the “My Projects” folder: Download Rule
• Flag any email from my boss as high importance: Download Rule
• Flag any email from my boss as low importance (Hey, we’ve all got different bosses, so wasn’t sure which you’d prefer!): Download Rule
• Delay delivery of all emails except those marked as high importance by 1 minute—just in case I said something I’ll regret: Download Rule

Can’t decide which rules you want?  Download All

There are just a few steps that you need to follow to import these rules into Outlook and get them up and running (Note: These steps are designed for Outlook 2007).

1)     Click on the above rule you want to download, or download all. To specify where you want to save the file, right-click the ‘Download Rule’ link and ‘Save link as…’. Once you’ve saved the file, unzip it so that you’ll be able to import the rule into Outlook.

2)     Open Outlook, go to Tools > Rules and Alerts > Options > Import Rules.  Find the file that you downloaded and click ‘Open’, then ‘OK.’

3)     Make sure that the rule is enabled by selected the check box next to the rule (as in Step 1).

4)     Chances are you will have to modify each rule slightly to make it work for your exact situation.  For example, you probably don’t have a folder called “Me, Myself and I” already, as in the below example.  To create this folder, click on the blue text (as in Step 2), select “New” (as in Step 3), and finally, select your Inbox (as in Step 4), and name the folder “Me, Myself and I” or anything else that you’d like (maybe “Mine and only Mine” or simply “My Emails”).

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

5) For rules that specify to do something with an email coming from or going to a specific email address, follow the same general steps as above, except rather than creating a folder, specify the email address for your exact situation (see Steps 5 and 6 below). 

Step 5

Step 6

What rules have you created in Outlook that you can’t live without?  Let us know by submitting a comment.  Happy Organizing this New Year!

Reposted from our company-wide blog:

Since the January 12 earthquake devastated Haiti, there has been a critical shortage of supplies, manpower and assistance to help the Haitian people through their crisis.

Beginning today, the hosting community is coming together as an industry to do our part to help in the relief effort by launching a new Website. Although normally fiercely competitive, as members of a common industry, we know we can help far more as a group than we could individually.

We know that no organization is better suited to the integrity of large relief efforts than the American Red Cross. So every dollar donated through our site goes directly to them, an organization that can make the biggest difference in disaster relief.

This is a joint effort between Peer1 Hosting, GoGrid, The Planet, ServInt and Rackspace, but we hope many others in web hosting and cloud computing will join us by making a donation. With the generosity of our combined groups of customers, employees and others, we know we can make a difference. If you’re one of our industry partners and want to join us, contact us [info@hostingforhaiti.com] about joining the cause.

Then, we hope you’ll spread the word by sharing the link and information on the project. Follow the progress of the effort on Twitter by following @hostingforhaiti. Or use the hash tag #hostingforhaiti. It’s all for a good cause and will provide immediate assistance to tens of thousands of Haitians in need.

Stay tuned to see what good things we can do when the hosting industry partners together!

We’re preparing for the third session of our successful Customer Advisory Board (aka CAB) program. We’ve gathered valuable feedback from our CAB members–feedback that has helped us to determine where we should focus our efforts and resources. It’s been invaluable for us, and we’re looking forward to the next CAB session, starting in February.

During each six-month session, we select 30 members–from businesses of various sizes and from various industries–who advise us on how to improve our products. We gather their feedback via surveys, interviews, and internal beta testing, and then we use their feedback to help improve our products and services.

Any time you have ideas for us, we encourage you to send us a comment via our feedback form, or submit an idea to Idea Central. But if you’d like to work closely with our development team and help make an impact on our products, we’d love to have you join us for CAB 3.0.

Interested? My name is Tom DuScheid and you can email me at Tom.Duscheid [at] rackspace.com to join this upcoming six-month CAB session.

Calling all “Geeks”… Next week our own database “geek” Stu Hood will be giving a presentation on Cassandra to a Java user group in Austin, TX. Cassandra is a non-relational database system that excels at storing large amounts of data. It’s a structured key-value store, where keys can map to multiple, complex values. It offers linear scalability and eventual consistency. Stu will describe what Cassandra is good at, what it’s not good at, and the differences between it and a traditional relational database management system.

Here are the details if you would like to join Stu:

When: January 26th, 2010 7-9 PM CST

Where: Commons Lil’ Tex Auditorium – 10100 Burnet Road, Austin, TX 78758

(Tell guard that you’re going to an Austin Java Users Group meeting at the Lil’ Tex in the Commons)

http://www.utexas.edu/commons/maps/

http://www.utexas.edu/commons/rooms/commonslayout.html

There’s nothing like working at the Rack (aka Rackspace)—we work hard and we play hard. And we love being fanatical for our customers. It’s been another great year for us. Here’s a look at our year’s highlights, as well as events that impacted our industry:

• Fortune named Rackspace one of their Top 100 Companies to Work For (again!)
• In the midst of massive layoffs in 2009, we actually hired over 60 new Rackers just for our division (and we’re still hiring!)
• Our CEO, Lanham Napier, was featured on Fox Business
• Email & Apps Rackers were showered with birthday surprises
• Timo Sirainen, the creator of Dovecot, joined the Email & Apps team
• Robert Scoble joined Rackspace and launched Building43
• We crossed a major milestone—hosting over 1.6 million mailboxes
• ReadWriteWeb argued that email is fading away
• We went to SXSW and countered that email is not only alive—it is the king of social media
• Xobni , Cisco, and IBM further proved that email is still alive
• We changed our name (again!)
• We sumo wrestled to celebrate our name change
• The Colbert Report gave us 15 minutes of fame (okay, maybe it was just half a second)
• Our customers sent over 7 billion emails and received over 23 billion emails
• We blocked over 17 billion spam emails and over 500 million viruses
• We safeguarded file systems with automatic backup and easy recovery
• We challenged our neighbors at Modea to a Wii Tournament – and won!
• We helped businesses increase morale in their IT departments
• Our Free Upgrade to Snow Leopard promotion was a huge hit!
• Google won a huge deal with the City of Los Angeles, and it was a win for us all
• Apple admitted that Microsoft Exchange still runs businesses
• We made it easier to move your email to Rackspace
• We launched our very popular Live Chat Support and our new Support Site
• We introduced Sync for iPhone, Search 2.0, and Rackspace Email 7.0
• reMail announced integration with Rackspace, to make email easier to search on your iPhone

Want to help us make 2010 even better? We’d love to hear from you!