The monthly update of the Email Center Pro full-text search index will take place on Thursday, September 2, at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time. Service should not be interrupted, but the search function may be slow while the re-indexing is in progress. It may take up to an hour from the start of the re-indexing for the newest messages to appear in search results.
While we like to think all of our customers are special, our newest Email Center Pro update will fix things for those of you who use “special” characters on a regular basis.
Starting August 17th at noon (PST), you will be able to use characters such as $, %, or \ in your mail signatures and Input Fields, and Email Center Pro will support lengthy URLs containing semicolons.
In addition, we’ve improved the Mailbox Traffic widget on the Dashboard to better reflect your preferred time zone. This improvement can be seen when you set the Date Range in the widget to 12 or 24 hours.
We hope you’re having a great summer, and that Email Center Pro is helping you respond to your customers faster and better. Let us know how it’s going anytime by clicking the “Contact us” link at the top of your screen with questions or stories. We love to hear from all our special customers!
We will be updating the Email Center Pro full-text search index at 5:00 PM (PDT), Tuesday July 27th, to make the search process faster and more reliable. While we do not anticipate any service interruption, you may find search results slow at that time. It may take until 6:00pm (PDT) for the newest messages to appear in search results.
We’re all sick of spam. But we’re even more bothered when we send a critical email that never gets read, because it’s flagged as spam.
Email Center Pro can’t help you write emails with fewer spam trigger words, but we can help you mark your business messages as authentic – from you, at your domain. Next week, we are adding a new managed email gateway, called SendGrid, to ensure your mail makes it to its destination and doesn’t get stuck in a spam filter.
If you already have an SPF record set up for your domain server, you will need to make a small change to it in order for your email to continue to be sent correctly. Full instructions are below. If you are not using the “Send email as” feature in Email Center Pro, this change is not necessary. If you are using it, but you haven’t set up an SPF record, now might be a good time to do so.
We cannot make this change for you, because it’s part of your domain server setup, not part of Email Center Pro. We recommend making this change by Friday, June 25, 2010. If you have an SPF record set up already, and you don’t add SendGrid as an authorized sender, your mail may be flagged as spam, so don’t hesitate to contact us with questions.
Many mail servers use the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) to determine which mail servers are to be considered “authorized” senders for that domain. If you’re not sure whether you already have an SPF record, here’s a tool you can use to check:
If you have not set up an SPF record before, you can do it now.
We provide a link, below, to a SPF Setup wizard.
Click this link to open the SPF Setup Wizard: http://old.openspf.org/wizard.html?mydomain=example.com
In order to list the email gateway as a valid sender, add include:sendgrid.net before ~all or ?all. If you haven’t already added your Email Center Pro subdomain to your SPF record, you should do that now as well, by adding SUBDOMAIN.emailcenterpro.com where SUBDOMAIN is your ECP subdomain (yourcompany.emailcenterpro.com).
The resulting string should look similar to this:
v=spf1 a mx ptr include:sendgrid.net mx:SUBDOMAIN.emailcenterpro.com ~all
where SUBDOMAIN is your Email Center Pro subdomain.
These instructions may sound complicated, but if you have access to a domain control panel, this should be fairly straightforward to set up. We would be happy to help walk you through creating an SPF record and getting it set up in your domain control panel.
As part of our efforts to improve search results, we will be releasing an update to all users of Email Center Pro on Thursday, June 10, 2010, at noon PDT. We do not anticipate any service interuption.
This update changes the default search settings to exclude Spam, Trash, and Deleted email from search results.
If for any reason you need to perform a search which specifically includes these folders, you can still do so:
You can find more tips on using search, creating Saved Searches, and more by clicking the Help link at the top of your ECP screen.
We will be repeating the switch of the Email Center Pro search feature to an optimized server at 5:00 PM (PDT), Thursday June 3rd. While we do not anticipate any service interruption, you may find search results slow for a few minutes at that time.
We will be switching the Email Center Pro search feature to an optimized server at 5:00 PM (PDT), Tuesday June 1st, to make the search process faster and more reliable. While we do not anticipate any service interruption, you may find search results slow for a few minutes at that time.
We have restored the full-text search function for all Email Center Pro accounts. You will need to log out of ECP and then log back in again in order to see the Search function.
Because of the large volume of mail handled by Email Center Pro, we have limited the current search to conversations that have occurred in the last three months. We are continuing to index earlier conversations, and those messages will show up in your search results as they become available.
We hate to see problems in the software, both as its creators and its users. The origin of this week’s problems has been found and corrected. We sincerely appreciate your patience as we fixed the problem and restored service.
More information: (more…)
The intermittent “server error” has now been resolved and service is back to normal, but the search function is temporarily disabled. As soon as search is available, we will send out an update. Please accept our apologies for the disruption.
On Wednesday, May 12th and Thursday, May 13th, at midnight (Pacific Daylight Time), customers may experience up to five minutes in downtime as we switch their accounts to a new, improved database server. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience during this transition.
Customer Service
1-800-229-7526
customerservice@paloalto.com
