The Digital West team is excited to release our new Mail platform. We’ve scheduled Saturday, December 15 as the cut-over day, so we wanted to give you a heads-up on what to expect.

Changes to Mail

Desktop clients (Outlook, Outlook Express, ThunderBird, etc.)

For those using desktop mail clients, there should be no visible change and your existing mail settings will continue to work. As a reminder, here are the POP mail settings you should be using:

Username:                     your full email address (must be lower case)

Password:                     your email password (note that this can be reset. See below)

Incoming Mail Server:   pop.digitalwest.net

Outgoing Mail Server:   outgoing.digitalwest.net

• Be sure to enable Authentication for your Outgoing Mail Server
• SSL and TLS connections will be supported by the mail server.

For more information on setting up your mail account see the Knowledge Base articles at http://support.digitalwest.net .

Webmail and user preferences

Those using webmail will see significant changes.  There will be a completely new interface.  User preferences for SPAM settings, Forwarding, Auto-responders, passwords, etc. will be managed via webmail. 

• Support for sent mail and user defined folders is included.  
• Email can be delivered into specified folders based on subject or sender.
• There is a password recovery option available for forgotten login passwords.
• Address book options have been expanded.
• A calendar for appointments is built-in.
• There is an add-on for Outlook 2000 – 2007 that allows synchronization of the address book and calendar between the webmail client and your desktop email client.  This utility may be very helpful for those who use webmail from time to time when they are out of the office.
• There are a number of additional SPAM filtering options that users may configure besides the SPAM threshold.
• For those using hand held wireless devices, there will be a WAP friendly version.

Note that any current Addresses used in the old webmail client will be ported to the new client. This is true for Whitelist and Blacklist addresses as well.

Domain Email Administration

Domain administration will have some new features and several changes in its new interface.

• The domain administrators will be able to set mailbox disk usage quotas for each user.
• Domain administrators will no longer log in with an email address, but will instead have a separate role account.
• Each account will be receiving updated login information prior to the change-over.
• Domain administrators will be limited by the plan values with respect to the number of mailboxes and disk space quotas they can allocate.  Extra mailboxes/disk space has to be ordered before these can be assigned for use.
• Disk space has been significantly increased under the new mail program!

Other changes

• New hardware is being rolled out in a configuration that will allow for better scaling and fail-over in the event of a hardware problem. 
• Virus and SPAM filtering has been enhanced and much of the SPAM will be rejected rather than delivered to the Junk Mail folders.
• Additional changes will be added with respect to outgoing emails to improve their deliverability (Domain Keys and Sender Policy Framework)

We look forward to releasing this new mail platform. We anticipate a smooth transition and look forward to some great feedback.