A look back at the first few days of mailbox.org

2014-02-24

We had hoped for positive feedback, but the response we received last Friday was nothing short of amazing. We were delighted to receive hundreds of positive, encouraging, and excited e-mails and we were touched by the fact that so many users invested a lot of time and energy in taking a close look at our service, asking questions, and offering serious suggestions for improvement.

Last Friday – within just a short period of time – over 2,000 users registered with our service and our support team took a special weekend shift to respond to around 500 support tickets and other requests for information. Thank you!

Difficulties

We had a few problems with regard to accessibility over the weekend and on Monday morning. Although we have a lot of experience operating large web and mail server clusters, we encountered two quirks involving the interaction between our Office software and our mail cluster that we had not discovered prior to this. Ultimately, we were faced with capacity problems and difficulties logging in to the web Office and connecting using CalDAV, etc. As of 11 a.m. today, these problems have been identified and resolved.

We apologize for any inconvenience. However, this weekend – particularly on Saturday – there were a number of serious problems at data centers in Düsseldorf and Berlin. These problems had nothing to do with our service and did not affect our servers. There were multiple denial-of-service attacks against another customer in those data centers, meaning that someone was trying to disrupt their servers. These attacks also affected all other users whose data was ‘just trying to squeeze by.’ Over the course of the day on Saturday, there were multiple ten-minute disruptions to different parts of the network in Germany. Again, this had nothing to do with us.

If you noticed a few strange things over the weekend, this may be the reason. Please try again. If you are still experiencing problems, contact our support team.

In addition, users are still having a few problems creating e-mail filters. In certain situations, the program fails to edit the e-mail filter and activate the encrypted mailbox. This error is not related to our servers; it is caused by problems in the Office interface. We have reported the bug to the manufacturer of the Office software and ask for your patience through the minor difficulties we are experiencing in the launch phase.

Outlook, ActiveSync, Android Sync, WebDAV/Linux, OX Drive

In short, it is questions about these services that make up the bulk of our customer inquiries. We have written a number of new Help articles to address these questions (Frequently Asked Questions = FAQ). Have a look at our Help section every so often: https://mailbox.org/en/help/. We add new articles every few hours. Our support team is always on call working to answer each question individually. We want to answer all questions quickly and promptly, so please understand that for standard questions, we will often only have time to provide a short response with a link to our FAQ. Brief overview of the top five questions:

Outlook 2011: Doesn’t work because Outlook uses only RC4 SSL encryption, which is not trustworthy.
ActiveSync/smartphone synchronization: Works, but there are a few special conditions to note (Windows/Mac, Android, iOS)
WebDAV/Linux: Of course you can also access your data from your mailbox.org Office DRIVE using WebDAV. You can use the DAV protocol to access this data directly as a network drive, particularly as a Linux user.
OX Drive app for Windows: There is currently a technical problem in which the Windows app still denies SSL access. This is not a problem with Linux. We have contacted the manufacturer about this problem.
Outlook Connector: Here there are a number of different issues.

Additional requests for us: Work in progress

Many users have requested that we expand our service to include additional functions and features. See https://mailbox.org/en/work-in-progress/ for a list of features we are currently working on. These new functions will be available for you as soon as possible. This page is updated frequently and also includes status reports about current problems or changes.

Use of individual domains

We were surprised by the number of requests we received for the use of individual mail domains at mailbox.org. Until now, we have always said that this is not possible. We didn’t expect that there would be this much interest. However, things have certainly changed. If you are interested in this service, you can follow the status of our work in the FAQ article: https://mailbox.org/en/can-i-use-e-mail-addresses-from-my-own-domain-with-mailbox-org/

Questions or concerns? Compliments or criticisms?

Thank you for your encouraging and motivating e-mails over the past few days – we received literally hundreds. There were also a number of lively discussions on Internet forums as well as on Facebook. Our colleagues are very pleased with this feedback. I mean, we have all spent weeks working overtime, nights, and weekends.

Feel free to contact our support team with any compliments, criticisms, and suggestions for improvement.

Please understand that it may take us a few days to respond to messages that are not urgent in nature. If you would like to really encourage our team (and other users) and share your opinions and experiences regarding our services, please feel free to leave a public comment on our feedback page.

Sunny Greetings from Berlin!

Peer Heinlein