Beta 3 Release

Release date Friday, December 11^th 2009.

This is the final major beta release before launch.

New Features

• Vastly improved accuracy! Our new "grey list" management module is now live. Please note that, due to the nature of handling grey listing mail servers, validation will be slower for email addresses on mail servers that implement grey listing spam protection.

Fixes

• More timeouts fixed. Please note that there may be a few issues with the "delete all" button still timing out. This will be fixed in the commercial version when launched.
  
• Emails that should be "blocked/rejected" were showing as "OK". Specifically , Yahoo email addresses (that cannot be validated due to Yahoo email server configuration) were showing as "OK" and now (correctly) show as "blocked/rejected"
  

Enhancements

• Increased storage. Now check up to 50,000 email addresses at one time
• Page size control is now scrollable (using up/down buttons)
  

Beta 2a Release

Release date Monday, November 30^th 2009.

Fixes

• None

Enhancements

• Improved performance. Changes to processing are now yielding faster validations.
• Storage limit increased to 50,000 emails (was 4,000).
  

Beta 2 Release

Release date Sunday, November 22^nd 2009.

Fixes

• Email checking service hanging (emails stuck in "Pending" state).
• Timeouts on import.
• Timeouts on filter / sort.
• Timeouts on delete.
  

Enhancements

• New hardware. Dedicated servers for email checking. Service is now faster and more reliable.
• Storage limit increased to 4,000 emails (was 2,000).
  
• "What's this" context help.
• "Filter" is now active by default. Click the "filter" button to hide filter options.
• Changing the page size now persists for your session.
• Right click (or CTRL+click for Mac) context menus for grid and campaign management.
• "Refresh" and "Delete Selected" buttons on grid header.

New Features

• File upload. Upload emails in text or CSV format. Recognises and extracts email addresses from text, Excel (save as .csv) and Outlook (save as .csv) formats.
• Campaign Management(keep track of different email lists) . Emails can be assigned to campaigns on import (file import only at the moment).
• Drag & Drop support. Easily manage campaigns by draging emails from list to campaign "tree".

New Video Product Tour

Video Created for Beta Launch

Blog comments: Now working ok

We've been made aware that there have been problems for some of you trying to post comments on the Beta test blog.

These have now been resolved.

Import Errors: Please read.

Several of you are getting errors on import.

This is a known problem that occurs on importing large lists.

As a temporary work around, please paste smaller numbers of email addresses. We've found that pasting around 500 email addresses at a time works well.

Longer term, we'll be providing a file upload capability that is far more scalable than copy/paste.

Day 1 Testing Observations

Firstly a big thank you to everyone that's been in touch today about their experience with trying out the new software. The response has been excellent so far.

Together with your feedback, we've been watching closely what's happening in the background. Already, we're building a picture of what needs fixing and enhancing.

Here are some of the common problems:

Emails stuck in "pending" state

Checking of the emails happens in the background using a server job. On several occasions today, the job has just stopped. We've kicked it off again so far at least 3 times so far today.

We know what's causing the job to stop unexpectedly and hope to have a fix in place in the next day or so.

Timeout on bulk import

We've seen this at least 5 times so far today for different testers. The problem is to do with the large numbers of email addresses being imported in one go.

As a work around, you can cut down the amount of addresses that you import in one go. We've found 500 to be a good number.

Longer term, we'll be putting in an "upload" function (rather than copy/paste) that will be far more scalable and able to handle larger numbers of addresses.

The dreaded - "Oops" error screen

We get alerts every time you see one of these! So far today, we've had a number of these. The good news is that we know exactly what's causing it. It's on the list to fix. Please bear with it.

Lack of documentation / instructions

Several of you have struggled with some aspects of the interface. I've done my best to respond individually to any queries. Hopefully, this got you up & running just for now.

We've outsourced documentation this to get it done. It will appear at some point.

There is some limited documentation here.

All in all, I'm quite pleased with how the first day has gone so far. Most of the issues that we are seeing are kind of expected in any software dealing with large amounts of data.